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Hamlet and the People “Who Know Things”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2020
Abstract
Is Shakespeare universal? Is Hamlet a “strong” text that generates the same interpretation across cultural space and time, or is it a malleable text whose meaning is contingent upon variables in the encounter between text and reader and the contexts of reading? These were the kinds of questions that my students and I addressed in several courses I taught on Shakespeare over the past four years. As one might expect, our answers differed. Here, I develop and refine the argument I made and, sometimes, made incoherently: universality, whether in a writer, a text, or in criticism “is neither natural nor self-evident.” Because part of my reason for turning to Shakespeare was my dissatisfaction with contrapuntal reading as a pedagogical strategy for cultivating a “critical understanding of imperialism” in students, I conclude that we can only achieve that goal if we deploy contrapuntal reading across the literary curriculum.
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- Articles
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Literary Pedagogy Confronting Colonialism , September 2020 , pp. 238 - 246
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press
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