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mangled body back together and resuscitates it with political lightning to produce a counterfeit life.

Neither the grave-robber metaphor nor the Frankenstein metaphor is quite apt here because not even Kernan really believes that literature is teetering on the edge of the grave. (He is far too astute a scholar to waste his time on a corpse.)5 What is dying is a brand of literary interpretation that has installed literature as the record of the greatest accomplishments of Western civilization. Kernan, it is clear, uses his “death of literature” rhetoric to create a sense of alarm, a feeling that unless right-minded people do something about those radical critical approaches now, we will soon have to do without literature. George Will amplifies this point to absurdity when he dubs radical critics the new enemy within. Kernan, therefore, is not so much giving the literary corpse its last rites as he is prematurely eulogizing literature in order to re-appropriate it for an out-of-fashion critical sensibility.

In the context of critical appropriation, Shakespeare’s corpse/ corpus therefore more closely resembles the corpse of philosopher and inventor Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) than it does the mutilated body of Milton or the patched-up creature of Frankenstein. Bentham’s bodily remains, which he donated to science when he died, are still on display in the foyer of University College, London (Bentham 1999a). The “skeleton is seated, wearing Bentham’s everyday clothes, his wide-brimmed straw hat upon his [stuffed] head, and the faithful Dapple in his hand” (Costigan 1967:25). He sits there, a stuffed and constant reminder of his own greatness and, by extension, of the greatness of the college that he helped found and that proudly displays him. What is more, according to one story, a video camera is permanently pointed at Bentham, so that every few minutes an image of his current state is posted on the World Wide Web. That Bentham’s body is lifeless and relatively unchanging apparently does not eliminate the need to make it continuously available for mass appropriation. Indeed, this appears to be the point of a Website about Bentham (Bentham 1999b), which notes the irony that the inventor of the panopticon (a glass prison that allows for the continuous and complete surveillance of the inmate) could himself be the most closely observed person in the world. Now the story goes that as a yearly prank, students from a rival college steal Bentham’s corpse, temporarily hide it, and claim it, and its cultural legacy, as their own. The body becomes temporarily unavailable. University College reclaims the body, which is returned in time, and so Bentham’s

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