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to new generations of students unless his name can be invoked powerfully in the context of current concerns? For, as I suggested earlier, it is not the “ideological content” of Shakespeare’s works, but their “symbolic capital” (to borrow a phrase from John Guillory) that makes them so well suited to the reproduction of institutional and social relations—and, of course, to the succession of professional careers that flourish in our institutions of higher learning (see Guillory 1993:ix).

It is ironic and self-serving that some conservatives who have seen their own careers and standing in the profession weakened by new methods of interpretation should accuse those who made their mark in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s of ‘‘rampant careerism” (Sabin 1997:86; Kernan 1997 quotes Sabin: 5; Vickers 1993). Indeed, if they could look past their longing for the past, they might see more clearly that it is not literature’s obsolescence, but their own, that is at stake here. Indeed, if the traditionalists wish to postpone their professional obsolescence, they should not focus so much on the imminent demise of literature, tradition, Western Civilization, and Shakespeare. They should not cry foul when new generations of academics invent new Shakespeares and appropriate his name for their causes. Nor should they pretend that new generations of critics are killing or dismembering the Shakespeare who once upon a time we all supposedly shared and loved. Instead they should realize that if they want to continue to claim for a little while longer a viable place in the current critical paradigm, they must, in the final analysis, make their Shakespeares compete in the academic marketplace with all the alternative Shakespeares out there—because this is the tradition of Shakespeare criticism, a tradition of competition and appropriation, one of newfangledness and inevitable obsolescence.

But it is not merely personal and professional bitterness over where English studies may be heading that grieves traditionalists. They do not seem to understand what literary “value” is and how it functions in the university and in society. They appear to believe that literary works possess values in and of themselves, and that those values can be taught in the universities to successive generations of students in direct support of a process of social and cultural reproduction. Value, in turn, is based on literary meaning, which, they believe, is pretty much fixed (by authorial intention, notions of universal truth, human nature, and what have you), though it may be open to subtle interpretations by well-educated, sensitive, commonsensical, generally like-minded critics who can reasonably

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