“Men learn in a negative rite to give up the best things they were born with, and forever.” —Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night (1968) William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1599) and Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de Sevilla (1612?) are the most archetypal plays by any Spanish or English playwright from the early modern period, arguably […]
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A number of prominent liberal intellectuals, such as Leon Wieseltier, acknowledge that the humanities are in trouble. There “really is a cultural crisis,” he said at a recent Aspen Ideas Festival. This is an improvement over the mass denial of a few years ago, when the standard retort to conservatives went something like this: “You […]
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The annual controversy over books assigned to freshmen as summer reading is upon us. Spoiler alerts. Odysseus makes it home. Hamlet dies. The Whale wins. Oh, not those books. We are talking more about White Girls (by Hilton Als, 2013) and Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003). White Girls, as one reviewer puts it, is “an inquiry into otherness” by a […]
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Dana Dusbiber’s statement in The Washington Post deploring the teaching of Shakespeare in high school English courses evoked universal scorn and laughter. Her thesis is simple: Shakespeare is too old, white, male, and European for 21st-century American students, especially those of color. His language is dense and unfamiliar, enough so that Dusbiber herself can’t always understand it. […]
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