{"id":306,"date":"2012-10-02T18:52:07","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T18:52:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=306"},"modified":"2013-06-07T19:06:59","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T19:06:59","slug":"working-my-way-back-to-you-shakespeare-and-labor","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/volume-ii-2008\/working-my-way-back-to-you-shakespeare-and-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWorking My Way Back to You\u201d: Shakespeare and Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sharon O’Dair,\u00a0The University of Alabama<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Yes, I do allude here to the song performed by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons in 1966 that reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100; that was performed by The Spinners in 1980 and reached #1 on the UK singles chart and #2 on Billboard\u2019s; and that was also performed by Boyzone, in the group\u2019s very first release, and reached #3 on the Irish charts in 1994.\u00a0 If readers are old enough to have danced to this song in either of its American incarnations; are Irish and young enough to have danced to it there; or if for some reason were forced to see Jersey Boys<\/i>, they will know that, despite the bubbly tune, the song is about a man who drove away the love of his life by abusing her emotionally or physically.\u00a0 Living through long and lonely nights, knowing he\u2019s not so strong after all, he mourns the \u201chappiness that died.\u201d\u00a0 Yet he\u2019s not \u201cabout to go living [his] life without [her],\u201d so he\u2019ll spend his days working his way back, trying to overcome her pride so that she will accept him, so that they will find again the \u201chappiness that died\u201d (Linzer and Randell).1<\/p>\n

Wondering why I chose to invoke a song whose tune may linger in their heads for hours, readers might conclude I did so to suggest that a change is\u2014or changes are\u2014occurring in the way Shakespeareans relate to Shakespeare, that we are working our way back to the happiness that died under the influence of a variety of democratizing and relativizing intellectual movements originating in the social upheavals of the 1960s, movements that found institutional and professional incarnation in postructuralism, new historicism, and cultural studies.\u00a0 One such change is a return to aesthetics or to evaluation, to the seeking out, in our field, of \u201cthe Shakespearean difference\u201d (Bloom 11).\u00a0 This return is motivated by an awareness that the dominant critical program isn\u2019t fun and isn\u2019t working \u2014whether we call it, with Paul Ricouer, \u201cthe hermeneutics of suspicion\u201d or less generously, and with Harold Bloom, a school of \u201cresentment\u201d aiming to \u201cdiminish\u2026the difference between Shakespeare and the likes of Chapman\u201d (Ricouer 32-35; Bloom 9, 10).\u00a0 Not just Bloom or the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics but Stanley Fish, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and K. Anthony Appiah, among others, have sensed for quite a while now, since before the turn of the century, that identity politics and \u201ctheory for its own sake\u201d have lost some luster:\u00a0 \u201cmirabile dictu<\/i>,\u2026more and more literary critics\u2026actually devote themselves to\u2026literature,\u201d as Appiah put it in 2000 (44).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Wonderful to relate, indeed! Or is it? \u00a0John Joughin points out in his introduction to Philosophical Shakespeares <\/i>that our profession\u2019s history over the past thirty years suggests that \u201cdisenchantment only ever serves to usher in new forms of re-enchantment as its necessary accomplice\u201d (15).\u00a0\u00a0 A more professional, though not necessarily more complimentary way to explain this movement, this see-saw or swinging pendulum, is that literary study oscillates agonistically<\/p>\n

between the discipline\u2019s two mighty opposites\u2014form and history.\u00a0 From positivist (now \u2018old\u2019) historicism to New Criticism to New Historicism:\u00a0 from structuralism and post- structuralism in cultural studies to what one recent collection of essays has dubbed \u2018the revenge of the aesthetic\u2019:\u00a0 each new orthodoxy has staked its claim by repudiating its predecessor\u2019s critical touchstone and re-covering (or re-\u2018new\u2019-ing) the concept rejected or abjected by that predecessor\u2026.[Literary study is] a self-perpetuating cycle of exaggerations, misrecognitions, and demonizations\u2026\u201d (Cohen 1).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Stephen Cohen\u2019s invocation here of professional politics and career-making suggests another such change, which might be called a return to the ethical, the idea, as Tzachi Zamir puts it, that \u201cliterature is knowledge yielding\u201d (7). \u00a0Besides the dreary knowledge Cohen invokes, literature yields other forms of knowledge, knowledge from the kinds of moral reflection stirred by watching or reading a play, reflection that resembles that stirred by watching the behavior of \u201cthe people who actually populate one\u2019s own life\u201d (Bristol, \u201cChildren\u201d 33).\u00a0\u00a0 Michael Bristol thinks that in order to \u201cunderstand what\u2019s happened to a character in a fiction [one really must] face up to what can happen to a real person\u201d and interpretation of Shakespeare\u2019s plays therefore requires something more than an analysis of the words on the page achieved through, say, an historically accurate understanding of those words as concepts and modes of behavior (\u201cConfusing\u201d 24). Interpretation of Shakespeare\u2019s plays also requires \u201ceveryday background knowledge of how the world generally works,\u201d not to mention an ability to fill in narrative gaps by contemplating \u201cthe scenes Shakespeare never wrote\u201d (\u201cVernacular\u201d 89). \u201cEngagement with a character has a moral dimension\u201d (\u201cConfusing\u201d 25) and this sort of engagement makes us think, makes us feel, and may make us better persons. \u00a0What yields knowledge in literature is an imagining, an engagement, that leads to \u201cintensely moral experience\u201d and a refusal of complacency with respect to the complexities of human behavior (\u201cVernacular\u201d 102).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

