Adjunct Pleasure: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Writing on the Walls

In this chapter, Matthew Harrison explores how the radical contingencies of Elizabethan sonnets and academic employment can mutually inform pedagogical practice. Tracing links between contingent labor in higher education and early modern poets’ “phenomenology of contingency,” the chapter considers what happens when the metrics of selfhood and social perception produce competing notions of individual “value.” Harrison diagnoses how readily structural shortcomings are masked by fictions of personal exceptionalism or failure, and it proposes several practical strategies that invite students to “replace postures designed for obedience with active and bodily engagement with each other’s ideas.”