The College Fix

Why should you not go to grad school? For one thing, if you do, you may unwittingly contribute to the destruction of all that is good in literature, according to Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Slate:

Recently I received an email from an editor at Bookforum who was asking a number of writers to contribute essays to a book to be called Should I Go to Grad School? …I had recently spoken to a grad school class on Shakespeare at NYU (led by my colleague, the gifted poet and memoirist Meghan O’Rourke) about my book The Shakespeare Wars. And if all grad school teachers of literature were like her, I would have no problem with the institution.

But I must admit I expressed some very “strong feelings” in that class. Specifically about the controversy stirred up by some academics who have arrogated to themselves spurious authority to discard parts of Hamlet. I had indeed emphatically warned the impressively bright students in the seminar against the kind of grad school-nurtured exegesis of Shakespeare most egregiously represented by James Shapiro in the section of his book, 1599, wherein he purports to read Shakespeare’s mind and discover that Shakespeare would have wanted to cut, trash, delete, and disappear Hamlet’s final soliloquy; one of the high points of the play and of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre.

… As I suggest in my book, the mind-reading case Shapiro makes for the excision is no small matter. It’s emblematic of a whole academic mindset, of the sort of tin-eared arrogance that would consign to the dustbin on no good authority 35 eloquently tormented lines of self-reflection by one of the greatest characters in world literature—a character defined by his penchant for introspection and self-reflection—on the basis of a half-baked theory. In this case, the theory that Shakespeare decided he wanted to revise Hamlet to make Hamlet more of an action hero! Like Schwarzenegger in True Lies! Or maybe a Bruce Willis vehicle: Die Hard With a Vengeance: The Elsinore Conundrum.