But moral inquiry of this sort is not personal or individual; it is social, rooted as it is in an understanding of \u201chow the world generally works,\u201d and it is therefore political. Shakespeare\u2019s characters face conflicts between domestic and official obligations and other, more abstract or largely self-interested considerations, such as ambition or chastity or trust or love.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare\u2019s characters grow and change as they manage these conflicts, and this, according to Robert Weimann, is Shakespeare\u2019s great contribution to the writing of character.\u00a0 In Shakespeare, character is effected through the dialectic between identity and relationship, between individual action and social circumstance\u2026.The mere juxtaposition of character and society fails to satisfy Shakespeare\u2019s immense sense of character. Merely to confront the idea of personal autonomy with the experience of social relations is not good enough as a definition of character.\u00a0 For Shakespeare the outside world of society is inseparable from what a person\u2019s character unfolds as his \u2018belongings\u2019\u201d (29, 27).<\/p>\n

This, too, I would urge, is also part of \u201chow the world generally works.\u201d\u00a0 Writers, critics, and theorists may have reveled in the notion of an autonomous bourgeois self, a self liberated from or juxtaposed to social and institutional authority, and they may have reveled even more when they debunked what they had created.\u00a0 But, as I have argued elsewhere, it was solipsistic, class-based fun, having almost nothing to do with reality, for such a self was, and is, a fiction, unavailable to most people living in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, not to mention those living in the twenty-first. (\u201cCartoon\u201d 84).\u00a0 Most people have never been free from social and institutional authority, most people know that their lives are played out, as Weimann argues is the case for Shakespeare\u2019s great characters, in a vital\u2014and moral \u2013engagement with the social and institutional. Yet in the current configuration of our field, we rarely speak of this.\u00a0 We have, as Ronan McDonald puts it, \u201cthrown the ethical baby out with the aesthetic bathwater\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

I<\/p>\n

Readers were correct, then, if they concluded I intended my allusion to the \u201860s pop song to suggest that changes are underway in the way Shakespeareans relate to Shakespeare. But rather than focus on the ways Shakespeareans are working their way back to aesthetics, I will focus here on one way Shakespeareans might work their way back to the ethical.\u00a0 I will suggest that before anything else, we should consider the work and labor of others, and in particular the ways our labor as Shakespeareans, the choices we make about what to study and how, affects the labor of others.\u00a0 Does it matter in this regard that, in the past thirty, now close to forty, years, our labor in conferences and in print has been devoted to Shakespeare and topics such as race, gender, or sexuality? \u00a0That we have seen dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of conferences on these topics and seldom a conference on labor, work, and class? \u00a0Might one hazard a guess about the ratio of articles or books published in the last thirty years on these respective topics?\u00a0 A hundred to one? \u00a0Two hundred to one? \u00a0My concern here, however, is not to answer all of these questions (although I am arguing that the answer to the first question is \u201cyes\u201d), but to speak more generally about the work of intellectual life, the underpinnings, shall we say, of our field-specific work. Unabashedly presentist, this essay uses the recent past and the present as the basis for discussion, and I hope to particularlize Terry Eagleton\u2019s position, elaborated in the \u201cAfterward\u201d to the 1996 reissue of his primer on literary theory:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Men and women do not live by culture alone, the vast majority of them throughout history have been deprived of the chance of living by it at all, and those few who are fortunate enough to live by it now are able to do so because of the labour of those who do not. Any cultural or critical theory which does not begin from this single most important fact, and hold it steadily in mind in its activities, is in my view unlikely to be worth very much (187).<\/p>\n

My contention is that that we have done far too little of this\u2014holding steady in our minds that we live by culture because of the labor of those who do not\u2014despite the politicization of literary study in the past forty years.\u00a0\u00a0 Like King Lear, I will argue, we have taken too little care.\u00a0 We seldom expose ourselves \u201cto feel what wretches feel\u201d and we are not concerned to \u201cshake the superflux to them \/ And show the heavens more just\u201d (3.4.34, 35-6).<\/p>\n

We know why the New Left began to focus on race and gender, on cultural politics, because the old socialist and working-class Left did not, focusing on class and class politics instead.\u00a0 \u201cThe Old Socialist leader Eugene Debs used to be criticized for being unwilling to interest himself in any social reform that didn\u2019t involve the attack on economic inequality\u201d (Michaels 19). But in moves just like the ones identified by Cohen above with respect to literary criticism, the New Left demonized its predecessor, and threw out the \u201cclass\u201d baby with the \u201dSocialist-Marxist-Master-Narrative\u201d bathwater, such that the \u201cleft today obsessively interests itself in issues that have nothing to do with economic inequality\u201d (Michaels 19).\u00a0 Further though, and more importantly, when cultural politics overwhelm class politics, intellectuals are allowed to stop feeling what wretches feel, allowed to take too little care.\u00a0 Can it be coincidence that during the past forty years, as intellectuals pursued a politics of culture, income inequality has increased in this country to levels not seen since the 1920s?\u00a0 That \u201csome 50 million Americans are members of households\u2014consisting of one or more workers\u2014[who] earn in total between $20,000 and $40,000 a year\u201d? Or that \u201capproximately 13.5 million Americans are even worse off, [living]\u2026in families whose total family income is below the poverty line [of $20,000 per year for a family of four], even though at least one family member works full-time\u201d? (Madrick 66)\u00a0 Can it be coincidence that while intellectuals pursued a politics of culture, it has become almost impossible for workers to organize a union at job-sites? \u00a0Or that governmental oversight and regulation has been allowed to be dismantled, piece by piece, to the extent that \u201cmanagers of countless companies, many of them well-known and admired\u2014not only Wal-Mart but JPMorgan Chase\u2014\u2026willfully break the law to reduce labor costs\u201d and post enormous profits? (Madrick 65).\u00a0 Minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws are violated daily, hourly:\u00a0 at Toys-R-US, Pep Boys, and Taco Bell, managers erase hours from time-sheets; Wal-Mart has locked in workers on its night-shifts (Madrick 65, 66).\u00a0 At a software company, eighteen engineers were fired with no warning and told that \u201cin order to receive their severance pay, they had to stay on the job and train their low-cost replacements from India\u201d (Madrick 66).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0One could multiply examples and data from the economists and political scientists, but a more important point for literary critics is that this situation, sadly, was not unanticipated.\u00a0 As I explained in 2000, the sociologists David Riesman and Nathan Glazer observed in 1955 that a focus by the Left on civil liberties and civil rights would be one that \u201cdiffers politically from the old New Deal causes.\u201d\u00a0 Such a focus, they argued, would \u201crepresent\u2026for many liberals and intellectuals a withdrawal from\u2026[such] larger\u2026concerns [and a concomitant move] into personal life and\u2026the field of culture\u201d (75).\u00a0 Civil liberties and civil rights would be, furthermore, a focus that allowed intellectuals to seek allies among those who share their sense of culture, \u201camong the rich and well-born rather than among the workingmen and farmers they had earlier courted and cared about; indeed, it [would tend]\u00a0 to make them conservative, once it [became] clear that civil liberties are to be protected, not by majority vote (which is overwhelmingly unsympathetic), but by traditional institutions, class prerogatives, and judicial life-tenure\u201d (78).\u00a0 Such a focus, Riesman and Glazer argued, would divide workers from intellectuals, and it would do so, in large part, because workers do not have the economic capital or the cultural capital\u2014\u201cthe practice of deference and restraint which is understood and appreciated\u2026among the well-to-do and highly educated\u201d (78)\u2014to see these issues as meaningful. \u00a0For workers they mean mainly sacrifice, either economically or culturally, which was not and is not the case for intellectuals, the rich, or the well-born.\u00a0 Liberal intellectuals may not have liked it then, and the cultural Left may not have liked it since, and readers may not like it now, but Riesman and Glazer were and are correct: \u201cthe demand for tolerance\u2026cannot replace, politically, the demand of \u2018economic equality\u2019\u201d (75).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

