Loving Shakespeare's Language, Then and Now

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine carries an elegantly written lament by Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University, who has come to believe that his students don't love Shakespeare's poetry as poetry anymore:

Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley, Calif. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility. In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid. It is as if the sense of linguistic birthright that I experienced with such wonder had faded and with it an interest in exploiting its infinite resources.

To this, I say: Okay. Maybe. But also maybe not. But if this is so, it isn't a naturally occurring phenomenon. It results from a changed set of educational emphases. Focusing on the poetry as poetry, and relentlessly working over the rhythms and images and word choices, was the central enterprise of college English Lit classes over roughly the middle half of the 20th century. And because that was what high school and middle school English teachers had learned how to do in college, that was what they passed on to students in middle school and high school. If Stephen Greenblatt came to college already loving Shakespeare for the beautiful language, it is because he had come to college through an educational system where studying Shakespeare meant studying the beautiful language.

There was a move away from this system (which went and still goes by the name "the New Criticism") starting roughly in the 1980s. Here's another passage by a scholar of Greenblatt's generation:

In graduate school at Yale in the late 1960s, I found myself deeply uncertain about the direction I wanted my work to take. I was only mildly interested in the formalist agenda that dominated graduate instruction and was epitomized in the imposing figure of William K. Wimsatt. His theory of the concrete universal -- poetry as "an object which in a mysterious way is both highly general and highly particular" -- seemed almost irresistibly true, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to enlist myself for life as a celebrant of the mystery.

Wimsatt was one of the intellectual giants of the "New Criticism," the so-called "formalist" attention to poetic language above all else. But our former graduate student couldn't limit himself to that approach. So he struck out in a new direction and pioneered a new critical approach to Shakespeare which centered on using history to illuminate the texts in new and innovative ways.

He is, of course, Stephen Greenblatt. The second passage is from Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, page 1.

A few quick acknowledgements: Greenblatt is legitimately the most famous and influential Shakespeare scholar of his generation. He has basically been Shakespearean Number One for years now. I don't know him personally, but we are one degree of separation apart in dozens of directions. And I will admit, right now, that he has been a major influence on my own work. I'm a big, big fan. (I knew right where to find that second passage, didn't I?)

Now, I have never believed that Greenblatt's work meant turning away from the poetry itself. But many of his many, many critics have said exactly that. They view the question as either/or: are we talking about poetry, or are we talking about "early modern culture?" I have always viewed the question as both/and: the intellectual tools that Greenblatt provides supplement the older toolbox originally filled by Wimsatt and the boys. (I spent my first year in college being subtly but relentlessly drilled in the older skill set by one of Greenblatt's most distinguished colleagues. That experience has turned out to be much more formative than I once admitted to myself.)

Greenblatt's NYT Magazine piece reads from one viewpoint like an inadvertent mea culpa, bemoaning all the changes that Greenblatt's critics once warned that Greenblatt himself would bring to pass. Kids don't love Shakespeare's poetry any more! We told you this would happen! But I read it instead as evidence that Greenblatt himself has always been a both/and type. He didn't turn away from Wimsatt's methods because he thought they were wrong. He took them as proven, and moved on to a different area where things needed more clarification. Loving the language was always something he presumed as part of the basic approach. And certainly, at the beginning of his career, with decades of educational infrastructure teaching every English major to use and value those Wimsatt-y New Critical skills, Greenblatt could safely take them for granted.

But the real problem with the NYT piece isn't that Greenblatt pines for the older approach that he himself helped to dethrone. The problem for me is that Greenblatt, whose own ground-breaking work has been on examining social and cultural context, ignores the context of the educational system itself. Greenblatt 2015 writes about falling in love with Shakespeare's language as a spontaneous personal event, wholly distinct from the educational system around him. (He even leads off with a middle school teacher's failed attempt to win him over to Shakespeare, so that he can imply that his love comes from himself and not from school.) But Greenblatt circa 1985 teaches us to be suspicious of those claims, and to look for the ways that the society around the individual loads the deck.

