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Page 16 robbers as well? “Cvrst be he that moves my bones”—so reads the playwright’s gravestone. Did he fear grave robbers and relic mongers, or was he trying to ward off the sexton, who would occasionally remove skeletons to the “bone house” to make room for fresh corpses? We may never know, but that Shakespeare was acutely aware of the ironic and violent fate a poet’s body might suffer is certain. In Julius Caesar, for instance, Cinna the Poet is torn to shreds by an angry mob, first because the crowd believes him to be one of the conspirators, but ultimately for his bad verses. In the current debate over critical appropriations of Shakespeare, the connection between the poet’s body and the reception of his verses is quite suggestive because the anxiety over the mutilation and destruction of the literal body has its corollary in today’s anxiety over the appropriation of the literary body. In 1990, Alvin Kernan, a distinguished and widely respected Renaissance scholar, announced the death of literature in a book that received favorable reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times, and other publications with wide circulation. From the reactions to The Death of Literature, it appears that many share its author’s apprehension that literature, which was once the proud repository of much that was held sacred, valuable, and universal in society, has lost its viability in our present-day culture. Kernan points to several factors contributing to literature’s demise in the postmodern era—television, a crumbling educational system, rampant relativism, and multiculturalism, to name just a few—but he also holds the current generation of literary critics responsible for literature’s passing. The problem, as he sees it, is that structuralists, deconstructionists, cultural materialists, new historicists, Marxists, and feminists have “emptied out” literature ‘‘in the service of social and political causes that are considered more important than the texts themselves, to which the texts are, in fact, only means to a greater end” (Kernan 1990:212). Like Richard Levin, Brian Vickers, Edward Pechter, Graham Bradshaw, and others who have taken issue with recent critical developments, Kernan does not deny that literary texts contain traces of past cultures, such as the oppression of women and class inequality. But he finds it impossible to envision how literature, when “stripped of any positive value” and viewed as “the instrument of oppression, furthering imperialism and colonialism, establishing male hegemony, suppressing any movement toward freedom from authority,” can “be considered worth reading and interpreting” (213). Literature is dead, and all that is left are the |
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