Railing at Greatness: Why Critics, Educators, and Readers are so Touchy These Days

[AuntShecky]

‘Railing at Greatness’: Why Critics, Educators, and Readers Have Been So Touchy Lately


A “classic,” as Mark Twain famously remarked, “is a book that everybody praises but nobody reads.” Over the past couple of decades, his observation is no longer true: not only has there been less reading, alas, but even less praise – at least for those artists and works who most deserve it. To make matters even more distressing, critics and their devotees haven't merely stopped reading and praising the classics: where they haven't successfully banned them altogether, they want to change them, update them, “dumb them down,” – doing everything necessary to make them palatable for 21st century readers, except letting them be what they are.

Very recently there has been a mini-controversy involving an well-meaning English professor whose good intentions led him down the consequently hellish path of exorcizing a word from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and substituting with another word, apparently one less-offensive, albeit less acutely descriptive and with fewer nuances, thus undermining the author’s use of the original word. Here on the LitNet blogs (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/blog.php?b=11352) a lively discussionhas sprung up concerning alleged racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a charge first raised in a 1977, subsequently revised as an essay ten years later and since updated by the esteemed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. (It might come as a surprise to many of us that both issues have already been covered–perhaps even settled -- fourteen years ago this month, more of which be explained in the second and third parts of this essay.)

In the past two or three decades we have seen highly respected professionals accepting or rejecting a work according to how much or how little it reflects the social and political temper of the time--not so much the time in which it was first created, but in the time in which it is interpreted. This subjective--rather than objective-- type of assessment is a relatively new development in the world of literary criticism. For much of the twentieth century, literary thought was dominated by the New Critics (such as Brooks, Leavis, Tate, and Robert Penn Warren et al) who urged close structural analysis of the individual work without very much emphasis on whatever outside forces may have influenced its construction. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot, who is often included among the ranks of this literary movement, maintained that the quality of a specific work must also be assessed against the whole canon of literary works which preceded it. Most importantly, Eliot argued for minimizing an poet's personal background, in order to shift the focus away from the author toward the poem itself. (That is an crucially important point which will return in a later part of this essay.)

In 1957, the Canadian scholar, Northrop Frye, published The Anatomy of Criticism, which many consider the greatest volume of literary criticism of the twentieth century. Frye helped send criticism down a bold new path in that he viewed the role of the critic not as an ancillary sidekick or adversary to creative works but as a creative endeavor requiring just as much of the imagination as producing the work of art itself. Still, the methods which Frye recommended seemed closer to science than to art. He called the process "inductive" -- looking at the work itself and then systematically analyzing it according to certain sets of criteria, including and especially mythological "archetypes." Despite the fact that primary focus began with the original work, by admitting an external framework into the mix, Northrop Frye unwittingly became a bridge between the New Critics and the more recent crop of literary critics: which more and more seem to resemble a precinct full of book cops as well as cultural watchdogs, ideological spokespersons, and word warriors in the cause of social justice.

The popular trend on university campuses of Derrida-style “deconstruction” notwithstanding, today's literary critics seem less interested in taking a difficult, comprehensive approach. Our fast-paced civilization has lost its appetite for the painstakingly-written, in-depth review, marginalized with the label “think piece.” The in-depth analysis has been evicted by the capsule review, a more superficial one designed to cater to “the consumer,” providing him with the option of accepting or dismissing a work in a matter of seconds with two-sentence book reviews or downsized movie blurbs. For all the sophisticated complexity of our technological gadgets, it is a misnomer to call ours “The Information Age,” when the basic morpheme is called a “bite.”

Somewhere along the line we stopped trying to discover what literature is; instead we somehow feel compelled to ask what literature is for: for self-improvement, for contribution to our culture, for airing grievances, and for righting wrongs, as if fiction and poetry were super heroes, dressed in colorful tights and capes-- though, in a way,
some of them do wear a kind of "mask."

One reason for this is that although literature once was autonomous, aloof, and isolated from the assault of transient trends and cultural vagaries, it has since been yanked down from its loft and forced to work for a living. Rather than considering art and literature for their own respective sakes, educators on every tier of the system, from elementary through post-secondary schools, have conscripted them as possible “educational tools,” and thus are fully prepared to reject them for failure to embody prescribed criteria. If a specific work of literature makes the grade, it may be subjected to specious interpretations in order to make it “relevant” or “interesting” to an audience held captive by ennui. A blatant example of this tendency was described in John Kilgore's essay (http://www.eiu.edu/~ipaweb/pipa/volume3/kilgore.htm) deploring the way poetry is introduced to high school students, such as reading Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as an exhortation to avoid peer pressure.

Elementary and secondary curricula are developed by experts who assiduously monitor texts for material that may be inappropriate; they are specifically on the lookout for ethnic and religious bias either in the work as a whole or isolated passage. Given the youth of the students, the process is, at least in theory, the correct one on the elementary and high school level. There is, however, a danger that quality material commandeered for the benefit of students may be rejected for questionable reasons, for example a word with multiple meanings, one of which may be offensive. This is the reason The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appears on so many lists of “banned books” despite the fact that no non-minority author in American literature ever made a stronger attack on slavery and racism. The well-intentioned monitoring of offensive material continues on the college and university level, where it is both refined and intensified. One of Philip Roth's novels sends up the zeal of the self-appointed protectors of oppressed groups. In The Human Stain some undergraduates, with their antennae up and their sensitivity meters ramped up to eleven, misinterpret a highly-respected professor’s off-hand remark in the classroom as a racial slur. Rather than defend a distinguished member of their faculty, administrative officials cower under the students’ charges, and Coleman Silk’s life is forever changed. The integral irony is that Silk himself straddles the racial divide in American society, and through this dilemma Roth examines cultural issues of race, class, education, and ultimately, on the broader scale, the human condition.

Additionally, this habit of seeking and inevitably finding offensive aspects in the classics may have another cause: factions of both academia and the literati seem beset with a condition of partial amnesia in which current readers and critics use present-day cultural, social, and political standards, historically hard-won by heroic sacrifice, to judge works created in an earlier, admittedly less socially conscious age. Unquestionably, denouncing bigotry in all of its forms is certainly the correct moral stance to maintain; still, insisting that artists who once inhabited a bygone era and a world which had not yet evolved into a position akin to modern enlightenment should be likewise righteous is not only preposterous but patently unfair.

There is yet another reason for making literature fit into a Procrustes bed (which in modern times would be undoubtedly be a therapeutically designed futon) is the contemporary tendency toward literalism, straight-forward candor earnestly delivered with a straight face. Tangentially, readers occasionally succumb to an unconscious tendency to equate the opinions and behavior of characters with that of their author, with the intractable assumption that everything he produces is “autobiographical,” or the notion that the “I”of the poem or its speaker is always the poet himself.

Despite the resurgence of what is called “satire” (but is more likely parody) in popular entertainment, and a general wave of healthy skepticism toward both governments and corporations, in many ways the children of the millennium are allergic to irony. One has only to recall their parents’ generation, in which television viewers were savvy enough to recognize the particular ax a situation comedy like All in the Family was attempting to grind. This wasn't the 1950s and early sixties typical sitcom in which the main comic foil -–usually the bumbling father-figure in the family --evoked empathetic laughter at his foibles, with the confusion predictably cleared up before the last commercial break. In Norman Lear’s “ground-breaking” series, however, the central character was meant to be laughed at, not “with.” Racism, sexism, homophobia and especially invincible ignorance were the direct targets of ridicule, through the loud blustering of a character who personified bigotry and wrong-headedness, the deflation and destruction of which was written right into his name, Archie Bunker.

In the four decades since that show’s premiere, we've had the rise of cable television accompanied by looser standards of programming regarding uncensored expression of language and themes. It could be argued that but for all of the apparent sophistication of these times, one can only imagine the impassioned outrage a network show such as All in the Family might evoke today. Somehow readers and audiences do not have the ability – or at least the inclination–to dig more deeply than what appears on the surface. The current collective unconscious somehow has lost that particular type of critical thinking, and in the process seems to have developed a wafer-thin skin.