II<\/p>\n

This essay is revised from the version I delivered in Youngstown, Ohio, at the annual meeting of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, whose theme in October 2008 was \u201cWorking Shakespeares.\u201d I had been to Youngstown three times before, in 1997, 1999, and 2001, to attend conferences hosted by the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University.\u00a0 It was nice to return to Youngstown, and to see the city in a better state economically.\u00a0 A decade ago, the city and the area more generally was bereft, still reeling, from de-industrialization.\u00a0 Beginning in the late 1970s, good jobs in steel \u201cbegan to erode\u2026and by 1992 less than a thousand people remained as steelworkers. The Youngstown area lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs, 400 satellite businesses, $414 million in personal income and many people\u201d (Corman).\u00a0 Downtown Youngstown was largely boarded up.\u00a0 People were grim.\u00a0 On one of my visits to Youngstown, I enjoyed a coffee and a muffin at The Beat Coffee House, right across the street from campus and the only game in town for the kind of coffee we professors tend to like. Shortly thereafter I discovered I\u2019d lost my keys, and I returned to ask the young woman behind the counter if someone had turned them in.\u00a0 She said \u201cno,\u201d and when I said I couldn\u2019t imagine where I\u2019d lost them, she commiserated with a statement that haunted me for months and which, although I haven\u2019t thought about it in years, returned to me quickly upon writing this essay. She said, \u201cYoungstown is like that.\u00a0 Kind of like a black hole.\u00a0 You come here and bad things happen.\u00a0 Things that don\u2019t happen to you in other places.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I am hopeful that fewer bad things are happening to people here these days, visitors and locals alike.\u00a0 Certainly visionary is Mayor Jay Williams\u2019s and the City of Youngstown\u2019s plan to recreate itself as \u201ca sustainable mid-sized city\u201d by \u201crationaliz[ing] and consolidat[ing] the urban infrastructure in a socially responsible and financially sustainable manner\u201d (Youngstown 2010). But I am mindful that measuring Youngstown\u2019s status as a black hole of bad luck cannot be accomplished by toting up what is nice for me, or us\u2014the addition of two, maybe several Starbucks and a Caribou Coffee or that I was able to stay in a Hampton Inn now, instead of the decayed but wonderfully retro Best Western (or something) that was a mafia front (or hang-out) eight or ten years ago.\u00a0 We must tote up what is nice for others\u2014jobs, health care, a decent standard of living.\u00a0 I am reminded here of people I know in Los Angeles\u2014I think it\u2019s no disgrace to call them \u201ccard-carrying liberals\u201d and I am one, too\u2014during the nasty 2003-04 grocery workers\u2019 strike.\u00a0 Asserting their support for labor by respecting picket lines, they avoided Ralph\u2019s and Safeway by shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe\u2019s, grocery stores where picket lines weren\u2019t established and whose cultural politics are easy to admire. But few of those committed shoppers knew that Whole Foods and Trader Joe\u2019s didn\u2019t earn a picket line because, just like Wal-Mart, neither of these companies is unionized. Taking too little care, not caring enough about income inequality to know these facts, these card-carrying liberals are part of the problem.<\/p>\n

