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 the university. 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.

Patrick Brantlinger is Rudy Professor of English at Indiana University