Ostensibly, the barriers of “censorship” seem to have crumbled, yet there is an apparent paradox in the fact that clouds of a form of prior restraint are rolling into the creative atmosphere. Some writers and artists have of late may be thinking that they are pushed into a position of near skittishness, in that they must –to use a phrase by a former White House Press Secretary– “watch what they say,” else they inadvertently enrage certain factions of their audience who will take a passage or a phrase out of context and proclaim it as an affront to civilization.

Part of this hypersensitivity can be attributed to the to the subjective character of our self-absorbed era, a predilection for solipsism stemming from an artificially inflated sense of self-esteem. Despite --or more likely because of -- its appearing on so many local lists of “banned books,” The Catcher in the Rye has attracted legions of devoted young readers from its initial publication in 1949 through the present day. That its author provides such a resonant voice for its adolescent protagonist/narrator attests to Salinger’s skill, but at the same time opens up a window in which his audience, flattered if not thrilled to the core, recognizes itself in Holden. The window, perhaps, is open a bit too wide, for such strong reader identification brings the unfortunate side effect of diminishing the art of this novel. While teen readers cheer at Holden’s railings against “phoniness” and worship his insistence on seemingly noble integrity, they take every single word out of Holden’s mouth as gospel and thus tend to miss some of Salinger’s comic observations and sly satire, i.e. “I don't know what I mean but I mean it.” Young readers may not have as yet reached the level of sophistication to recognize that the authenticity which they admire so much has been craftily calculated to appear genuine. It never crosses their minds that other narrators might be unreliable or that modern authors–including Salinger!– did not and do not live in an unambiguous, literal universe.

Another byproduct of such intense reader identification is that young people expect the same instant recognition and flattery everywhere else. They want the similar experience no matter what they read; no matter the character, these readers want to “feel” the same way Holden Caulfield does as when cares about the ducks in Central Park. Taking everything personally could be part of the answer as to why so many contemporary readers are quick to bristle and find offense even where it doesn't necessarily exist. Adolescents and hypersensitive adult readers as well–might benefit of a reminder that -- even though the themes of all good books concerns themselves with the human condition, with all of the virtues and flaws we hold in common as well as the onslaught of slings and arrows that accompany the whole of mankind--not everything you read is about you.

The experience of literature is not limited to validation and praise; more likely it tends to challenge and chastise. This is not to say that reading literature of high-quality is not enjoyable, yet reading, as Mortimer Adler so eloquently told us, is not a passive activity. It’s hard work, but like everything of any value in life, “you get what you pay for” in terms of time and effort.

This might be the reason young readers shun vigorous modern American authors such as Bellow or Roth. Their narrators are nothing like Holden: instead of aspiring to “save” the innocent, to catch children from falling over the cliff of worldly knowledge (and thus maturity), the anti-heroes in the novels of Bellow and company are non-apologetically cynical, unsentimental thinkers. Characters such as Charlie Citrine and his mentor Humboldt (whose model was the real poet, Delmore Schwartz), as well as the academic administrator Albert Corde are not conventional saints but insatiable scholars of both book-learning and human nature. Their observations and musings are embedded with multiple layers of meaning descending more deeply than an off-shore oil rig. Every bit as introspective as Holden, but less romantically so, they are primarily men of thought rather than exclusively men of feeling. Their sense of moral outrage is as intense as that of Salinger’s noble youth, but with the mature recognition of life as it really is rather than what a less-seasoned, would-be hero such as Holden Caulfield would prefer it to be. If the reader is looking for a straight answer, a comprehensive explanation of life in terms of black and white, he'll seldom if ever find it in contemporary literature --or in all of modern art, for that matter,–because human existence seems to be at the mercy of relentless chance, a fundamental absurdity for which the only response-- if there can be any–-is ambiguity. The world observed through filters devoid of rose-tinted lenses cannot be completely explained in simple declarative sentences, and seldom offers a scenic view that is conventional, straightforward, or socially acceptable. This world is not “nice,” and neither are its artists.

What these contemporary protagonists and their creators are, most of all, is articulate, indeed exquisitely so, almost to the point of intimidation. So-called “serious” literature --or, as it is pigeon-holed into its artificially-imposed genre, the redundant term “literary novel” -may have, among its loftier goals, an attempt to stretch language to its outer limits and/or reduce it to its irreducible core. Whereas this kind of work is a novel in its conventional sense of its being “about” plot, character, setting, and theme, it is “about” itself as well, with as much, if not more, emphasis placed on the “how” as on the “what.” Thus, the contemporary or “post-modern” novel often features references, allusions, even parodies of –to use the favorite word of insurance corporations --“pre-existing” material, transformed into “black humor,” “gallows humor,” “tragicomedy,” “dramedy,” but always offering “jokes”–highly sophisticated bits that go over some readers’ heads, like an stand-up comic whose dry material is “too hip for the room.” That the reader is unfamiliar with the references or is unable to “get” the joke does not mean the work is flawed; an artist can never be held responsible for the gaps in a reader’s education.

Added to this challenging mix, as complex as a multi-step recipe full of obscure gourmet ingredients, is the possibility that the narrator and/or his author may be unreliable, either or both may be deliberately lying, intentionally throwing the unsuspecting reader off the scent, with an artistic approach which Stravinsky praised as being “sincerely insincere.” Again, many contemporary readers, especially the Americans, may lack the irony gene.

It is not easy to read and understand ultimately literature that pushes us out of the safe comfort of the “quick read,” a book that flatters us by catering to our tastes and is as easily “digestible” as an bowl of false alarm chili. When literature demands time-consuming mental effort and reflection, it may evoke a sense of frustration in readers accustomed to less demanding fare. When readers mistake challenges as confrontational condescension, they shift the source of irritation away from themselves to that of the author. This is the theory examined by the critic Vince Passaro who published “A Flapping of Scolds,” a literary review published in Harper’s Magazine way back in January 1997. We'll take a look at Passaro’s views on how such reader resentment takes shape in the second part of this essay which follows below.




Please stay tuned for Part II, which continues below in reply #2----

[AuntShecky]

II.

Several years ago a New York City tabloid unleashed what is commonly called a “media frenzy” over what can only be described as a contrived rumor. The subject of the slew of “articles” (to use the term loosely) was some idle speculation over the sexual preference of one of the Big Apple’s Major League ballplayers. Boldface headlines screamed with questions – who is he? Does his manager and the team’s owners “know?” Was the assumed “cover up” deliberate? Is he about to come out of the “closet”? Naturally, the name of the hypothetical gay ballplayer was never disclosed–if he ever existed at all. (He could have been entirely fabricated, like “Sidd Finch,” George Plimpton’s mythological pitching phenom capable of hurling 100+ mph fastballs in rapid succession.) Meanwhile, the gossip about the closeted pro ballplayer must have caused a spike in newsstand sales. Eventually, a fresher sensational rumor and/or scandal hit the streets, and the hysteria over the anonymous player withered away. But at its height the speculation did not cause massive legions of fans –homophobic or otherwise–to boycott either of New York’s two baseball venues or to stop watching televised games. Nor did any of the prurient pandering inspire anyone to question how sexual preference would affect any ballplayer’s ability to play the game.

That inane anecdote from the outskirts of the sports world might illustrate as an analogy: just as sports fans have no difficulty separating what a player may or may not do “off the field” with his performance in the game, so should we be willing to distinguish the facts we know about an author’s personal history from his works. When it comes to art, perhaps we could evoke the oft-cited Christian dictum that we should “hate the sin but love the sinner” and apply a kind of converse: abhor the artist but admire the work.

In his 1919 critical essay, “Tradition and The Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot outlined his idea of the role of a poet as well as urging readers and critics to shift the focus away from the poet to that of his work, further suggesting that the emotions of art differ from the emotions of life. Ironically enough, critics made no such distinction when they began serious studies of Eliot’s own poetry. Though the Nobel Prize Committee found Eliot’s work worthy of the literature prize in 1948, critics gradually attempted to diminish his stature, becoming more dismissive as the decades progressed, mainly on the charges of Eliot’s anti-Semitism.