Shortly after the 2008 Republican Convention concluded in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Toledo) appeared on \u201cDeadline Now,\u201d a local public affairs show airing on Toledo\u2019s public television station, WGTE.2 \u00a0She expressed strong regret that \u201cin a year in which we need all the focus on the economy and the war,\u201d the Democratic Convention focused on \u201cgender and race.\u201d\u00a0 Kaptor was dismayed by the media coverage, suggesting that we got \u201cpulled over here, [to cultural questions]\u2026when\u2026we need attention here\u201d\u2026on the economy and the war. Talk about gender and race \u201ccurbed the amount of time the candidates could devote to [these serious challenges facing the country].\u201d Perhaps anger is not surprising in a woman who represents a district in a city whose official unemployment rate in July of 2008 was 8.9%. But I suspect that Representative Kaptur was more than unusually exercised about the convention because she knew the crucial importance of the economy for voters in Ohio\u2014a key battleground state, where the unemployment rate in August 2008 was 7.4%\u2014and also for voters in the neighboring state of Michigan where the unemployment rate in August 2008 was 8.9%, considerably above the national rate for August, 2008 of 6.1%., which was, nevertheless, the highest level since 2003.3 \u00a0Primary elections in Michigan and Ohio were won with margins of 15% and 8%, respectively, by Senator Hillary Clinton over eventual nominee Senator Barack Obama.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indeed, it is and was easy to wonder why Senator Obama wasn\u2019t from the beginning many percentage points ahead of the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, in the national polls. More even than in 2004, when the situation in Iraq had galvanized the public and would, two years later, result in a return of both houses of Congress to the Democrats, 2008 seemed the year for a Democrat to win the presidency.\u00a0 Iraq, Afghanistan, the economy\u2014each was a deepening problem, and President Bush\u2019s approval rating was less than 30%. Then, in the middle of September, a crisis emerged in the financial markets unparalleled in almost all of our lifetimes. Recalling 1929, the markets were in disarray and the world turned topsy-turvy, with free marketers, like Wall Street investment banks, not to mention George Bush and his cabinet, looking eagerly to Uncle Sam for bailouts. What was being sought and then implemented was socialism for \u201cthe rich, the well-connected, and Wall Street,\u201d ensuring that \u201cprofits are privatized and losses are socialized\u201d (Roubini).\u00a0\u00a0 And yet, polls indicated that deep into September almost an equal number of voters support each presidential candidate. The explanation easiest to hand for this situation is racism among white voters. Hillary Clinton\u2019s gaffe in May was telling in this regard.\u00a0 In what was, for me, her second-worst gaffe of the campaign, she cited an Associated Press story that referred to an exit poll finding that \u201cSenator Obama\u2019s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and\u2026[that] whites\u2026who had not completed college were supporting [her]\u201d (Kiely and Lawrence).\u00a0 Commentators rightfully blistered Clinton for insinuating that African-Americans are not hard-working.\u00a0 But no one I know of at the time or since observed that Clinton\u2019s remarks are derogatory, too, toward working-class and poor whites.\u00a0 After all, given the Clinton administration\u2019s lack of concern for the poor and working-class,4 only racism or stupidity can explain the support given to Hillary Clinton by these \u201chard-working\u2026white Americans\u201d who haven\u2019t completed college.<\/p>\n

I do not deny the existence of the former (or the latter for that matter) among this group of people or any other. But neither racism nor stupidity can account entirely for the failure, since 1968, for forty years\u2014that number again!\u2014of the Democratic Party to win a majority of the white vote and in particular of the white working-class vote and even more particularly, of the white male working-class vote.5\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Attributing these results to something other than these voters\u2019 racism or stupidity is not, I know, a common view among upper middle-class liberals, perhaps especially in the academy, but here I would invoke Senator Obama, who, in his speech last March, entitled \u201cA More Perfect Union,\u201d chided members of his own class, those who would \u201cwish away the resentments of white Americans, [and] label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns.\u201d\u00a0 Such thinking, Obama implies, is counterproductive, widening \u201cthe racial divide\u201d and feeding into the hands of \u201cthe real culprits of the middle class squeeze \u2014 a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Indeed, while many have fretted for years\u2014perhaps most famously in Thomas Frank\u2019s What\u2019s the Matter With Kansas?<\/i>\u2014about the (white [male]) working-class\u2019s flight from the Democratic Party, and while many have demonized those voters for their racism, sexism, and homophobia, the fact is that this group of voters saw the situation well.\u00a0 In 2008, during the long presidential campaign, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia observed that in the 1970s, \u201cthere were a lot of people, like myself, who got really disillusioned by the Democratic Party getting away from its message of taking care of working people\u2026And after the Democratic Party started obscuring its message, they look[ed] up and [said], \u2018At the top there\u2019s no real difference between the parties, no real difference except at least these people\u2019\u2014the Republicans\u2014\u2018are gonna protect God and guns\u2019\u201d (Boyer 40).\u00a0 In 2000, in a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Anna Greenberg suggested that \u201cthe Democratic Party changed over time such that white men no longer [saw] it as representing their interests\u201d (2). In 2001, Greenberg\u2019s fellow political scientist, William Galston, reminded members of the Democratic Leadership Council that \u201cnearly every major development of the past generation worked to push white men away from the Democratic Party,\u201d including defense and foreign policy, the role of government in people\u2019s lives, the many fronts of the culture wars, and the ways power was distributed in the party itself.\u00a0 Of course, as Frank pointed out in 2004, the DLC itself is one of those developments. This powerful group, which \u201cproduced figures such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar workers and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.\u201d\u00a0 Yet of course the DLC is hardly alone in promoting this agenda and, as Frank observes, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly when \u201cin the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional consitituency\u201d (Kansas <\/i>243, 242).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Politics is about distribution.\u00a0 Politics is\u2014eventually, or nearly\u2014a zero-sum game. Local, state, and federal budgets are zero-sum games. Taxes are zero-sum games.\u00a0 And when politicians and parties change the ways they distribute power and benefits, some win and others lose, as Greenberg points out: the bulk of the New Deal policies administered at the national level such as the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps benefited men\u2026.The programs of the War on Poverty and Great Society, on the other hand, largely aided women and minorities. \u2026These changes to the welfare state meant that Democratic policies fundamentally changed the role of government in [peoples\u2019s] lives (6).<\/p>\n

