“‘Shakespeare’ on his lips”: Dreaming of the Shakespeare Center for Radical Thought and Transformative Action

Abstract

Rooting his pedagogy in an Orwellian commitment to exploring the relation between writing and the cultural forces that shape it, Eric L. De Barros takes up linguistic complexity itself as a pedagogical model in this chapter. De Barros sees Shakespeare’s texts as a “weapon” to use against a range of lazy habits of mind, from bardolatry to consumerist approaches to higher education. He describes how he invites students to examine their own subject positions and ethical priorities in conversation with Shakespeare’s plays; how this engagement spurs conversations about issues from racialized beauty and consent to social mobility and criminality; and finally, how students parlay these insights into practical strategies for addressing related issues in their own lives. Fusing thoughtful intertextual engagements with close reading and autobiographical student writing, De Barros seeks to develop a “personally inflected, politically responsive” Shakespeare capable of combating cultural forces that discourage potentially subversive thought and action.