The critics were still at it as late as 1995 with the publication of T.S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form by Anthony Julius (who incidentally is an attorney who served as the divorce lawyer for Princess Diana.) Vince Passaro offers an examination of Julius’s thesis in “A Flapping of Scolds,” a literary review which, in addition to Julius’s book, scrutinizes a collection of literary essays by David Denby, a new edition of Heart of Darkness, and a posthumous publication of previously unpublished early poems by Eliot himself. While Passaro does not dispute the allegation that Eliot was anti-Semitic, he strongly disagrees with Julius that such religious bigotry “was central to Eliot’s work,” adding that Julius bases his charges on “very slim pickings,” namely one complete poem, excerpts from five other poems, and a ”few scattered remarks.” Although negative reviews of Julius’s work from the NY Times and NY Review of Books eventually appeared, Julius and his scathing indictment were initially lionized. Passaro notes that when news of Julius’s book broke in America, the cocktail party crowd heaped praise on the lawyer/critic; they “congratulated him, with a jaunty approval usually bestowed on strong wrestlers or winning ponies,” followed by “the sighs of pleasure that fill the air during the public flogging of the sinner.”

The applause for the “flogging,” Passaro believes, stemmed from anger and disgust that is the natural reaction to anti-Semitism itself, upon which was grafted “the conviction that literature had no right to cause that pain, using such unpleasantly effective images and words.” While Passaro seems truly sympathetic to such discomfort, he does not want muzzles forced on literature in order to spare the feelings of readers. He wants to hold on to the belief that there is a “proud willingness” among the ranks of the American literary culture “ to extend to serious art the privilege of causing pain, of exorcizing demons, of flirting with annihilation, of attempting to say the unsayable or give voice to what for prudence’s and politeness’s sake should be left unspoken. Obviously, no such privilege exists, not because of a prudish public but because of an academic and procedure-ridden literary world which chooses not to ‘authorize’ work that offends or threatens us in any way.”

Characterizing such indignance as “the new prudery,” Passaro likens it to a “reactionary, nineteenth century impulse, a deeply conservative desire to bring all cultural expression into harmony with the moral conventions of our day,” in which literature is valued on the basis of its impact upon its audience, reducing it to mere function,” and consequently judging on the extent in which it fills that bill. Passaro believes that these latter-day Bowdlers and Comstocks prefer to regard literature as a way “to affirm the predominant cultural values of our time, and the agreement that this is its proper role seems as unshakable as the ancient prohibitions aimed at the protection of virginity, or the contemporary ban on smoking in public places.”

Readers of Passaro’s essay must be gratified to read that he is quick to make a distinction between this “new moralism” and the oversimplified “political correctness” cliché:

“The new moralism is not. . .merely a matter of political correctness vs. traditional canons; it is a projection of a long-standing and deeply middle-class fear and resentment of art, one that . . .can be found in equal measure among leftist cultural critics and conservative opponents of whatever is politically or sexually offensive. The Western literary intellectual in the late twentieth century has been. . .severely undereducated and raised in an atmosphere full of irrational babble, grave pieties, and adamant distinctions. We seem to have bred generations of literary critics who speak only in the tones of those who deplore, who regret, who feel compelled to express their outrage at one or another form of doctrinal deprivation. Standing against them are almost no advocates of a literature that dares to speak unpleasantly or even plainly about the darker corners of the heart.” {Emphasis mine.} Clearly, members of the literary establishment have a habit of taking themselves much too seriously, for, as Passaro suggests, they are “rarely lucid” and “even more rarely funny.”

In our times literature has endured another assault in that it is expected to prove its worth through pragmatic results. (Sorry, William James.) Passaro states that the arts and the humanities have to earn their keep, so to speak, “when ‘art’ for its economic survival must be peddled as a public good akin to universal health care, with a body of administrators paid to make sure every population is represented and gets its weekly dose.” The “patrons of art” of past centuries are long gone; instead we have “figures with access to government and corporate-purchase orders” whose “political survival” depends on their reassurance that “we are all being personally and socially improved by art. What we are not being, they are quick to assure us in moments of wrenching doubt, is challenged or disturbed.” {Passaro’s emphasis.}

Part One of this thread brings up the issue of irony in the sense that some readers are incapable of recognizing irony when they see it--unlike potentially offensive passages which supposedly jump off the page into the eyes of those who make a practice of looking for them. Passaro’s takes irony to an exponential level; he believes that irony is “what we despise about literature, and what exhausts us about modern literature in particular,” and “ its acknowledgment that in. . .the beautiful process of creation is tinged with something slightly immoral, something exploitative of intimacies and experience, rude, vain, self-justifying, disloyal, brutal, unrestrained. . .Modern art insists on making something significant and even beautiful out of ugliness, dissonance, fever, hatred, anger, failure, and pain.” Passaro admits that readers and audiences who follow their own “intuitions” are more receptive to such a sensibility, but “marketeers and critics” are not, for:
“The tragic impulse in literature is what such impresarios of art wish to demolish most of all, especially complicated or ambiguous tragedy. If one must portray tragedy, it should be simple and psychologically direct, something akin to Death of a Salesman or Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.” (Though Passaro doesn’t mention cinema directly, the preference for palatable simplicity and the persistent looking at “the bright side of life“-- a sentiment hilariously spoofed in a Monty Python song – may help explain Hollywood’s stubborn habit of making movies with “happy” endings.)

From that point Passaro segues to a critique of a 1996 publication of Heart of Darkness, edited by D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, who includes other texts about the Congo and other regions of Central Africa as they existed in the 1890s. Passaro states that this edition puts the novel in the historical context which “Conrad had observed (or ignored)” when he was there. Passaro sees the value of this “evenhanded” presentation, for “it connects Conrad palpably to the European colonialization of the continent that he barely, in Heart of Darkness, refers to by name, and it hardens the connection between Conrad and colonial racism made most famous by Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe. . .”

Passaro disagrees with Edward Said, author of
Orientalism, Culture, and Imperialism,in that Said takes “Conrad’s vague references to the superiority of the British to the Belgian forms of African colonialism a little too far “ because Said– and presumably Conrad’s other detractors– either misses or minimizes the dry observations of Conrad’s narrator, Marlow. Passaro regards Marlow’s view of “essentially every conquering nation past and present in his ironic dismissals,” and illustrates it with one of Marlow’s remarks near the beginning of Heart of Darkness: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into too much.”

That may hint at the “problem” of both Conrad and Eliot: their literary assailants may indeed be “looking into it so much” for hidden landmines of bigotry that they fail to detect their ironic tone. Passaro elaborates: “What particularly disturbs us about writers like Eliot and Conrad is that they employ such dangerous forms of irony with utter self-confidence and abandon.” What makes “readers uncomfortable,” Passaro writes, “are the insinuating suggestions of ugly, painful, destructive redemptions.” Achebe’s well-known diatribe stems at least in part with the demented Kurtz , aggravated by Marlow’s description of him as “a remarkable man,” which enrages Achebe so much that he cries: “ Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?”

Achebe’s question is, to my way of thinking, reasonable, and I can see how one who has firsthand evidence of his countrymen, having suffered under the long-standing oppressive system of colonialism, may feel moved to ask it. Still, I can also see the equally-compelling argument in Passaro’s point in his attempt to answer it:

“Yet it is exactly within the economy of modern literature to reduce an entire continent to a metaphor in the development of a single consciousness. This ‘arrogance’ is exactly the arrogance of the writer, the writer’s prerogative, and I suspect that in the long run Achebe
has hit upon the core of our hostility to writers of Conrad’s stature and authority. . .[T]he brush of racism is wide enough to paint over the accomplishments of most artists and intellectuals at work before 1950 who are guilty of having lived in less enlightened times.”

At this point Passaro briefly weighs in on the long-running furor over the alleged “racism” in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although his paragraph on Twain is short relative to others in his lengthy review, it is nonetheless the most shocking in its summary of a critique of Twain from a writer whose stellar reputation suggests she might have known better than to espouse such an astonishingly bizarre opinion:

“[A]n essay by Jane Smiley (author of the ‘comic’ novel Moo and a social work version of King Learcalled A Thousand Acres) . . .unfavorably compared Mark Twain with. . .Harriet Beecher Stowe, a deranged and hyper-Protestant nineteenth-century Martha Stewart who wrote an unreadably didactic novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Smiley declared Twain a racist on the grounds that Huck, although he likes Jim, doesn’t overtly declare Jim his own equal and bow down before him in shame begging for mercy. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, says Smiley, is a superior novel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of the former’s ennobling vision of African Americans. Smiley’s essay demonstrates vividly the necessity of ignoring the literary quality of a work in order to show it to be morally wanting.”