People in Greenblatt's generation encountered the message about Shakespeare's beautiful language over and over again, maximizing the chances that it would eventually stick. Students today encounter the message that "Shakespeare can be cool in some exciting new medium!" over and over again; if students who got that message relentlessly until high school graduation reproduce that message themselves in college, that's not exactly supernatural. People don't fall in love with Shakespeare entirely and spontaneously on their own. Someone else always passes notes for him in study hall.

If Stephen Greenblatt wants students to love the Shakespeare that he loves himself, he needs to woo them for that Shakespeare. He needs to show students those poetic beauties and give the students opportunities to savor them. He needs to woo persistently without pestering, to allow the wooed party room to breathe without letting the courtship run cold. He needs to keep the object of desire before the students' eyes until they decide that, deep in their own hearts, they desire it for themselves. It's a tricky process. It's not easy, and it doesn't always work. But we've been doing it for a long time, and it has a name. It's called "teaching."

cross-posted (and all comments welcome at) Dagblog

In Praise of Fred Rogers

A county clerk down in Kentucky, Kim Davis, is refusing to do her job, getting herself thrown in jail for contempt, and posing as a martyr. Once again, an extremist and divisive version of Christianity, obsessed with minor points of doctrine and followed by only a minority of Christians, is presented to the American public as "Christianity." This is nonsense, of course. Only a tiny, tiny minority of Christians believe that handing same-sex couples a wedding license is somehow sinful. And disapproval of homosexuality is an incredibly minor Christian doctrine which some theologians exclude altogether, while on the other hand not setting yourself up as judge over your neighbors is a core Christian belief. I could go on, but then we'd be talking about Kim Davis instead of actual Christianity, which is just what Kim Davis wants.

I'd like to talk about a positive example instead: a genuinely devout Christian who spent decades in the public spotlight and did nothing but good there, who never turned his faith into a weapon of division but used it, day after day, to welcome and include all comers. I am talking, of course, about Mr. Rogers.

Or rather, I am talking about the Reverend Fred Rogers, ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963. Rogers was, according to virtually everyone who knew him, a deeply committed believer. But he never preached on Sundays. The TV show was his ministry. Let me go further: it appears that the seminary that ordained him considered the TV show his ministry. Fred Rogers was, as Brother Elwood puts it, on a mission from God.

But you won't see or hear any explicit Christian symbolism on Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. It's not there. And I don't mean it's cleverly disguised, either. That was not Fred Rogers's game. The Kingdom of Make-Believe isn't some C. S. Lewis feed-the-children-Jesus-when-they're-not-looking propaganda. King Friday XIII is not God, X the Owl is not Jesus, and Donkey Hote is not the Holy Ghost. When Mr. Rogers feeds the fish, he's not doing some Christian fish symbolism. He's just feeding some fish. There is nothing sectarian in Mister Rogers's Neighborhood. There is nothing exclusively Christian about it, nothing aimed at one religious group and absolutely nothing aimed at converting or indoctrinating Fred's audience of impressionable preschoolers. This was by design. Terry Gross, of NPR's Fresh Air, once asked Fred why there wasn't any Christian symbolism in the Kingdom of Make-Believe. Fred answered, simply and directly, that he never wanted any child to feel excluded in the Kingdom of Make-Believe.

But not being sectarian or exclusionary does not mean that Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was not Christian. Remember, the people who ordained Fred a minister explicitly told him that his show was his ministry. Fred's refusal to exclude children or insist on any doctrinal labels was part of the show's Christian mission. He did without the superficial religious symbols in service of a deeper Christianity.

Where was the religious content, then? Everywhere. And I mean that. Almost every syllable spoken on that show came from Fred Rogers's religious convictions. (Everything that he did or said on the air was deliberate and purposeful. Every show is a meticulously crafted and executed lesson.) The core message that Fred made sure to include in every single show, more than once, was the Christian message of universal, unconditional love: "I like you just the way you are." The central lesson, every day, was that the children watching were people deserving of love. Fred didn't talk about being Christian. He made himself an example of Christian love.

