Shakespeare is dead

I was getting coffee with a friend and fellow columnist so I could hear all about his wonderful adventures studying abroad in London.

We were gabbing right along when something struck me. He said that in London they only focus on the Western canon. In fact, they’re so dedicated to the Western canon that University College London, where he was studying, doesn’t even have any type of creative writing program.

And this pretty much baffled me.

At IU, we’re used to being able to study almost anything we want, whether it was created a week ago or hundreds of years ago. This university’s dedication to the new and popular culture as well as the older parts of the canon is exactly what a university should do in my eyes.

Personally I don’t see why we need to keep beating Shakespeare’s work into a messy, scholarly pulp.

The fact of the matter is, the world sees hundreds of articles published each year based on old, dead, white men’s work. If you do write anything about Shakespeare, all you get to do is recycle other arguments from previous scholars.

Where’s the fun in that? And more importantly: where’s the growth in that?

I do think it’s important to study the canon and get familiar with the works that have shaped almost every piece of Western thought that has come subsequently.

It’s important that we see the birth of the novel, the start of literary and artistic criticism and other noble firsts. Critiquing the older works in the canon also helps to learn a different style of writing and argument, one based on unraveling and recreating previous schools of thought.

But it’s also important to expand the canon and learn the world we live in now.
To stick with the Shakespeare bashing I’ve got going, we need to remember that he was never an established artist in his period. His plays were today’s “Real Housewives” — pure entertainment.

We need to stop discounting and devaluing modern works like “Star Wars” just because George Lucas’ flesh isn’t decaying yet (even though his film career is).

The world’s scholars should be devoting more of their time to pop culture trends and interests. That’s what tells us what a society values. We can even apply the old to the new — we just can’t bury our heads in old men.

This university’s strength comes from the professors I’ve had who know how to analyze Victorian literature and write pop music reviews at the same time, as well as those who can support a student exposing how Shakespeare set the basic plot line for almost every Amanda Bynes movie out there.

Chaucer’s great, but he hasn’t put out anything good for a long time. We don’t need to exclusively study him.

So here’s to you, IU: the school where I can read Jane Austen’s “Emma” one semester and write a critical theories paper on the online dating documentary “Catfish” the next.

— sjostrow@indiana.edu