Passaro says writing the passage about made him “cringe;” seeing Smiley’s strange words 14 years later makes this reader cringe just as much.


Part III continues below in Reply #3

[AuntShecky]

Next the review turns to Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, David Denby’s account of his experience of going back to college as a middle-aged adult in order to revisit the core curriculum he had studied at Columbia College, his alma mater. Passaro had high hopes that Denby might offer a remedy to save literature from the literary bullies, or as he puts it, “the educated barbarians.” Denby, alas, only offers a “maudlin defense of the Western canon,” and an ineffectual one at that, for Passaro thinks that Denby fails to recognize
"that even in [Columbia’s] core curriculum the point of reading seems to have been given over to the realms of the political and therapeutic. The question university students reading Heart of Darkness . . .are asked. . .is whether Conrad was defending or condemning Western civilization; that he was doing something entirely more obscure, difficult, and interesting is a problem neither Denby nor the class he attends seems to want to address.”

Denby and his younger classmates also read Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence in such a way that validates their own experiences, as if literature were fresh-delivered merchandise from Ikea, a mirror, maybe, that would brilliantly reflect their own personalities back to them in a flattering way. Similar to the stunningly narrow, hyper-relevant high school reading of “The Road Not Taken” mentioned in the first part of this essay, such highly subjective reading shrinks the infinite universe down to a tiny asteroid, as the professor in Denby’s class, Edward Tayler affirms: “Those writers are like you guys. You always cherish in your hearts that sense that you’re an individual.”

Evidently, a tiny population of “us guys” must have read the works of the Western canon for the wrong reason, mainly for their own inherent excellence, without caring so much about the potential effects upon our self-esteem, our own self-improvement, or the greater benefit for society as a whole. Passaro puts it more eloquently:
“[T]here are areas of knowledge that universities once had the nerve to declare simply necessary for their students to study, not in order to be better people or to enjoy themselves but to be educated people, in a culture that had certain criteria for what education is.”

Perhaps recalling Eliot’s poetic line “In my beginning is my end,” the concluding section of Passaro’s review returns to where he started –with Julius’s screed against anti-Semitism in Eliot’s poetry. Passaro thinks Julius’s stated purpose as an “act of resistance” reveals the crux of the debate: “That a writer of Eliot’s stature and significance must be ‘resisted’ implies that we readers are an oppressed people, tyrannized by our betters.”

It’s hard to dismiss Passaro’s explanation for the surge of “resistance,” in that it was born out of the intense need for Academia to secure opportunities in which to ply its trade and especially for doctoral candidates to be prospectors in search of ore to mine for their qualifying theses:
“In the professional training ground of Ph.D. programs, this is no doubt a tangible reality: new bodies of literature are needed to keep the profession going just as corpses are needed in medical schools. Excellence is, professionally speaking, uninteresting and therefore suspect as a criterion. Thus it has been a central, self-preserving aim of professional criticism. . .to make great writers appear to be less good than they are and lesser writers to appear more important and talented.”

Passaro makes an excellent point, which he illustrated earlier with his anecdote about Jane Smiley’s choice of Stowe over Twain. Even I can recall that thirty or forty years ago literary scholars had essentially “run out” of topics about which to write. Even a monumentally revered genius such as Shakespeare had, over the centuries, inspired so much literary comment that the subject has just about been exhausted. So many volumes had already been written about Hamlet alone– i.e. “Why did he delay?” –as well as specious speculation about the “true” authorship of Shakespearean plays that they would fill a library the size of Yankee stadium and spill out into the parking areas. Some doctoral students plumbed the canon for “fresh” authors (who presumably had good reason to be “little known”) and from these hard-to-find books tried to squeeze a thesis out of their mundane obscurity. (Or, perhaps out of desperate frustration of finding anything “new” to write about, there have been actual cases where future career opportunities and/or professional prestige are not priorities in which the student rummages through the here today/ gone tomorrow pop culture world. Hence, the recent evidence of a woman earning her graduate degree by studying The Beatles (http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/liverpool/hi/people_and_places/newsid_9376000/9376984.stm) or a rising young film star teaching a course about himself (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/31/james-franco-101-actor-to_n_816456.html). Note that the "Columbia" which is the aforementioned David Denby's alma mater is not the same as the other "Columbia" on the other coast where the actor will become a member of the distinguished faculty.) Finally, the only workable material had to be more-or-less contrived, as Passaro suggests, by taking lesser authors and pumping them up or greater authors and knocking them down a peg or two.

Passaro’s observation is hard to dismiss, yet in the fourteen years since Passaro first wrote his article, an invading army of hard economic realities has encamped in every sphere of western civilization, including and especially Academia. While clinging to the middle class cardinal tenet of faith “To get a good job, get a good education,” the sputtering economy has forced parents and students to change how we approach
satisfying the necessity of a college education. Amid escalating tuition and fees temporarily settled by college loans– which quite often saddle the graduate with a lifelong debt that by law cannot be forgiven through bankruptcy while the lenders, like Erinyes dressed in three-piece business suits, chase down the debtor throughout his entire life--students are pressured more than ever before to declare a “marketable major.” In order to get a reasonable Return on the Investment, (R.O.I.) or more “bang for the buck,” parents insist that their child selects a course of study that will prepare him for a career with the potential to provide a comfortable, if not lucrative, life. Consequently, less “practical” majors such as literature become less and less popular; fewer and fewer students sign up for classes in English, American, or World literature, naturally followed by a dwindling number of Ph.Ds in the humanities to fill faculty slots that are gradually being phased out of undergraduate and graduate programs until the humanities major will someday be a quaint artifact from the past, like experts in the discipline of Rhetoric or – rarer than raccoon coats and leather football helmets on campuses today – professors of Classical Greek.

Come to think of it, the cold fact of a country strapped for cash may form part of the explanation why “impractical” cultural phenomena – the arts and humanities in general and literature in particular–have been forced to demonstrate their pragmatically quantitative value, or like some tax-payer funded government program, justify their existence. A society demanding that literature earn its keep downgrades it to the level of a servant of the prevailing culture. Just as part-time “associates” at a retail store must (in order to remain employed) follow the prescribed regulations: “Don’t be late, don’t chew gum or use your cell phone on the sales floor, don’t joke around with the customers, don’t thumb your nose at the District Manager,” etc., so does society expect literature to obey the company rules: “Don’t get too fancy–just tell the story without a lot of extra description,” “Don’t mess around with language and jokes,” “Don’t be sarcastic or ironic,” “Don’t lie,” “Flatter the reader and don’t forget to affirm everything he holds sacred,” “Whatever you do, do not hurt anyone’s feelings now or a hundred years from now,” and-- perhaps the most important of all “Don’t ever write something so dangerous, daunting, or difficult that we can’t understand it.”

Imposing such restrictions on creativity is far worse than the sputtering of blue-nosed censorship. Of course, the current rules are nowhere codified or written down but they are undeniably there and enforced every time a ticked-off do-gooder raises her voice. In unexpressed theory and actual practice the rules inflicted upon modern literature can be condensed into just one: “Never be excellent.”

The battle which purports to be against offensive material in literature is actually then, Passaro believes, part of a war against excellence, as shown by the epigraph by Montaigne directly beneath the title of his review: “Since we cannot attain to greatness, let us have our revenge by railing at it.”

Such a deep resentment toward excellence is what drives Julius to mount his mission against T. S. Eliot. With unqualified conviction, Passaro suspects that Julius reached his damning conclusions about Eliot through an elaborate workaround:

“Julius believes that in order to make his claims significant he must at least acknowledge Eliot as a major poet, even a great poet, while at the same time skinning him like a rabbit. His problem is as follows: if the poetry contains anti-Semitism but is great poetry, and if the poet is an anti-Semite but an admirable figure in twentieth-century letters, then any traditional view of greatness leads one to conclude that Eliot’s anti-Semitism doesn’t matter. This is an unacceptably difficult and dangerous idea. If one can, as Julius tries to do, remove from the system of literary values any substantial aesthetic considerations–
any sense that literary greatness entails the straining of language and image (even in the depraved and damaged ways that are our inheritance) toward what is good and true and beautiful and redemptive in the muddled experience of human consciousness – then the problem goes away.”