Now, you don't have to be Christian to entertain the idea of every individual's fundamental worth and dignity. There are secular versions of that. But the idea that every human is unconditionally worthy of love is both at the very heart of Christianity and broadly palatable to non-Christians. Nearly every religious tradition includes a mix of core ideas that are nonetheless widely attractive to outsiders and more peripheral beliefs that often serve to define sectarian boundaries. Most people can get on board with Talmudic teachings on justice and integrity. Most people are not eager to embrace the "can't touch the light switch on Friday nights" rule. "Love thy neighbor" is a big, ecumenical hit. "Stained glass windows are sinful idolatry" is, more or less by its nature, designed to divide and exclude.

The two kinds of religious teachings do very different things. There are a set of moral and philosophical positions, which offer believers guidance in the big questions. And there are a set of generally minor and sometimes even peculiar doctrines that serve to mark group identity and form community. "How do we live a just life?" is an essentially but not exclusively Jewish question. "Is it okay to eat milk and meat together?" is a question about whether you're Jewish. Religious groups focused on conflict with outsiders tend to focus on these relatively peripheral, sect-specific positions (or put another way, sects focused on peripheral doctrines tend to focus on conflict with outsiders). During the heyday of Christian-vs-Christian religious violence in Europe, back in the 16th and 17th centuries, the stained-glass-or-no-stained-glass question was treated as crucial, with love-thy-neighbor and thou-shalt-not-kill taking distant back seats.

Mr. Rogers's Neighborhood was all core principles and no checkpoint shibboleths. Fred was not interested in sectarian identity, because universal love has no room for Us vs. Them. He never talked the talk. He unrelentingly walked the walk. He did not preach lessons. He provided an example, and in doing so proved truly exemplary. 

Although he became a cultural touchstone, Fred Rogers's message was deeply counter-cultural. Our society, although superficially and nominally Christian, has a deep emphasis on teaching children to compete, to earn their parents' approval and too often their parents' love. Our children are bombarded throughout their childhood with messages about winners and losers. (Even the self-esteem movement, widely derided for not teaching children to compete enough, accepts the winners-and-losers premise, destructively telling children that they are all winners rather than pointing to a value system beyond winning.) There's no room in that for I like you just the way you are, but Fred Rogers insisted on that room. He made space for that message where there had been none. The only shame was that when students grew out the the pre-kindergarten age on which Fred focused, there weren't equally powerful voices communicating that message to first graders and up.

And part of Fred's greatness as a teacher (and make no mistake, Fred Rogers was a great master teacher) was his deep and evident humility. Humility is another central Christian virtue that doesn't get much attention or love in our nominally Christian country, but Fred embodied it. Listen to him singing on the show. He's obviously not a professional singer. He doesn't have a "good," i.e. media-ready singing voice. He'd get cut immediately on American Idol (a show obsessed with competition to the point of, what's that word, idolatry). But singing well is not the point. Fred is not embarrassed, and you aren't embarrassed for him, because his ego has nothing to do with it. He doesn't care whether or not his voice is good or bad. Singing is just something that helps his lesson, and so he does it, with the impeccable confidence of the utterly humble. That humility was part of his educational genius, because it meant that nothing was ever about Fred. It was always about the student learning.

What matters to Fred is not the technical polish of his singing, but the connection he makes with the kids. Singing is a way to make himself more emotionally present to them, to connect. And the very fact that he's singing in such an unpretentious way underscores that he is opening himself up to the kids, creating intimacy and trust. He is telling them that he won't laugh at them because he knows they won't laugh at him. (Ask yourself this: who do YOU feel comfortable singing in front of? See what I mean?) And the singing, which starts every single show, communicates something essential about the value system: it's not important to show off. You don't sing to impress other people, let alone to show who is a better singer. You sing to people as a way to connect with them. We are a country of showing off for the neighbors. Fred Rogers made every lesson about loving the neighbors, in every sense of that word.

