Early Modern Culture Volume 14 First-Generation Shakespeare Article 4 6-15-2019 Empowering First-Generation Students: Bardolatry and the Shakespeare Survey Cassie M. Miura Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/emc Recommended Citation Cassie M. Miura (2019) "Empowering First-Generation Students: Bardolatry and the Shakespeare Survey," Early Modern Culture: Vol. 14 , Article 4. Available at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/emc/vol14/iss1/4 This Seminar Essay is brought to you for free and open access by TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in Early Modern Culture by an authorized editor of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Empowering First-Generation Students: Bardolatry and the Shakespeare Survey CASSIE M. MIURA few years ago, I taught an introductory course at the University of Michigan called “Shakespeare on Screen” that focused on processes of A adaptation across genre, medium, and culture. We read a handful of Shakespeare’s plays and then looked to contemporary films like 10 Things I Hate About You, starring Heath Ledger as a modern-day Petruchio, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, a visually stunning retelling of the story of King Lear set in feudal Japan. Students wrote film reviews, engaged with rigorous Shakespeare scholarship, and wrote their own creative adaptations of a select scene from a play of their choosing. As one might expect, I found that the films, sometimes just by virtue of their being performed, made the Shakespearean text more accessible to students with limited previous experience reading early modern English. I was also pleased to notice that the creative adaptation assignment encouraged students to return again and again to the original text in order to justify their own creative renderings of it. However, toward the end of the semester, I began to wonder whether all of the rich and culturally diverse representations that I had consciously built into my syllabus were reinforcing the idea of Shakespeare as a universal genius in ways that I had not intended. Once I began teaching at Western Oregon University, an institution with a more diverse student body and a large number of first-generation students, concerns about equity, inclusion, and student retention moved to the forefront of my thinking. Especially in first-year and/or introductory literature surveys, I found myself deprioritizing Shakespeare to focus instead on works by Junot Díaz, Roxane Gay, and Sherman Alexie.1 This marked a decisive break with my prior training as an early modernist but, I avoided replicating the skewed vision of multiculturalism that my previous course had, at least in part, affirmed. An extreme articulation of this vision can be found in Harold Bloom’s claim from a 1995 interview: “Shakespeare is universal. Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented on the stage.”2 Given Bloom’s immense influence in the field of literary studies and the ubiquity of sentiments like this at all ranks across the academy, the petition circulated by Yale undergraduates in the spring of 2016 calling on the English department to decolonize a required two-semester sequence on Shakespeare and seven other dead white men (Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Donne, Pope, and Eliot) should have come as no surprise. Nevertheless, student activists met resistance. Katy Early Modern Culture 14 (2019): 44-56 © Clemson University Press Empowering First-Generation Students Waldman, a staff writer at Slate and Yale English alumna, defended the two-term sequence with the claim that “these writers tried to represent the entire human condition, not just their clan. [M]any of Shakespeare’s female characters are as complexly nuanced as any in circulation today, Othello takes on racial prejudice directly, and Twelfth Night contains enough gender-bending identity shenanigans to fuel multiple drag shows and occupy legions of queer scholars.”3 These statement are all perfectly true, but they are deployed here to support a contrarian defense of the status quo, and there are few serious scholars of Renaissance and early modern literature who would maintain that, for example, studying Shakespeare’s female characters is an acceptable substitute for studying women writers. While far-right “news” sources like RT, Fox News, and the New York Post have been quick to run headlines lamenting how the nation’s top institutions no longer require English majors to take a dedicated course on Shakespeare, this has in fact been common practice for some time.4 A 2015 report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that among 52 elite institutions surveyed, only four (Harvard, UC Berkeley, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Wellesley College) have retained such a requirement.5 As Stephanie Pietros notes in her contribution to this issue, the current conversation about decolonizing the English canon has been led in large part by students and faculty at elite institutions and does not necessarily reflect the interests or concerns of those at regional and public institutions which disproportionately serve first-generation students from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.6 At the University of Washington Tacoma, my current institution, there is no Shakespeare requirement because there is no English degree. Rather, we offer a dedicated literature track within a more interdisciplinary Arts, Media, Culture major. Nevertheless, during the Shakespeare Association of America seminar from which this special issue first arose, some auditors raised strong objections to points emerging from our discussion on the grounds that we, as Shakespeare scholars, seemed to be arguing ourselves out of a job and contributing to the general decline of early modern and Renaissance literature in American public education and in the academy at large. My own position, quite different, is that for Shakespeare to stay the course in the 21st century and for the field of early modern studies to continue to advance in new and productive ways, we need to intentionally foreground how our work informs and is informed by current events. Especially as early modern scholars, we need to respond to the world as it is and imagine how it could be rather than waxing nostalgic for the past. As a teacher at a majority-minority institution, I want my students to learn that historical context matters and that we are all embodied and culturally situated as readers. This, to my mind, is precisely the kind of critical thinking that enables individuals to deconstruct the increasingly pervasive narrative that Western culture is somehow under siege or that white men are being unjustly robbed of the “natural” privileges and power afforded to them by history. Those who overstate the threat that curriculum reform poses to Shakespeare studies contribute to this narrative and do so at the risk of further alienating the next generation of students and early modern scholars. While the current iteration of 45 Early Modern Culture 14 First-Generation Shakespeare the debate over canonicity harkens back, in part, to the culture wars of the 1980s, it also assumes an entirely new form with the election of Donald Trump, the rise of white nationalism, and the proliferation of hate speech and racially motivated acts of violence on college campuses across America. How does one teach Shakespeare, assuming one does still teach Shakespeare, without also engaging students in this broader public and most urgent conversation? Given the opportunity, I argue that first-generation students are uniquely equipped to participate in the ongoing reappraisal of Shakespeare in the field of early modern studies and doing so can furnish them with the critical skills and conceptual vocabulary needed to articulate their own positionality within the university and to interrogate other forms of symbolic power. From a student-centered perspective, I suggest that one way to better serve first-generation students is to make visible the process of canon formation alongside our teaching of canonical works. By this, I mean empowering students to vocalize and interrogate their own assumptions about Shakespeare within the larger educational, cultural, and arts institutions that have shaped them. Some students may approach the study of Shakespeare with feelings of curiosity, excitement, and admiration, while others might approach it with feelings of intimidation, indifference, or resentment. What remains essential, in either case, is meeting students where they are and creating a space for authentic engagement with the text. In an article addressing Shakespeare and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy, Laura Turchi and Ayanna Thompson argue that the first step in “rebooting” outdated approaches to Shakespeare is “for educators to have a frank conversation—and perhaps a debate—about why Shakespeare is in their curriculum.”7 While I have some reservations about asking students to engage in a debate for which the conclusion is already forgone— even if students decide unanimously that Shakespeare should be excluded from the high school curriculum, their course is unlikely to be altered—such ‘frank conversations’ would also benefit college students. While first generation college students may have had prior experience reading Shakespeare in high school, many took little from this endeavor apart from a general sense of foreboding and the memory that he made getting an “A” more difficult. Recently, I co-designed a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) experience that connected first-year students from the University of Washington Tacoma with students from the Institute of World Literatures and Cultures at Tsinghua University in Beijing.8 The purpose of this experience, apart from using technology to promote cultural exchange, was for students to discuss their respective readings of the Tempest. The classes exchanged fun introductory videos and discussed the process of deciphering Shakespeare’s English, motivations for reading the play, and ideas for representing Caliban in a contemporary context.