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Gary Taylor accurately notes that “[l]iberal intellectuals in the West lost the culture wars of the 1980s in part because they surrendered the mechanisms of cultural selection to their opponents. They made no secret of their contempt for the public.… [T]he academic establishment has increasingly separated itself from the rest of society.… At academic conferences, in faculty lounges, a thousand sarcasms bloomed and died, while Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth rode The New York Times best-seller list and conservatives in America, Canada, Great Britain, and Germany won election after election” (1996:13).

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It is perhaps unfair to lay this at the feet of Levin et al., because they do not intentionally invite such appropriations, but these appropriations are an inevitable consequence of their labors.

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I do not mean to suggest that Levin et al. should stop criticizing the new critical approaches—on the contrary, I believe that their work is often extremely valuable in fine-tuning Marxist and feminist and other approaches—but we should not kid ourselves into believing that their authorial intentions will surface in public discourse.

5  

Less than five years after the publication of The Death of Literature, Kernan published a delightful book on Shakespearean performance at the Jacobean court (1995). Harold Bloom appears to share Kernan’s mixture of bleakness and optimism. Bloom writes that Shakespeare may be the only canonical writer “that can survive the debasement of our teaching institutions, here and abroad. Every other great writer may fall away, to be replaced by the anti-elitist swamp of Cultural Studies. Shakespeare will abide” (1998b:17).

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I borrow the term “cultural capital” from Guillory who, in turn, gets it from French theorist Pierre Bourdieu: “First it is linguistic capital, the means by which one attains to a socially credentialed and therefore valued speech, otherwise known as ‘Standard English.’ And second, it is symbolic capital, a kind of knowledge-capital whose possession can be displayed upon request and which thereby entitles its possessor to the cultural and material rewards of the well-educated person’’ (Guillory 1993:ix). What Guillory is most interested in is who in our society has access to cultural capital and how it is distributed among different classes, or, to put it slightly differently, how “class determines whether and how individuals gain access to the means of literary production” (ix).

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In his latest book, Bloom asserts that “High Romantic Bardolatry, now so much disdained in our self-defiled academics, is merely the most normative of the faiths that worship” Shakespeare (1998b:3).

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See Bristol 1990:15.

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My reading of Lucrece has been shaped by Kahn’s (1995) fine essay on the poem. Likewise my comments on Much Ado are influenced by Cook’s (1995) work.

10  

There are, of course, isolated exceptions to this. See Linda Woodbridge 1991:295.

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“Containment” refers to the idea that “subversion” is not a legitimate threat to established power in society but a direct and necessary product of power, designed to underscore the rightness and legitimacy of that power, and is hence contained by it. See Greenblatt 1988: 21–65; also see Dollimore 1985:2–18.

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