Fred Rogers bore witness to his Christian beliefs every time he stepped in front of a camera. His Christianity was always inclusive and never divisive. It's humbling to watch, because I will never be that good a teacher or nearly that good a Christian. But being humbled is part of the point.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Fox News at the Crossroads: or, The Great GOP Divide

Fox News got record-breaking ratings for its Republican debate in Cleveland. It got one of the top-ten highest cable TV ratings of all time; the other nine are sporting events, mostly big bowl games on ESPN. So Chris Christie and the boys got better ratings than Tony Soprano, and if you'd like to make your own Mad Men joke, here's the place for it. On the other hand, thousands of Fox viewers have denounced Fox's moderators as biased and unfair. At least ten thousand have signed a petition demanding that Megyn Kelly be banned from all future debates. Roger Ailes has had to promise Trump that they'd promise him fairly, and Kelly has gone an an unexpected vacation. I've lost track of the back-and-forth. Fox is doing the best business it's ever done, and some of its most loyal customers are enraged. How did Fox get here?

What I think we're seeing is an important fracture between the two most important elements of modern American conservatism: the Republican Party's political operation and the conservative media. We can talk about the Establishment vs. the Tea Party, but the really profound split is between the Political Side and the Media Side. Yes, those sides have long worked together and depended on each other. But they also have their own separate agendas, and obey separate strategies defined by very different strategic logics. What is good for one is not always good for the other. The Media Side, especially, can thrive off things that are simply disastrous for the Political Side. And now we're seeing those two sides in conflict, catalyzed in part by Donald Trump, and Fox News, trying to remain loyal to both, is at war with itself.

Obviously, the conservative media complex (most importantly Fox News and conservative talk radio) actively advocate for conservative Republicans to win elections. But those media companies don't need the Republicans to win. Barack Obama isn't worse for their business than George W. Bush was; it many ways he's better, because he upsets and energizes Fox's (and Beck's and Limbaugh's) core audience. Remember, most of these conservative media outlets really got rolling during the Clinton Administration. They're designed to thrive in opposition.

More importantly, and this is where the trouble sets in, conservative media is designed to thrive in an extremely fragmented media environment, competing with a vast array of other choices. Fox News is one cable channel out of hundreds. A talk radio host competes against dozens of other stations in every market. Blogs ... don't even get me started. What this means is that conservative media has no hope of actually reaching a majority of the American people, or even a plurality. Fox News's highest-rated shows usually get a couple of million viewers: not even a single percent of the population. Put another way, on any typical night more than 99% of the American public does NOT tune in to Bill O'Reilly. But that's still a viable business model, because America is huge. You can make a lot of money on cable, or on AM radio, by getting a tiny slice of the market.

But the Republican Party ultimately competes in a two-party world, most of all when the presidency is on the line. The major parties need to be at least close to a majority to win. It's not even like the old three-network setup. It's more like the 1930s, when there were only two national radio networks, NBC and CBS. (Third parties in national elections function less like ABC than like independent TV stations or PBS.) A small and intense band of followers is not enough for the Republicans to take the White House. If you want to be elected President of the United States next fall, you're going to need at least 66 to 70 million votes. To put that in perspective, all of the people who watched the first Republican debate on Fox, put together, are only about a third of the votes the eventual nominee will need to win. In fact, that record number of viewers is only about 40% of the number of people who voted for Mitt Romney. To many Fox viewers, Mitt Romney is a big embarrassing failure while Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are huge hits, but that's because totally different standards apply.

(And this is not strictly partisan. John Kerry got hundreds of times more voters than John Stewart or Stephen Colbert ever got viewers. Being a cable TV entertainer and running for the presidency are nothing alike.)

