< previous page page_28 next page >

Page 28

differ—as gentlemen sometimes do. Moreover, it is the critic’s solemn task and professional duty to teach meanings and their value in such a way that they aid in the reproduction of social relations and, in the words of George Will, the “constitution” of the “national mind.” What they do not grasp is that literary value is “not a property of the work itself but of its transmission” (within the social/educational system), and that ‘‘[t]he real social process [at work here] is the reproduction not of values but of social relations” (Guillory 1993:55–56). What actual “value” or “meaning” a critic might locate in a literary text does not really change the way the school or university operates in society. To argue that the witches are the heroines of Macbeth, that The Tempest participates in discourses of imperialism, or that King Lear dramatizes the decline of feudalism and the emergence of a vicious middle class does not constitute an intervention in the structural operations of the institution. The most deconstructive reading of Shakespeare does not alter the university hierarchy or the tenure process in North American universities, though it may affect who gets tenure and who does not.

What needs to be clear is that the concept of literary value is “not grounded in an ‘institution of criticism,’ as is sometimes said. Criticism is not an institution but a disciplinary discourse inhabiting a historically specific educational institution” (Guillory 1993:56). Criticism is an expression of specific currents, codes, demands, and needs within the institution. Educational institutions, therefore, do not depend on any particular literary value or meaning, just on the continuation of concepts of value and meaning in general. In this century, the patterns in the relationship between literary value, the university, and society suggest that as long as smart, innovative, and articulate critics lay claim to finding meaning in Shakespeare’s plays, and as long as the institution continues to embrace that meaning as its cultural capital—which it must do because it is its raison d’être— then the show will go on, much as it did (of course with small changes) prior to the supposed revolution.

While we are often invited to believe that universities exist foremost to nourish, improve, and reproduce society (the university where I did my graduate work has “In service of the nation” as its motto), we cannot ignore Guillory’s potent claim that “[i]nstitutions of reproduction succeed by taking as their first object not the reproduction of social relations but the reproduction of the institution itself” (1993:57). There is nothing sinister about this: institutions quickly develop an internal logic and defenses to protect their “being” from

< previous page page_28 next page >