From this perspective\u2014and regardless of how favorably one judges those changes, the ways in which \u201cthe Democratic Party has moved to or represents the political left\u201d (Greenberg 2)\u2014the voting behavior of the white working class, and particularly of white working-class men, must be judged rational if somewhat conservative; it is not, as pundits, politicians, and intellectuals too often suggest, the result of unabashed racism, sexism, and homophobia.\u00a0 Nor is it solely the result of choosing to privilege morality over economic interests, as Michaels correctly sees is a common and legitimate choice among the upper middle-class (139).\u00a0 Rather, as Webb confirms, working-class persons vote for their values because that is all they can vote for, because they cannot vote for their economic interests.\u00a0\u00a0 They know that the Democratic Party, like its intellectual ideologists, substituted culture for class and began the process of deregulation and tax reform in favor of the well-to-do in 1978 during the Carter administration, and that the Clinton administration, among its other sins, took away what remained of the Glass-Steagall Act, a measure from 1933 that tightly regulated financial firms (Cassidy 26).\u00a0 \u201cLike the conservatives,\u201d this Democratic Party, \u201ctake economic issues off the table\u201d (Frank, Kansas 243). These voters know, as Webb says, that there\u2019s no difference at the top when it comes to matters economic.<\/p>\n

If this is the case, then to win the votes of these voters, liberal politicians must address their interests, give them something tangible\u2014like health insurance and retirement benefits, the opportunity to organize a union, a more equitable distribution of wealth, job retraining and unemployment insurance, and equally funded primary and secondary schools throughout the United States.\u00a0 What will not do is to consign them to losing their jobs at age 40 or 50 and then offer them the comfort of a lower-division classroom where, after studying diversity and tolerance, they will learn, as Walter Benn Michaels puts it, to \u201cfeel better about their inferiority,\u201d not to mention the inferiority of others.\u00a0 Michaels suggests that this option is too easy, and that we fetishize diversity and tolerance because doing so is easy.\u00a0 Doing so \u201ctell[s] us that racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices.\u201d\u00a0 In contrast, \u201csolving the problem of economic inequality might require something more; it might require us to give up our money\u201d (89).\u00a0 Which is why, as Michaels also points out, \u201cthe right wants\u2026culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead of money, it doesn\u2019t matter who wins.\u00a0 And the left gives it what it wants\u201d (109).6<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Michaels calls this conception of politics a \u201cprofound mistake\u201d (19), a judgment with which, of course, I agree.\u00a0 We can see the profundity of the mistake in the recent election, in the closeness of the race and in the stunning choice by John McCain of Sarah Palin as candidate for Vice-President.\u00a0 Pundits duly noted that Palin ably brings the Republican base of evangelical Christians into the McCain fold.\u00a0 But the choice also demonstrates\u2014again\u2014that identity politics can be embraced by the right as well as the left.\u00a0 No one to my knowledge observed that Palin kept \u201cculture\u201d on the front burner of this election.\u00a0 Rather than shout from the rooftops, with Representative Kaptor, the facts about globalization and job loss\u2014or Professor Roubini\u2019s judgment that the recent economic crisis constitutes socialism for \u201cthe rich, the well-connected, and Wall Street\u2026[as]\u2026profits are privatized and losses socialized\u201d\u2014Democrats wrangled with Republicans, and pundits blathered on, about whether a woman counts as a measure of diversity if she opposes abortion, charges victims for rape tests, and would like to ban books.\u00a0 If she can run a state government and raise five children at the same time, is she a feminist? \u00a0Is she as good a feminist as Hillary Clinton? \u00a0What is her appeal, exactly?\u00a0 Is it that she a sexy puritan?\u00a0 Do women find their inner Elle Woods in Sarah Palin?<\/p>\n

Further, while much has been made about the generational change heralded by the rise to prominence of the Obamas and Palins, the selection of Sarah Palin as a vice-presidential candidate adumbrates a problem no one to my knowledge has yet discussed:\u00a0 we will in future field not only candidates who are Black or Asian or female and hold advanced degrees from Harvard or Yale but also candidates who hold academic degrees and are unqualified for high office.\u00a0 Barack and Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin are all about the same age\u2014Michelle and Sarah are the same age\u2014and their educational histories result from choices the country made in the 1960s to expand access to higher education to almost every American, only not equally for all.\u00a0 Enabled by programs of affirmative action instituted decades ago, the Obamas hold the sort of credentials typically held by holders of high office, degrees from Ivy League or peer institutions. Enabled by expanded access to community colleges and state universities, Palin holds the sort of credential typically held by people selling radio advertising, having managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree in journalism after (apparently) switching schools five times in six years, attending the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, the University of Idaho, Matanuska-Susitna College, and the University of Idaho again. Is it ironic\u2014or just plain scary\u2014that the next Vice-President of the United States, the person just a heart-beat away from the Presidency, might well have been a woman who has the kind of higher education that most Americans, and almost all poor or working-class Americans, in fact have:\u00a0 six schools in six years and a BA in something?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The political histories of these candidates\u2014and our political futures\u2014are the result, partly, of our society\u2019s inability to speak the truth about the ways we have gone about expanding access to higher education, as if a Rose is a Rose is a Rose, when clearly one Rose is far more rare than another.\u00a0 Whether Barack Obama has more native intelligence than Sarah Palin, I cannot say.\u00a0 But I can say he is better educated and more suited to high office than she is, because Columbia University is significantly different from and superior to North Idaho College, even though our ideology\u2014perhaps especially our professional ideology\u2014insists upon no difference between them.\u00a0 Further, even if, like me, you acknowledge that difference, not one of us can point out the error of our ideology here, since that ideology has also made politics a \u201ccode of manners,\u201d a way to \u201censure that no one is offended\u201d (Michaels 91).\u00a0 Unlike conservatives who loudly proclaimed Palin\u2019s unfitness for office, we are not going to publicly \u201cdiss\u201d the educational credentials of a woman who perhaps overcame many obstacles to obtain her degree.\u00a0 Not one of us is going to suggest publicly that those who attend North Idaho College are not comparable to those who attend Columbia University and therefore are not qualified to run the country.\u00a0 Would you do so publicly, to your own students?7<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

