Who Killed Shakespeare: What's Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties

Who killed Shakespeare? asks the world outside the university, convinced that something's rotten in the state of academia. Have English professors really tossed out the Bard to take up 'theory' instead? After public relations disasters surrounding 'political correctness', deconstruction, and the Social Text hoax it seems that everyone - politicians, parents, and the press - has something to say about what's wrong with universities. Patrick Brantlinger argues that critiques of the 'university in ruins' are misdirected. Shakespeare, English, and the humanities in general are all being marginalized - not by professors, but by an increasingly corporatized and career-oriented direction in higher education. This provocative look inside the ivory tower is required reading for anyone who thinks he or she knows what's at stake in the modern university.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: A View from the Ruins 2. Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English Since the Radical Sixties 3. English Departments as Heterotopias 4. Anti-Theory and Its Antithesis: Rhetoric vs. Ideology 5. How the New Historicism Grew Old (and Gained its Tale) 6. Postcolonialism and Its Discontents 7. Between Liberalism and Marxism: The Populism of Cultural Studies 8. Informania U 9. Apocalypse 2001: or, What Happens after Posthistory? 10. Works Citied

About the Author :
Patrick Brantlinger Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of several books, includingCrusoe's Footprints, published by Routledge. His other publications include Bread and Circuses,Fictions of State, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of MassLiteracy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Ruleof Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,1830-1914.

Review :
"Brantlinger takes the reader on an entertaining journey to uncover the truth behind Shakespeare's reputed death. Brantlinger's exploration of how cultural studies in universities have diminished in accordance with the shifting cultural and societal trends is timely and important." -- Library Journal "Patrick Brantlinger's Who Killed Shakespeare? casts a cold and eminently rational eye on the English department wars of the last two decades. He gives us the first persuasive account at once of disciplinary debates and cultural conflicts that made English the major focus of disagreements over the status of theory and the aims of undergraduate education. People on both sides of these issues will find the book invaluable." -- Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "In Who Killed Shakespeare? Pat Brantlinger maps the confusing terrain of much recent fashionable discourse concerning literary theory, postcolonialism, posthistory, and other similar topics with extraordinary authority and lucidity. In the process, he clarifies and resituates a number of current modes of academic investigation from cultural studies to informatics, and indicates that, beyond the border disputes between one or another theoretical approach, lies a larger threat not only to the academic world, but to the world at large. Who Killed Shakespeare? provides a sane, unflinching assessment of what academic studies are achieving today, and what they are not." -- John Reed, Wayne State University "Who Killed Shakespeare? is a wonderfully wise and witty book. Pat Brantlinger discusses how parochial attacks from the right and the left on the curriculum of English Departments miss their target, and suggests how large social changes have affected the nature and purpose of higher education. His critique of the 'corporatization' of American universities should be read by anyone interested in the future of education, which means all of us who form the reading public." -- Martha Vicinus, University of Michigan "Like Graff's Teaching the Conflicts, Guillory's CulturalCapital, or Readings' The University in Ruins, this is a candid and informed account of the humanities in market society. The chapter on the contradictions of English departments and English professors is stunning, the critiques of neopragmatism and new historicism are fearless, informatics are defined and their pay-off to universities laid bare, crash/theory and end-of-history optimists and pessimists are surveilled and swept before him. This is an angrier Brantlinger than we've seen, and an angrier criticism than we've seen for some time. Good." -- Regenia Gagnier, author of The Insatiability ofHuman Wants