Yet the ugly fact of the anti-Semitic aspect of Eliot’s life, like the hackneyed elephant in the parlor, won’t go away, an indisputable fact which Passaro neither ignores nor excuses. He does, however, provide the background in which such a religious bias may have surfaced:
the influence of the political philosophy of Charles Maurras in which anti-Semitism was a “crucial component of its attempt to combat liberal democracy and all that it stands for.” Additionally, the admiration which Maurras and by extension Eliot held for Catholicism was decidedly “unspiritual,” but rather a skewed perception of the role of the Church in establishing “European social order,” since both Maurras and Eliot were rock-hard social conservatives. “As a social critic,” Passaro tells us, Eliot was “a monarchist, an antidemocrat.” (Old ideas, no matter how erroneous they may be, die hard. In a footnote Passaro mentions two of Eliot’s essays published in a single volume titled Christianity and Culture in which Eliot promulgates a civilization built upon a specifically Christian society. While not an overtly anti-Semitic tract, traces of it are there– by default, one assumes, since there are “few explicit references to Jews,” but more tragically so because of its timing: in years preceding and just after the Second World War in Europe, the same years in which Nazism executed its atrocities against Jews and their fellow human beings who were members of other targeted groups.)

In addition to being intellectually stubborn, Eliot was “an arrogant and selfish man, as so many great artists are (or perhaps, must be.)" The conventional wisdom about the so-called “artistic temperament” may have a basis in truth, as I have heard that a writer is “impossible to live with” for nearly a lifetime. If being an artist means one must also be an S.O.B. is, I suppose, an occupational hazard to be tolerated for the sake of the art. As Faulkner notoriously quipped, “If a writer has to rob his mother he will not hesitate; ‘The Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”

Yet, as was suggested in earlier passages in this essay, the work is separate from the writer who created it. Eliot himself was the critic who urged poets to “escape” from their own personalities in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which unequivocally declared “The emotions of art are impersonal.” Thus, while Eliot the man struggled with objectionable ideas, as a poet he enabled his work to break free and transform itself into something much greater than the man who created it. Passaro further refines this catalytic conversion: this process, which Passaro describes as “a narrative movement toward God,” occurs within the poems, which culminates when Eliot reaches the full maturity of his vision, with The Four Quartets in 1943.

“Aesthetically, he was a terrific snob. All of this shows up in his poetry, but it is not the point of his poetry. It was Eliot’s constant effort to take the stuff of the neurotic, damaged, modern personality, and the stuff of everyday irritation, anger, fear, loathing and contempt–the self, in all its horrors– and try to move it toward some divine plateau (toward ‘extinction’ he would say) where the burdens of personality fall away and the truth, painful and retributive though it may be, makes itself known.”

According to Passaro, many readers felt compelled to “overlook” and “sidestep” Eliot’s Christianity; apparently, “ignoring any hints of spiritual intent,” makes it easier to read Eliot’s “less explicitly Christian” early poetry. This, Passaro believes, is what Julius does “with a passion,” reading the works on a rather superficial level, thus missing the essential meaning.

One of Eliot’s early poems “Gerontion” (1920) is the one that Anthony Julius accuses of anti-Semitic.” Focusing on the opening lines of “Gerontion,” Julius apparently sees the image of the “jew,” who “squats on the window sill,” as a continuation of the pejorative image of the Jew found in literature over four hundred years ago in an England where there few or no Jews to observe closely enough to depict an accurate image, thus typically recapitulating luridly false folklore of villainy as in the title character of a Christopher Marolowe drama marked by stereotypes, i.e. the frequently cited “infinite riches in a tiny roome” line from the play, or caricatures, occasionally painted with a somewhat more complex palette as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, III,i.

It took centuries for literature to start catching up with an ever-changing world, its real-life social progress developing at an excruciatingly slow pace. With the anguished disillusionment following the First World War, writers and artists began to temper their expression with tentative ambiguity, along with a modern use of the classical device of irony, an aged wine in a new bottle forged out of foggy glass. Eliot’s “Gerontion” then was born out of ironic disillusionment redeemed by religious allegory, not, as Julius literally sees it as an ugly stereotype, but as part of a multiple-meaning allegory which ultimately symbolizes Christ.

The lines which Julius choose for derision shows that Julius “seems to have little inkling of what the meaning of the poem contains them might be.” For Julius’s benefit – as well for the readers of Passaro’s review, Passaro offers a highly detailed analysis. “Gerontion” is "a poem about an old man waiting to die. He resides in a house that serves as the central metaphor of the poem; the house is his life and contains history itself. . . The image of the Jew is unpleasant and disturbing, but that he is the owner of the metaphorical house containing history suggests something else about him.” Among the allusions which Passaro discovers in the poem are the “devouring” animal as “Christ the tiger” who “devours” us; bilingual wordplay in which the word “estaminet” can mean “manger” in a Belgian dialect; and references to the Elizabethan bishop, Lancelot Andrews, who “created the mesmerizing image of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Logos, ‘the word within a word, unable to speak a word.’ “

Such are the poem’s deeply metaphysical meanings which Julius could not – or would not– see: “A universe in which a horrifying, hostile, contemptuous image of a “jew” can also be made to suggest God, in his most tender of Incarnation as well as in his terrifying justice,
is a universe in which Anthony Julius and many other critics steeped in comfortable assumptions would prefer not to live. Literature is not the game for them.”

If literature is not the place for the “comfortable assumptions” in which critics such as Anthony Julius and his ilk are “steeped,” then Christianity, especially the rarefied mysticism at the heart of Eliot’s most profound poetry, ultimately carries the redemptive power of divine love, and is therefore not the place for hatred in any of its guises, including real or mistakenly detected anti-Semitism.

In the final section of Passaro’s comprehensive review, Passaro offers a short passage from one of Eliot’s later works, which Passaro introduces with a bit of sly irony of his own:

“Here are some lines from The Four Quartets and the moral monster Eliot:
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always–
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. “

Passaro closes his lengthy piece with a strikingly candid and convincing assessment of T.S. Eliot. Despite Eliot’s arrogance, unlike many of his fellow-artists (and I daresay his critics), Eliot recognized the requirement of humility, “whether he managed to muster it or not.“ In making his case for humility, Passaro does not directly quote from the poetry, but indeed Eliot mentions the word– twice!-- in these lines from the “East Coker” section of
The Four Quartets:

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

Passaro further confesses that “[Eliot’s] work expresses a fascinating traceable progression from a position of profound moral confusion and disillusionment to one of increasing spiritual wisdom. . .” Furthermore, Passaro believes that “it is a shocking and destructive
critical error to assert that his most dramatic moral confusions define him,” as Anthony Julius attempted to do. Finally, Passaro unequivocally concludes that “great art and great artists have no other moral obligation than to have the courage to dramatize a distinct moral condition, and this Eliot did better than any other poet of his time.”

Part IV -- and the conclusion, at last, continues below in
Reply #4:

[AuntShecky]

IV.

The public assaults upon the works of illustrious authors such as T.S. Eliot, Conrad, and Mark Twain from Anthony Julius, Chinua Achebe, Jane Smiley and others who share their incensed sensibilities seem to be relatively recent, but the cultural history of the last two centuries teems with incidents of similar outrage. Not every artist deliberately sets out to piss off the middle class by shaking it out of its complacency, but it’s funny (in both meanings of the word) how seldom the so-called bourgeoisie fail to show boisterous signs of that very reaction. Cases in point are the riot that broke out on opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the fact that it literally took a federal case to allow Ulysses to be published in the United States in 1933, and the (weather-permitting) picket lines organized by various demographic groups in front of theaters for having the audacity to show some allegedly offensive movie or boycotts (actual or threatened) over an insensitive theme or shocking portion of some transitory television show, an action which more often than not raises the financial risk for the targeted network when commercial sponsors cave in to the pressure.