III<\/p>\n

When I teach undergraduate Shakespeare, a favorite classroom exercise is to introduce discussion of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream <\/i>by asking students why they are in college. Invariably, they reply, \u201cbecause I want a better life.\u201d \u00a0Some say, \u201cbecause I want to make more money.\u201d\u00a0 Occasionally, one says, \u201cfor the intellectual challenge.\u201d\u00a0 I then ask what jobs they hope to find upon graduating and I write them on the board: teacher, lawyer, social worker, probation officer, art therapist, and because this is Alabama, minister or pastor.\u00a0 I then ask them to identify the jobs performed by Shakespeare\u2019s rude mechanicals or more pointedly, the jobs performed by today\u2019s \u201crude mechanicals\u201d: carpenter, of course, but also electrician, plumber, pipefitter, oilfield driller, automobile or aircraft mechanic, and so on.\u00a0 I then ask my students who makes more money, a small-town lawyer or the person who pilots ships in and out of Mobile bay? A minister or a driver for UPS? \u00a0A social worker or a plumber? \u00a0And then I tell my students I am reminded of the movie, Moonstruck<\/i>, when Rose Castorini\u2019s would-be lover\u2014who is, as you may recall, a college professor, and quite possibly a literature professor\u2014walks her to her home late at night and is astonished to discover she lives in what is, from his point-of-view, a mansion.\u00a0 He then asks what her husband does for a living.\u00a0 When she replies that he is a plumber, the would-be lover is almost struck dumb.<\/p>\n

What do I conclude from my students\u2019 responses? \u00a0I conclude that they are not in college to make more money than they could without a college education and that to the extent they equate \u201cmaking more money\u201d with \u201ccollege,\u201d they are misguided.\u00a0 I suggest to them\u2014as I suggest to you\u2014that for them \u201cbetter life\u201d does not mean more money but it does mean not doing physical labor, not working with their hands, and it does mean avoiding dirt, sweat, and foul smells.\u00a0\u00a0 As such my students confirm what Garrett Keizer suggests about our culture as a whole: ours is one \u201cthat has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work\u201d (11).\u00a0 This seems to me to be true, but our culture\u2019s aversion to labor is long-standing, conventional, and deeply rooted.8\u00a0\u00a0 More than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i>, and toward the end of the play, Duke Theseus wonders how his court shall \u201cwear away this long age of three hours \/ Between our after-supper and bed- time?\u201d (5.1.33-4).\u00a0 Offered a list of ready entertainments, the Duke settles his curiosity upon \u201cA tedious brief scene of young Pyramus \/ And his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth\u201d (ll. 56-57). Theseus\u2019s master of revels explains:<\/em><\/p>\n

A play there is, my lord, some ten words long.<\/em>
\n Which is as brief as I have known a play;<\/em>
\n But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,<\/em>
\n Which makes it tedious; for in all the play<\/em>
\n There is not one word apt, one player fitted.<\/em>
\n And tragical, my noble lord, it is,<\/em>
\n For Pyramus therein doth kill himself; <\/em>
\n Which, when I saw rehears\u2019d, I must confess <\/em>
\n Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears<\/em>
\n The passion of loud laughter never shed. (ll. 61-70)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

\n

This assessment fails to convince Theseus to choose another entertainment, but Philostrate\u2019s emphasis on propriety, taste, and style foreshadows the responses to the play offered by the assembled audience of Theseus\u2019s court:\u00a0 both play and players the aristocrats tell us, are ungoverned, disordered, uncouth, childlike, and error-ridden (ll. 123, 125, 353, 122, 237). Pyramus and Thisbe <\/i>is the work of \u201chard-handed men\u2026\/ Which never labour\u2019d in their minds til now,\u201d and it is, as Hippolyta concludes, \u201cthe silliest stuff that ever I heard\u201d (ll. 72-3, 207).<\/p>\n

Years ago, Louis Montrose concluded, correctly I think, that the \u201cideological positioning\u201d of Dream <\/i>and of its play-within-the-play \u201cis more complex and more equivocal than can be accommodated by the terms of an elite\/popular opposition\u201d (198).\u00a0 Yet the oppositions invoked by the aristocrats in response to the mechanicals\u2019 work\u2014mind\/body, order\/disorder, adult\/child, governed\/ungoverned, and refined\/uncouth\u2014have displayed remarkable staying power and, I would suggest, serve to characterize elite assumptions about \u201crude mechanicals\u201d even today.<\/p>\n

But today, one doesn\u2019t need to be an aristocrat to be a part of the elite; academics are part of the upper middle-class.\u00a0 Data from the US Census Bureau indicate that in 2007, a household with a minimum income of $100,000 resides in the top fifth of households in the country. If a household earns $177,000, it resides in the top 5% of households.9 \u00a0If you are a tenure-track faculty member\u2014even a rookie assistant professor\u2014and you have a partner earning the same salary as you, you are in or very near being in the top fifth of households.\u00a0 If you are a full professor, with a partner earning the same salary as you, you are in or very near the top 5% of households. \u00a0What this means, if I can paraphrase Michaels, is that you are not part of the middle-class, and certainly not working-class.\u00a0 You are upper middle-class.10<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

As a result of not caring and not courting for fifty years, many academics, especially those educated in elite PhD-granting institutions, are so disconnected from working-class persons that, I think, we literally cannot see the problem of class.11 \u00a0Some of us cannot even speak to working-class people, as William Deresiewicz confessed in a recent issue of The American Scholar<\/i>.12 \u00a0We are too much like Lear, trying to rule the world with eyes closed and ears shut, not realizing how profoundly our choices affect the lives of others.\u00a0 And so, as I conclude this essay, I would like invoke once again the old King\u2019s prayer, spoken when his eyes and ears were open:<\/p>\n

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe\u2019er you are,<\/em>
\n That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,<\/em>
\n How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,<\/em>
\n Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you<\/em>
\n From seasons such as these? \u00a0O, I have ta\u2019en<\/em>
\n Too little care of this.\u00a0 Take physic, pomp,<\/em>
\n Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,<\/em>
\n That thou mayst shake the superflux to them<\/em>
\n And show the heavens more just (3.4.28-36).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Without a doubt, we will see more houseless heads and unfed sides among us in the coming years.\u00a0 What do we do?<\/p>\n

