Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate (A.A. Joubin & L.S. Starks)

 "Teaching Shakespeare in a Time of Hate" by Alexa Alice Joubin and Lisa S. Starks, from Shakespeare Survey 74, is a remarkable essay, and refers quickly to another remarkable work, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, ed. Eklund and Hyman (Edinburgh, 2019).

I say this in part because when I attended college (starting in 1976), a majority of English instructors would have preferred to bracket the question of ethics, or the need to teach ethics or justice in a particular social or political or cultural context. English literature, they might say, could deal with style and metaphor and theme and a host of other things we find in the texts, but assuming a need to confront the hate of the times with literature didn't seem among the priorities of the instructors. If that occurred on its own, fine, but other things might be discovered in the texts as well, so better to find where the texts were leading, first, and later, only if the texts warrant it, might a students or instructor consider how literary texts challenge a culture of hate, or of war, exploitation, of mass shootings, of weapons sales, etc.

But hate in the land of Trump has gotten so bad, that it's hard to proceed without acknowledging that context.

[HATE - August 2017 TIME cover - Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for TIME. Fair use. TIME notes, "For the Aug. 28 issue of TIME on hate in America we turned to artist Edel Rodriguez to create a cover to capture the aftermath of the Charlottesville tragedy. With his bold, graphic approach, Rodriguez depicts a protester giving a Nazi salute while draped in an American flag."]

One might also say it's not just the land of Trump, but also a land where Hillary Clinton's campaign encouraged the media to pay more attention to Trump before the 2016 election because they thought he would be easier to beat, and that this would be clever. (The strategy backfired.)

It is also the land where Bernie Sanders set records for fund-raising by way of only small donations, but was still opposed by the DNC, which supported Hillary, and then Biden.

So we live in a context of hate, but in a country that had remarkable grassroots support for a Democratic Socialist.

One can read Joubin and Starks' essay by downloading a PDF. Excerpt:

Emmanuel Levinas posits that relations with the Other pre-exist any kind of being, thereby making ethics the most primary philosophy. In Levinas’s theory, the human being is constituted in, through, by and for the Other – in the face of the Other – first and foremost. Rather than assuming that the I or ego first exists via its own consciousness and then attempts to interact with others, Levinas argues that it is only through the Other that the I emerges at all; this interaction occurs pre-consciousness, pre-ego formation, preor ‘otherwise than’ being. For Levinas, then, ethics or moral behaviour is not a supplement or an addon to an already fully formed subject; conversely, it is the basis upon which the subject is formed, the primary philosophy itself, the foundation of all.

Teaching Shakespeare offers opportunities to help students to cope with these difficult times, to examine their world critically, to learn how to respond respectfully and sensitively to others, and to sharpen their intellect. Drawing on Levinas’s philosophy, Alexa Alice Joubin and Elizabeth Rivlin have argued that literary criticism carries strong ethical implications. A crucial, ethical component of interacting with a literary text is one’s willingness to listen to and be subjected to the demands of others, creating moments of ‘self and mutual recognition’. [4] Seeing the others within oneself is the first step towards seeing oneself in others’ eyes.

If you are interested but the download is not working, let me know by way of LinkedIn's message system, and I'll see if I can send an attachment. 

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Thanks for reading! My current project is a book tentatively titled Hamlet’s Bible, about biblical allusions and plot echoes in Hamlet.

Below is a link to a list of some of my top posts (“greatest hits”), including a description of my book project (last item on the list):

https://pauladrianfried.blogspot.com/2019/12/top-20-hamlet-bible-posts.html

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