If a reader objects to material in a book, the simple solution is to stop reading it. Unfortunately, what complicates matters is that the perceived affront seems so intense that he feels compelled to prevent others from reading the nasty material as well, calling to mind H. L. Mencken’s famous description of a Puritan “living in constant fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.” The more public the protest, the better the publicity, and so the Morally Indignant go to extraordinary lengths to make their anger known, mounting passionate campaigns not against living, breathing bad guys or unpleasant abstractions such as injustice but against an inanimate object: a piece of printed matter. To the militant busybodies themselves the mission is a sacred one, while a casual observer may shake her head at an enterprise that seems quixotic, if not naive, with these peacetime soldiers wielding atomic flyswatters and –to borrow one of Vonnegut’s analogies-- “putting on a full set of armor to attack a hot fudge sundae.”

What is baffling, maybe irritating, about those loud voices and pointing fingers is their preternatural presumption that they have the unadulterated right to speak for someone else. Chinua Achebe at the very least was a citizen of the country which was allegedly wounded by Conrad’s words. Much farther removed from reality are the critics who take it upon themselves to fight another’s battles, in most cases without being asked to do so by the group supposedly wronged. It's like the nursery rhyme, "This is the House that Jack Built": say, a critic for a New York literary journal fuming about the depiction of a native population in an African region by an author born in Poland in a novel published a century ago in England. Despite the earnestness and conscientious – and perhaps genuine– sympathy for the cause, speaking in behalf of others is a dangerous undertaking:

“Beware behalfies! The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it replaces literary values with political ones. It is the murderer of thought. Beware!”

The writer who said those words knows without a shred of doubt what he is talking about. His own written words were literally a matter of life and death; for several years he was the target of a worldwide death threat against him by “behalfies” convinced that their religious belief had been attacked by one of his novels. That writer and the source of the quotation was, of course, Salman Rushdie.

Artists, especially the ones who take their work-- but not their selves!–seriously usually have the fortitude to slough off controversy. Up until recently, literary furor has been intermittent and short-lived, except in the cases of T.S. Eliot., Conrad-- and, mystifyingly so, given his prolific writings against slavery, racism, and colonialism, Mark Twain. Aside from the general theory that art belongs to “everyone,” if anyone can claim ownership of a work of art, it is the person who created it, and not the audience with whom it is shared. Yet, perhaps because it is the audience who may pay for a book or a movie ticket or provide financial support through taxes or contributions to non-profit arts organizations, the audience claims a kind of ownership of the works that are offered to them and thus somehow claim the “right” to object to it, or censor it, or fiddle with it and clean it up to make it presentable for polite company.

Vince Passaro’s lengthy treatise that the New Prudery is a reaction to excellence is, I believe, a correct one, and it has taken more than a fortnight of anguished thought for me to reach that conclusion. When a work proclaims its own excellence, it may have a tendency to intimidate people, but the reason great literature is excellent is that it is effectual. By that I mean, the work of art shows emotions so well that the audience’s aesthetic experience is intense; the work makes them “feel” exactly the same way as they feel in life. One wonders then if this isn't why works of art move them to anger so much, because they mistake the emotions of art with the emotions of life. That is also why when they think they see racist or anti-Semitic elements in art, they may react just as strongly as if happened to put the book down and looked out the window to see a terrifying band of white-hooded, cross-burning thugs stomping through their neighborhood.

Let’s be clear – there is absolutely no question that anti-Semitism, racism, colonialism, and every other odious “-ism” that has vexed and tortured mankind for millennia must always be denounced in whatever hideous form it takes in the real world. It is also an unarguable fact that a human being, regardless of his or her religious belief or lack of it, has the moral imperative not to inflict harm or to aggravate any pain that has already been inflicted upon our fellow members of the human race. Moreover, it is our sacred responsibility to alleviate suffering wherever, whenever, to whomever we can. This–more
than any other action we may choose to take in our lives–is the highest purpose of human life–of life, but not art.

There is a difference: life is life and art is its expression. Life plants itself in the terra firma, and keeps itself busy with the predictable, the actual, the temporal, the tangible, and the real. Art either tiptoes or barges into a party to which it hasn't been invited and insinuates itself into the unpredictable, the hypothetical, the timeless, the ineffable, and the imagined. In all of its forms, art brings into existence something that has never existed before.

In its written forms, art attempts to make, in Eliot’s phrase, “a raid on the inarticulate.” The articulated result can be wildly comic or deadly serious or both at once, according to the dictates of the artist’s unique vision. A writer has the absolute freedom to express his or her vision as directly or obliquely as he or she chooses. Precisely how the specific subject matter presents itself – coarsely or sublimely – is the prerogative of the writer alone. That the proverbial little old lady in Dubuque blushes at a sensual scene or a base expletive or that some anxious faculty member striving for tenure at a Massachusetts college campus writes a damning article about the book’s ideological bent or that a disaffected high school student balks at reading the work because understanding it is just “too hard,”-- none of it is the writer’s “problem.”

Those of us who have dedicated a large portion of our limited lives to the appreciation of the finest literature a civilization can produce is forced into a battle which, like most human conflicts, should never have reared its ugly head to begin with. Despite our efforts to the contrary, certain groups– well-intentioned or not -- will sporadically take action to defend their specific idea of society against writers who depict the same society with a different, perhaps dissenting, vision. The gleaming integrity of an extraordinary piece of literature stands immune from the chastisement of self-appointed social arbiters for whom protecting their own interest means preserving the status quo, from the scolding and name-calling of lesser lights secretly cowering in the presence of greatness, and from the irrelevant judgement of the undereducated young reader who assesses the depth of a work’s value on the shallow basis of whether he “liked” it or not.

[The Comedian]

Auntie -- that was an impressive piece of writing. And unfortunately, I do not have the time to respond to each point that you make here in kind and care that it deserves. So I'll summarize quickly. . .

Agreements
There is no doubt that the humanities are on trial in our (American) educational systems. And the idea that any sort of scholastic activity should have a direct link to a dollar (dangling on a barbed hook) is certainly a reality in my institution. And, as you note, what's worse is that this monetary justification is seen, too often, as the only sort of justification for study is sad indeed.

I'm also on board your critique of overzealous cultural/historical criticism. These critical schools were all the rage when I was an undergraduate, and they almost turned me into a fish and wildlife major instead of an English major. It's a shame that such monomaniacal attention to historical authors not expressing modern cultural values. . .or worse, those historical authors making forward-thinking ethical statements that are mis/under-read by undereducated administrators is equally a problem today.

If I've misread any of what you wrote here, please correct me.

A Disagreement
I think it's part II and II of your post where you address valuing excellence for excellence sake and that we shouldn't encourage undergraduates to see canonical authors as "like" themselves. Insofar as this is not the only thing we teach about literature, I'm more than fine with this approach. I encourage it. I think it's important for new and potential readers of literature to see how great artists and writers have dealt/expressed feelings or ideas similar to our own. Often such a companionship, between author and reader, is the start of a more advanced study. But more than that. . .it's where the "value" (an idea you don't like that much) of literature lay.

I firmly believe that literary reading can make us better people because it helps us to see the wondrous and metaphorical parallels between literary and lived experience. And in seeing such parallels, we have in literature a treasure chest of shared experiences that can use to make better decisions in our lives because we see literature not just as art but as life. And in seeing it as life, we expand our own experiences, sympathies, and character.

True, I doubt this value will fit neatly into a "metric" or pie chart, but its subtle ROI is actual value with plenty of yummy compounded interest.

I could post more but I must be off. I'll correct the several spelling/language errors in this post a little later.

[AuntShecky]

I can't tell you how grateful I am to you, Comedian, for putting the time in to reading this lengthy essay. I had spent nearly 3 weeks doing nothing else (beyond household obligations), so I'm relieved that all that time and effort were not for naught.

Thanks for your comments, also. I'm afraid we'll have to agree to disagree with you concerning the notion of pandering or catering to students. For just as everything we read is not always a romp in the park, sometimes we have to learn things that are difficult and painful and have little or no correlation to our lives. For instance, in high school we all had to study differential equations, an topic which seldom if every comes up in our daily lives. Same with algorhythms, a knowledge of which brought billions of $$$ to computer engineers, but let's face, we don't need to calculate algorhythms when we go to the grocery store.