When you're trying to build a cable-TV or AM-radio audience, you want to get a small slice of the population as worked up as you can. You want to ramp up the intensity, no matter what that takes. Being polarizing and controversial is good. Making people upset is good. If half of America hates you -- hell, even if two thirds or three quarters of America hates you -- but fifteen percent likes you and two or three percent totally LOVES you, you are going to print money. Beck, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and the rest are using Howard Stern's basic media strategy.

However, if you are running for president, 60 percent of the country disliking you is just deadly. National candidates need broad appeal, even if that means doing without the hard-core loyalists. (Think Tom Hanks instead of Howard Stern.) And candidates need to make a broad appeal to win nationwide. The kind of divisive positions that strengthen a media figure with a niche audience (and every openly-partisan media figure, right or left, has a niche audience) are just poison to a national candidate.

But Fox and AM have been building up Republican primary candidates who play well on Fox and AM, meaning niche politicians who have electoral troubles outside their safe GOP districts. Fox wants to promote the politicians, or would-be politicians, who make good TV, meaning good niche-cable-news-TV.  Ron Paul. Rand Paul. Michelle Bachman. Herman Cain. Ted Cruz. Bobby Jindal. Ben Carson. Those people aren't realistic candidates for president, because their strategies are aimed at ramping up a small, passionate segment of the base by turning off the wider electorate. Mike Huckabee has taken to talking openly about subordinating the Supreme Court to his religious beliefs; that's a frightening thing to hear, but Huckabee would never say that if he believed he had a prayer of being nominated. Trump is just the culmination of these conservative-media-friendly fringe candidacies. He understands the media logic intuitively: be as outrageous and polarizing as possible, to whip up your small section of support.

Simply put, what's good for Fox News is bad for the Republicans right now. The Republicans need to be rolling out broadly palatable general-election candidates, and taking positions that will help them win next fall. But their primary is clogged with people who are trying to build small, intense followings by taking the most controversial positions possible. And there's no way to tell the core Fox/AM talk radio voters to get with the program. Those voters have been with the program, literally, between elections: whipped up and made angry or frightened every 24-hour news cycle, fed whatever extreme positions moved the dial on a given day, and -- worst of all, from the perspective of the GOP as a political organization trying to win elections -- taught to demonize anyone who disagreed. The motto of Conservative Media is "No Compromises. No Middle Ground." But you win the White House by winning the middle ground. Now the Political Side and the Media Side are in fundamental conflict, and apparently there's no compromise to be had.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog

Goodbye, My Second City

Although "Doctor Cleveland" is my nom du blog, I've been splitting time between two cities for years. Like many academics in my generation, I've struggled with the "two-body problem" as part of a couple with teaching jobs at universities in different places. We've had homes in both places, but I've been the primary commuter and my spouse has held down the home front. I've really been "Doctor Eastern Great Lakes" or "Professor I-90." Now, at long last, we have solved that problem. My trusty Buick has made the last of its round trips.

The bittersweet part is that being together means saying goodbye to one of our cities: the city where we were married and bought our first house, the city where we made our primary home. Today, the sale of our house in Rochester closed. I have come to love Rochester, and I will miss it.

The Kodak Building from the cheap seats

Rochester and Cleveland are not so different: they are resilient Rust Belt cities on the shores of Great Lakes. And both have been home. But Rochester taught me the charms of the small city. Hundreds of thousands of people, rather than millions, live in and around Rochester. It lacks the major amenities of a big city: no big-league sports, no Big Five orchestra, no Art 101 masterpieces in the local museums. But the scaled-down versions of those amenities make for a pretty good life. Rochester taught me the pleasures of Triple-A baseball and the local Philharmonic, the quirkiness of small museums, the pleasures of a pocket-sized amusement park tucked alongside the small beach. Aristotle writes that The Good is that which needs no addition, and there were many days and evenings when I had no desire for any finer place.

