Literary Analysis and Race, Class, and Gender

ANNE NEAL: We have, again, the desire of many to take a look at works focusing on historical context, race, class, and gender. These are perfectly legitimate subjects, but when they are offered to the exclusion of other ways of looking at literature, when the literature class becomes more a class in politics than it is looking at the language, looking at the vocabulary, looking at the words that Shakespeare, for instance, has given us, looking at that incredible human drama, we really are seeing a narrowing and a very much more limited focus in these classrooms that disserves our students.

Regrettably, that particular perspective has become almost the only perspective. So that those students who are interested in reading literature as literature, who are interested in looking at the language, at the poetry, at the issues that books like Hamlet, and Midsummer Night's Dream, and Julius Caesar and others raise, instead find themselves faced with course after course after course that looks at theories of sexuality in the booklet, or theories of race, class, and gender in these plays.

And I think this is part of a sad dumbing down where we no longer open up the richness, but in fact, we really limit the students' ability to look at the full breadth of the subject. Certainly one can enjoy and look at Shakespeare because of its historical context and understand the circumstances from which it rises, but to miss out on those themes, the common frame of language, the common frame of reference that they offer, really diminishes, I think, all of us in a society that desperately is looking for a community of discourse.