Yet our schools tried to teach it to us -- not because it would ever be of any use, not because it somehow makes us better people to know it, not even because it forces the brain to use neurons it wouldn't ordinarily use. No, we have to sit through excruciatingly boring and incomprehensible math classes because the subject is part of what constitutes an educated person
“[T]here are areas of knowledge that universities once had the nerve to declare simply necessary for their students to study, not in order to be better people or to enjoy themselves but to be educated people, in a culture that had certain criteria for what education is.”

Also, please look at the part that precedes that quote, covering the section where the Columbia(!) professor flatters his students, trying to tell them that D.H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman are just "like them" and what I said about it:
Denby and his younger classmates also read Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence in such a way that validates their own experiences, as if literature were fresh-delivered merchandise from Ikea, a mirror, maybe, that would brilliantly reflect their own personalities back to them in a flattering way. Similar to the stunningly narrow, hyper-relevant high school reading of “The Road Not Taken” mentioned in the first part of this essay, such highly subjective reading shrinks the infinite universe down to a tiny asteroid, as the professor in Denby’s class, Edward Tayler affirms: “Those writers are like you guys. You always cherish in your hearts that sense that you’re an individual.”

Evidently, a tiny population of “us guys” must have read the works of the Western canon for the wrong reason, mainly for their own inherent excellence, without caring so much about the potential effects upon our self-esteem, our own self-improvement, or the greater benefit for society as a whole.

Maybe your point, Comedian, it that it's better to use any means possible to get kids reading, but it opens the door to all manner of misreading and the pitfalls covered --fairly extensively, if you don't mind me saying so-- in "Railing at Greatness."

If schools keep on teaching literature as if it were a sister channel of MTV, if people continue getting Ph.Ds in Madonna or Lady Gaga, what will being an "educated person" really mean? (Not that a college degree is worth the parchment it's printed on anymore.)

[JBI]

Meh, I would just say put the whole thing in brackets and put a big "AMERICA" beside everything - these trends are very deeply American, and, to me, stem less from a sense of political correctness than from a sense of repressed shame and repressed history (Martin Luther King is celebrated, bringing the racist history as a form of celebration of its overcoming, rather than a disgust at its existence). That simple classical American example of reworking events and its own narrative forces every artist and critic to watch out - they know that the repressed demon is lurking around the corner waiting to strike, and as soon as it does, out goes their career.

My English literature education was not totally dominated by this preoccupation - then again, it also was not dominated by American literature. Achebe did not intend to kill Conrad, only to rewrite him - nor did Said try to write a polemic or a rallying piece for Arabs in Orientalism (his afterward to the last edition before he died says it more clearly). The goal is merely to raise the questions - it's just that this is the British tradition crashing with the American one, which is totally preoccupied with culture politics whereas England is not as much.

Literature is still read and enjoyed, even by academics, but Americans have a harder time doing so, since they are not honest with their own history - it creates an internal conflict when writing literary history - I was taught Eliot's poetry, for instance, not Eliot, with a remark that Eliot tried to hide from his poetry as much as possible, and denied the publication of an official biography - his voice is not in the Waste Land, even if people think it is - his voice is most heard, from what I can gather, in his most personal poems, namely The Four Quartets, and especially The Dry Salvages, but even then, there is not a real trace of antisemitism.


As for Irony, that also is dependant on culture - Canadian irony is still written and read, for instance, but irony takes the ability to laugh at yourself a little bit, something which Americans are reluctant to do, as they repress things and seem to prefer to silence things rather than face them.

Still you look out into the world today, what are people reading? The biggest readership I know of, China, for the most part loves romantic stories above all, but in terms of non-fiction irony has seeped in (as it had in the early 20th century, and before, with a long tradition of irony and satire). Readers have never been more numerous, and, now with technology, it is not uncommon to see people reading novels everywhere on their phones - whether on a bus, or even in a lineup - likewise, journalistic writing is sold and devoured everywhere people are, and bookshops are busy and well stocked - the culture is more obviously into reading than in the States, or even Canada, but why is that?

Why do you see these trends, and what do they mean? To me, they basically just show a culture not sure about itself, with icons that they no longer trust.

[Virgil]

This was a great essay Aunty! Perhaps the best ever written on Lit Net. Heck I think you should get this published some where.

I don't think I disagree with you anywhere, though I probably should read it again before I say that. I wish I could get a hold of Pissaro's essay. I Googled it but one has to buy it from Harpers.

As it turns out last year I read T. S. Eliot: Lives and Legacies, by Craig Raine and Raine has an excellent section in there rebutting all the anti-Semitic claims on Eliot. I used to consider Eliot a soft anti-Semite (as opposed to a clear hard anti-Semite like Ezra Pound) but after reading his rebuttal, I'm now convinced that there is no evidence that Eliot was anti-Semitic and there are perfectly good non anti-semitic readings to the suspect lines. For instance, what exactly is anti-Semitic about saying a Jew "squats on the window"? That image can have all sorts of connotations.

As to Jane Smiley ranking Uncle Tom's Cabin over Huck Finn, well, that's ridiculous. I've now come across a number of Smiley critical comments that make me cringe and so i can only conclude that she is blindly ideological. I've tried to read Uncle Tom's Cabin a number of times and have always had to put it down for its lack of artistry. It goes to show you that unless a white, euro-centric ethnic writer writes in black and white (no pun intended - ah heck, pun intended :p) elementary themes of the conventional, politically correct sense, today he is going to be called a racist, anti-Semite, misogynist.

To JBI:
Big America? It's been my impression that this politically correctness has come over from Europe to influence our academia. Guilt over colonialism effective European culture before guilt over racism effected American culture. Sure we make a lot over Huck Finn. But for your information, Anthony Julius is a British critic hailing Eliot, a mostly British poet an anti-Semite and Achebe, a Nigerian who resented colonialism, hailing Conrad, a British novelist a racist.

Achebe did not intend to kill Conrad
What? You obviously haven't read his essay. Google it. Read it. He does to try to bury Conrad.

[Emil Miller]

Virgil, you are right about political correctness being a mindset superimposed on the USA via academia but, in my view, it's a fault inherent in Anglo-Saxon protestantism. Which explains its disturbing influence wherever the descendants of English colonists have remained. If anyone thinks the USA is a source of political correctness, they should try living in England which is it's natural home.

[JBI]

No Virgil, he cannot, and does not, as he does not wish to bury history, he means to burn Conrad, and derail him, but still hold him up as an example, since he knows very well that his history, and his own literature is part of Conrad's.

As for it starting in Europe - that is true, but I do not think European criticism is as touchy about race and political correctness - perhaps Feminism, but even so, I do not see, for instance, Italians saying do not read Dante for whatever reason, in the sense that Walt Whitman has been branded a racist, and an imperialist.

By expansion, we could say that Shakespeare has been burned on or not on anti-semitism, and racisim, but at the same time, his career didn't feel a hit, and the greatest promoters of Shakespeare are English.

Canada's own Duncan Campbell Scott seems to fair better than many American poets now getting the lashing, but he actually was a brutal racist who had quite the hand in racist policy and the foundation of Residential Schools. They recently started giving out awards in his name (something which I do not approve of, as I do not like his poetry, or his legacy that much).

I do not see how it is a European phenomenon either - political correctness certainly exists, but does it exist in literary culture is the question - I would say probably not as thoroughly - generally, the closest thing I can think of would be feminist work, but even that does not dismiss or recreate literary personalities - allegations of anti-semitism hardly do either - we know Dickens was an anti-semite, for instance, as were numerous other big names, but their reputations did not tarnish.

As for Eliot slowly being lowered in esteem, well, he has gotten old - he was so much the poet of the last generation, the way Tennyson was of his generation, that he had to lower eventually, the allegations of anti-semitism never really seemed to amount to much - perhaps the realization that he was a Romantic poet at heart did the most to burn him. Pound did not suffer, and we know he was a devout anti-semite and racist.

[AuntShecky]

JBI, Brian Bean, and Virgil, Thank you so very much for taking the time to read this I didn't think it would generate much "business" so to speak because of its unusual length. As I told The Comedian earlier, I am grateful beyond words.