Over twenty years ago, when criticism became strongly politicized, Bristol argued it is not enough \u201csimply to say \u2018forbidden things\u2019 about Shakespeare or\u2026connect his work to an ideologically subversive discourse.\u201d\u00a0 Located in the academy, such efforts express \u201cthe politically weak and practically insignificant corporate goal-values of pluralism.\u201d\u00a0 What is needed, Bristol argued, is a \u201ccritique of tradition [that] breaks out toward an active constituency\u201d (\u201cLenten Butchery\u201d 220; America <\/i>61).\u00a0 Breaking out toward a constituency is difficult, however, when a person has no relationship to it, can\u2019t speak to it, doesn\u2019t even know it exists.\u00a0 In the wake of Barack Obama\u2019s election to the Presidency, many on the Left and in the Democratic Party think irrelevant the constituency that is white working-class America.\u00a0 Demography tells the story, they say:\u00a0 continuing immigration, the continuing \u201cbrowning\u201d of America, means that eventually the Democrats will not \u201cneed\u201d white working-class voters to win the Presidency. Even if true, however, this argument is not compelling, either conceptually, politically, or morally.\u00a0 Conceptually, it ignores the question of where lines of political contention in a post- racial America will be drawn, a question that might be answered by the word \u201cclass.\u201d Politically, it ignores the fact that in a year when conditions were almost otherworldly ripe for victory by Democrats, it took a meltdown of the financial system\u2014the worst since 1929\u2014to secure that victory.\u00a0 In contrast, as Webb argued in the Wall Street Journal <\/i>in 2004, every election would offer powerful margins of victory to the Democrats if they found a way to bring the white and African-American working class \u201cto the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously kept them apart for the past two centuries\u201d (Boyer 40).\u00a0 Morally, it ignores the fact that for two centuries, a formula has indeed \u201cconsciously\u201d kept apart these constituent parts of working class.\u00a0 Indeed, to ignore the white working-class would be to replicate that formula by flipping it, as if the sins of the past justify future sin.\u00a0 The Democrats will win, consistently, not when they ignore the white working-class, but when the Party and its intellectual ideologists work their way back to Labor, when they respect Labor as much as they respect Mind, and when they find their allies among working people, regardless of gender, color, or ethnicity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

NOTES<\/p>\n

1The version sung by the Spinners and Boyzone is a medley with \u201cForgive Me Girl.\u201d See: http:\/\/homepage.ntlworld.com\/gary.hart\/lyricsd\/detroit.html<\/a>. Accessed 6 September 2008.<\/p>\n

2 My transcription of the interview.\u00a0 Accessed 28 September 2008.<\/p>\n

3 See the U.S. Department of Labor website for data on the states: http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/lau\/<\/a>. For the national rate see http:\/\/www.bls.gov\/.<\/a><\/p>\n

4 Think of what characterized the 1990s, including welfare reform, NAFTA, stagnating wages, and a continuing rise in income inequality.\u00a0 Consider that, as Thomas Frank puts it, Bill Clinton \u201cruled like a nice, responsible Republican,\u201d balancing the budget while triangulating here and triangulating there (\u201cFuture\u201d).<\/p>\n

5 According to Andrew Hacker, John Kerry and Al Gore fell 17 and 12 percentage points, respectively, behind George Bush among white voters (16). Bill Clinton fared worse in 1992, falling 21 percentage points behind the combined total of Bush pere and Ross Perot, and about the same in 1996, falling 11 percentage points behind the combined total of Robert Dole and Ross Perot (National Exit Polls Table).<\/p>\n

6 In this sense, the left is a handmaiden to, an \u201caccomplice\u201d of, and in certain instances, the \u201cpolice force\u201d for the right, having produced\u2014or more accurately, perhaps, having reduced\u2014 politics to a \u201ccode of manners, a way of talking and acting designed not to produce radical social change but to ensure that no one is offended\u201d (Michaels 19, 75, 91).<\/p>\n

7 Neither did the Obamas to the country. In Denver, both emphasized a shared goal to ensure that every American will have what they had, what they wanted, what their families worked for, \u201cthe chance to go to college.\u201d\u00a0 Neither said a \u201cgood college,\u201d much less \u201can Ivy League college,\u201d and neither mentioned by name the institutions of higher education each, in fact, had attended.\u00a0 If this was arguably good politics, it was also hypocritical and heightens the irony that we might well have gotten the ignorant Palin as Vice-President, instead of the brilliant Obama as President.\u00a0 We might well have gotten she who had what the Obamas seek to give to all, \u201cthe chance to go to college.\u201d\u00a0 Again, I insist, a rose is not a rose is not a rose.<\/p>\n

8 More than one hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen argued that our culture has long understood physical labor to be \u201cirksome,\u201d \u201cignoble,\u201d indeed \u201cwrong\u2026and\u2026morally impossible.\u201d It is the \u201cperquisite of the poor,\u201d and thus to be avoided (200-201). \u00a0The irksomeness of labor and of those who labor <\/i>is \u201ca cultural fact,\u201d Veblen argued, for which there is no remedy \u201cshort of a subversion of that cultural structure on which our canons of decency rest\u201d (201).<\/p>\n

9 http:\/\/www.census.gov\/hhes\/www\/income\/histinc\/h01AR.html\u00a0 <\/a>In 2007, the median earnings for men in the US was $45,113 and for women it was $35,102. See: http:\/\/www.census.gov\/hhes\/www\/income\/histinc\/p38AR.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