Guarding my study on a summer night

I will miss the Japanese maple in our backyard, and grilling dinner on a crisp September night. I will miss the mated pair of cardinals that nested nearby, and our evening strolls along leafy side streets. I will miss the annual Oscar party in fancy dress at the George Eastman house, and the Rochester Philharmonic's annual Messiah. I will miss our church, where we were married, and the pastor who married us. I will miss Sunday brunch at the Highland Diner, where we eventually became such regulars that we weren't always given menus. I will miss driving past the Kodak building late on winter nights, knowing that when I saw it I was nearly home.

Time to be going

 I will miss our first house. I will miss our dining room and the old two-way swinging door to the kitchen, I will miss the old butler's pantry with its 1920 woodwork, and the fireplace that my wife loved building fires in. I will miss coffee on our front porch, and the garden which managed (thanks to the foresight of the previous owners) to have something in bloom or berry almost all year round. I will miss our lilac trees and our holly bush. Most of all, I will miss the little window in the room I used as an office, which looked out into the enclosed porch that was my spouse's office. And most of all I will miss looking up from the sidewalk in the evening and seeing her in her well-lit aerie, looking down at something on her desk.

Near the end of summer

I will miss the dinner parties we had for friends. I will miss hosting our parents, both sets, for Thanksgiving in that dining room. I will think fondly of the friends who visited us in that house, for a weekend or an afternoon.

As we were doing our last weeks of yard work, packing away our garden tools until next year, I realized that one of the bushes in our back yard, which we had never identified and which had only just begun bearing its first green, immature fruit, was actually a peach tree. The little mystery fruits yellowed and reddened into small, half-grown peaches, too small still to eat.

As ripe as this summer allowed

The full ripening, and the taste of backyard peaches at the kitchen table, will not come until another year. But I was happy that I got to see that color on the tree, promising better things to come.

cross-posted from Dagblog.

Still Killing Citizens: The Death of Sam Dubose

A University of Cincinnati cop has been indicted for murder. He killed an unarmed black citizen named Sam Dubose, whom he had initially stopped over a minor traffic issue: no front license plate. Why are we still doing this?

We've heard this story before. A ridiculously minor offense, the kind of thing that cops routinely let go, escalates into homicide when a cop kills a black citizen who has no weapon. After Eric Garner and Mike Brown, after Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland and Walter Scott, we are still doing this. Why?

The facts in evidence in the Cincinnati case are appalling. The killer was wearing a body camera. His police report is flatly refuted by the video from that camera. A number of other police officers made sworn statements, backing up the killer, that are also flatly contradicted by the video evidence. All of that is a disgrace. But even more shocking than what they did is when they did it.

After Ferguson, after Baltimore, after Tamir Rice and Walter Scott, after months and months of protests against police killing black citizens, and after months and months of increasingly less plausible denials of the problem, these cops went out in the second half of July 2015 and did EXACTLY what apologists for the police have been telling protestors cops don't do. A cop escalates a chicken-shit traffic stop over a license plate into a homicide, for no perceptible reason. His fellow cops lie and perjure themselves to back him. We are still doing this. Apparently, some of us insist on doing this.

Protest and conscious-raising have not been enough. There are still some cops out there, people who should never have been police for even a minute, who do not see killing unarmed black people as a problem. Attention to the issue has not made such people more cautious; Sam Dubose's killer is unbelievably reckless. Watch the tape. Attention to the issue has not dissuaded some cops, sworn peace officers, from this terrible crime against peace and justice.

Our national conversation about race and policing is not working, because some people, some actual cops, are refusing to accept that conversation. They are not willing to stop killing unarmed civilians. It is, apparently, a privilege they insist on.

There is nothing left to be done but to apply the full force of the law. We are still doing this, because some people refuse to stop doing this, refuse even to have an honest conversation about this. It is time to stop talking. It is time to put some people, as many people as insist upon it, in jail.

cross-posted from, and comments welcome at, Dagblog