Introduction: ‘Truth in Advertising’—Shakespeare and the 99 Percent

Abstract

The introductory essay to the volume addresses the collection’s appropriation of the discourse of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 percent as means of examining inequities in higher education. In setting up the main concerns of the collection, we suggest that “Shakespeare”—the playwright, the field, the profession—like “the 99 percent” of the Occupy movement, works in the essays as heuristic analogy, as a collective site for teasing out and making visible the complex, and often complicit, relations between literary studies as an intellectual discipline and the profession as a social organization, relations that result in a host of inequities across higher education, having to do with race, class, and gender but also with place, prestige, and resources.