10 Michaels, 192. He is speaking of himself.<\/p>\n

11 Before he could write The Trouble With Diversity<\/i>, Michaels had to move, with an outsized salary, to a public institution like the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose PhD program is ranked a lowly number forty.\u00a0 Quite a shock, I am sure, after Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, where he labored previously, but that is what it took to focus his mind on the topic of class. Literally, I think, he could not see the topic at Berkeley or Hopkins.<\/p>\n

12 Deresiewicz confesses that \u201cit didn\u2019t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I\u2019d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn\u2019t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn\u2019t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

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Boyer, Peter J. \u201cThe Appalachian Problem:\u00a0 Obama goes to rural Virginia.\u201d The New Yorker <\/i>(6 October 2008): 36-41.<\/p>\n

Bristol, Michael.\u00a0 \u201cConfusing Shakespeare\u2019s Characters with Real People: Reflections on Reading in Four Questions.\u201d\u00a0 Forthcoming in Shakespeare and Character:\u00a0 Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons<\/i>.\u00a0 Ed. Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. New York: Palgrave, 2009.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cHow many children did she have?\u201d \u00a0Philosophical Shakespeares<\/i>.\u00a0 Ed. John J. Joughin. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.\u00a0 18-33.<\/p>\n

—. \u201cLenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 Shakespeare Reproduced:\u00a0 The Text in History and Ideology<\/i>.\u00a0 Ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O\u2019Connor.\u00a0 New York: Methuen, 1987. 206-24.<\/p>\n

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Frank, Thomas.\u00a0 \u201cNo Future for You.\u201d\u00a0 The Huffington Post <\/i>(September 26, 2008). http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/thomas-frank\/no-future-for-you_b_129619.html <\/a>Accessed September 26, 2008.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

—. What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas?:\u00a0 How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. <\/i>New York: Henry Holt, 2004.<\/p>\n

Galston, William A.\u00a0 \u201cThe White Male Problem.\u201d\u00a0 Blueprint Magazine <\/i>(July 12, 2001). http:\/\/www.ndol.org\/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=<\/a>127&subid=171&contentid=3564. Accessed 7 February 2009.<\/p>\n

Greenberg, Anna.\u00a0 \u201cWhy Men Leave:\u00a0 Gender and Partisanship in the 1990s.\u201d\u00a0 Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association.\u00a0 Washington, DC, 2000.<\/p>\n

Hacker, Andrew.\u00a0 \u201cObama:\u00a0 The Price of Being Black.\u201d\u00a0 The New York Review of Books <\/i>(25 September 2008): 12-16.<\/p>\n

Joughin, John.\u00a0 \u201cPhilosophical Shakespeares: an introduction.\u201d\u00a0 Philosophical Shakespeares<\/i>. Ed. John Joughin. London: Routledge, 2000.<\/p>\n

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Keizer, Garret.\u00a0 \u201cClimate, Class, and Claptrap.\u201d Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/i>. V. 314 (June 2007):\u00a0 9-11. Kiely, Kathy and Jill Lawrence. \u201cClinton makes case for wide appeal.\u201d USA Today <\/i>(May 8, 2009).\u00a0 http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/politics\/election2008\/2008-05-07-<\/a> clintoninterview_N.htm.\u00a0 Accessed 10 October 2008.<\/p>\n

Linzer, Sandy and Denny Randell.\u00a0 \u201cWorking My Way Back to You.\u201d\u00a0 Released by The Four Seasons in January 1966. http:\/\/www.lyricsdomain.com\/6\/frankie_valli\/working_my_way_back_to_you.html.<\/a> Accessed 6 September 2008.<\/p>\n

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Moonstruck<\/i>. Dir. Norman Jewison. MGM, 1987.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

National Exit Polls Table.\u00a0 The New York Times <\/i>(November 5, 2008) http:\/\/elections.nytimes.com\/2008\/results\/president\/national-exit-<\/a>polls.html?scp=1sq=voter%20new%20service%20exit%20poll,%20november%2010,%201996&st=cse<\/span>.\u00a0 Accessed 7 February 2009.<\/p>\n

Obama, Barack.\u00a0 \u201cA More Perfect Union.\u201d \u00a0March 28, 2008.\u00a0 Transcript accessed on October 10, 2008. http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=88478467<\/a><\/p>\n

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—. \u201cOn the Value of Being a Cartoon, in Literature and in Life.\u201d Harold Bloom\u2019s Shakespeare<\/i>. Ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer.\u00a0 New York:\u00a0 Palgrave, 2001.\u00a0 81-96.<\/p>\n

Ricouer, Paul.\u00a0 Freud and Philosophy : An Essay on Interpretation<\/i>. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, 32-35.<\/p>\n

Riesman, David and Nathan Glazer.\u00a0 \u201cThe Intellectuals and the Discontented Classes.\u201d\u00a0 The New American Right<\/i>. Ed. Daniel Bell. New York: Criterion Books, 1955, 56-90.<\/p>\n

Roubini, Nouriel. http:\/\/www.rgemonitor.com\/roubinimonitor\/253625\/the_transformation_of_the_usa_into_the_ussra_united_socialist_state_republic_of_america_continues at_full_speed_with_the_nationalization_of_aig<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Shakespeare, William.\u00a0 A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i>. Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. Ed. Harold F. Brooks.\u00a0 London:\u00a0 Routledge, 1979.<\/p>\n

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Weimann, Robert. “Society and the Individual in Shakespeare’s Conception of Character,” Shakespeare Survey<\/i>, 1981. 23-31.<\/p>\n

Youngstown 2010. http:\/\/www.youngstown2010.com\/vision_files\/vision.htm. <\/a>Accessed 10 October 2008.<\/p>\n

Zamir, Tzachi.\u00a0 Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama<\/i>. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sharon O’Dair,\u00a0The University of Alabama Yes, I do allude here to the song performed by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons in 1966 that reached #9 on the Billboard Hot 100; that was performed by The Spinners in 1980 and reached #1 on the UK singles chart and #2 on Billboard\u2019s; and that was also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":66,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-306","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/306\/revisions\/309"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}