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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bernard Shaw expressed this view when he spoke of the way in which
future theater audiences, who would grow up in a socialist society,
would have overcome the cult of Shakespeare's greatness, embedded as
that is in the exploitative society of colonial England, and have replaced
it by the heightened appreciation of the superiority of Shaw's or other
socialist authors' works. Shaw concluded
All Urlsocial Socialist
with the
comment:
The first literary result of the foundations of our industrial system
upon the profits of piracy and slave-trading was Shakspeare Isicl. It is
our misfortune that the sordid misery and hopeless horror of his view
of man's destiny is still so appropriate to English society that we even
today regard him as not for an age , but for all time.
The Sigllificallce oj
((Victilllolo<~)'''
The second confirmation of the deeper agenda of the debate is the
stress on the setting up of interdisciplinary programs of studies on de–
prived or victimized groups. The early models of these programs were
the postwar departments of religion.
In
the early fifties, the argument
had been advanced by supporters of religion that the secular university
and secular educational system had deprived students of knowledge of
even the rudiments of any historic religious culture. As a result, depart–
ments of religious studies were widely introduced. The curriculum in
these areas reached beyond the disciplinary approaches set by history, lit–
erature or linguistic study to provide an interdisciplinary approach to
topics like Christianity, Buddhist studies, or Jewish studies. The challenges
involved in these curricular innovations were recognized and debated at
that time.
One such challenge was to guarantee that courses in religious studies
were not exercises in consciousness-raising but involved a critical scholarly
approach to even the most sacred aspect of the religion. This also meant
that, unlike extracurricular group activities which could appropriately be
restricted to members of the same religious community, the courses in
Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and so on would be conducted as academic
studies for believer and nonbeliever alike. Instructors in such courses in
principle, whatever the practical empirical exigencies, would not have to
be recruited from sympathetic or committed practitioners of the histori–
cal religion that formed the curricular subject matter.
In
many instances
the instruction in these areas, sensitive to the potential charge that it had
been transferred from its traditional domicile in the theological seminary
or other religious academy, reacted with vigorous pursuit of scholarly
standards and aggressive expression of critical inquiry.