All of your comments were thoughtful. My only objection is that the term "political correctness" doesn't go far enough in describing what is afoot here, why so many readers are getting angry and/or reading literature in roundabout ways and/or wanting to change what is written
on the page.

As far as JBI's point that it seems to be mostly an "American" problem, I agree to a point. (After all, the critic who called T. S. Eliot's work anti-Semitic,Julius Anthony, after all, is a Brit through and through.) But I am totally convinced that Americans, unlike their North American neighbors to the north and south, have a blind spot when it comes to irony; they (we) are much too literally minded and judge too quickly on a superficial basis.

I have some more things to say-- not in direct response to your intelligent comments, but notions that came to me in the middle of the night(s) after posting this thread initially.
I guess you could call it "d'esprit d'escalier":


I couldn't disagree more with the notion that it’s an acceptable teaching method to tell students that they're “just like” the writers whose works they are reading. First of all, at this point in their lives, most --if not all–students are not at all like these writers. For one thing, I'm willing to bet that Whitman, D.H. Lawrence et al. are smarter than they are, and for another, I'm 99.999% certain that their writing is infinitely better than that of most students, many of whom can't tell the difference between an apostrophe and an apostate. So forgive me, but I must say that I seem to think that this kind of teaching philosophy is overly-accommodating at best, and cynically disingenuous at worst.

If “reader identification” is the only way to get young scholars to “relate” to great literature, I would hazard a guess to say the problem is with the teachers and the students and not with the works themselves. Instead of dragging the literature down to their level, the better plan would be the opposite tactic: raise the level of the students, helping them develop the knowledge, vision, and critical thinking skills that would enable to appreciate great literature for what it is, not as a validation of their (as yet) limited scope of experience or as a self-help book to guide them through whatever future exigencies that they may encounter in life.

Introducing literature as anything than what it is might provoke the problems previously described in this thread. Just as importantly, not every work of literature conveniently lends itself to highly subjective interpretations. What would students, and the current reading public in general, primed to see their callow selves in everything they read, make of Marianne Moore (1887-1972), I wonder? Though praising her poetic integrity and exemplary importance in modern poetry, fellow poet and critic Hayden Carruth notes that some readers find “her manner today finical and her sensibility remote.” In addition to poems such as “What are Years?” “Poetry,” and “Writing and Baseball,” her choice of subjects frequently seems a bit removed from the immediate experiences of ordinary humans; she writes about animals, and not run-of-the mill domestic creatures at that, but exotic ones such as the pangolin and paper nautilus; and if not animals, she writes about inanimate objects. Take for instance, these lines:

Were not ‘impersonal judgement in aesthetic
matters a metaphysical impossibility’ you

might fairly achieve
it.
What’s most surprising about that “impersonal judgement” line is not just that it happens the point I'm talking about at the moment, but the fact that Marianne Moore’s speaker thinks that such aa aesthetic response can be achieved by a . . .steamroller! (which is the object to whom her poem is addressed.) Now, no one in his or her right mind would identify with a machine that crushes rock into a road, but the fact that we can't truly “identify” with a steam roller doesn't mean that the poem is not worth reading, does it?

One point which Vince Passaro comes down hard against is regarding literature as a way to make the reader a “better person.” I agree with that in the sense that demanding that works of art be anything other than themselves or that they must “do” something to justify their existence diminishes them. Poetry should indeed “sing,” but it shouldn't be expected to “sing for its supper.” Even though art and literature have no inherent function, they certainly can and do have an effect: they can enlarge an individual’s tiny, self-enclosed world by giving him an opportunity to see a larger world, a different perspective, if you will; art and literature can –to use the cliché– “broaden
one’s horizons.” For instance, looking at The Mona Lisa for the first time will not inspire you to go home and practice making enigmatic expressions in the mirror, but it will make you see life –and especially how life is expressed – in a totally new way.

Otherwise, as Vince Passaro says, all literature will be downgraded to the level of non-threatening “children’s books,” or it will be like the cable news channels in which viewers only watch the stations which confirm and reiterate their own views, “preaching to the converted,” as the saying goes? By that way of thinking, should only agnostics readthe poetry of Wallace Stevens and only Anglo-Catholic converts read T. S. Eliot? Or for that matter, should militant anti-communists avoid watching films by Jean-Luc Godard? Atheists refuse to listen to Coltrane recordings? The list would go on and on. It’s silly, but this is what happens when we bring what Passaro calls “The New Prudery” to its logical conclusion.

Students and the reading public at large who only read the material that directly relates to their own lives and reaffirms their own cherished beliefs makes them feel comfortable. But they are really and truly missing something if they don't break out of their world and read something that challenges them. If something is difficult or remote or offensive or painful, they don't have to “like” it, but it won't hurt to look at it. Reading great literature will not necessarily make them better or stronger people, but by refusing to read it all but guarantees that they will continue to look at the world in their own little, tragically limited way.

They might live their entire lives without ever reading these magnificently ambiguous, and ironic-- uncharacteristically “personal” in that they are self-deprecating --lines with their delicate nuances from “East Coker”:

That was a way of putting it–not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetic fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us,
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems
to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.


Those lines are haunting me in the middle of the night as well.

[Alexander III]

I have to agree with JBI. Here in europe academia we have very little of the problems he mentions, which plague the U.S academics. Of course I can only speak for undergraduate system. Here we do not infuse everything with politics and such, rather to focus is on the work of art as being an independent peace of art separate from society. Very close to teh Wilde ideal of how literature and art should be appreciated. Of course, I am in the first year, so yea maybe it gets worse...

[JCamilo]

Wait, England, XIX century, Bowlder.

Wait, Antoine Galland, France, XVII century, 1001 Nights.

Political correctness is not american (Brazil, XXI Century: Monteiro Lobato classic is accused of racism and people want to remove it from schools. Same ground as Mark Twain. Borges's, Argentina: he is accused of racism and his reading combated.Japan, XXI Century, Manga may be edited for being wrong for kids.) it is an effect of any conservative country, empire, who attracts diversity and still must wear a flag of unity. Of course, democracy, this english idea, is the discussion in america, but we may find some perhaps even in the roman empire.).

[Virgil]

Virgil, you are right about political correctness being a mindset superimposed on the USA via academia but, in my view, it's a fault inherent in Anglo-Saxon protestantism. Which explains its disturbing influence wherever the descendants of English colonists have remained. If anyone thinks the USA is a source of political correctness, they should try living in England which is it's natural home.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to say one way or the other if it's only an Anglo-Saxon protestant issue. It could be, but I have seen French guilt over their colonialism and German guilt over their anti-Semitism.


No Virgil, he cannot, and does not, as he does not wish to bury history, he means to burn Conrad, and derail him, but still hold him up as an example, since he knows very well that his history, and his own literature is part of Conrad's.

As for it starting in Europe - that is true, but I do not think European criticism is as touchy about race and political correctness - perhaps Feminism, but even so, I do not see, for instance, Italians saying do not read Dante for whatever reason, in the sense that Walt Whitman has been branded a racist, and an imperialist.

Ok, I think we generally agree now, but you did initially say Achebe didn't try to kill Conrad.



All of your comments were thoughtful. My only objection is that the term "political correctness" doesn't go far enough in describing what is afoot here, why so many readers are getting angry and/or reading literature in roundabout ways and/or wanting to change what is written
on the page.

I agree with that. "Political Correctness" is too simple a term, but that's what came to mind. The impulse to degrade writers of the past with the racist or anti-Semite label is more insidious, even pernicious, than "P-C".

[Emil Miller]

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say one way or the other if it's only an Anglo-Saxon protestant issue. It could be, but I have seen French guilt over their colonialism and German guilt over their anti-Semitism.


Ok, I think we generally agree now, but you did initially say Achebe didn't try to kill Conrad.


I agree with that. "Political Correctness" is too simple a term, but that's what came to mind. The impulse to degrade writers of the past with the racist or anti-Semite label is more insidious, even pernicious, than "P-C".

Actually, the French are proud of their colonial history that had beneficial effects for the people living in their colonies, but of course the legacy of Rousseau and the revolution of 1789 is deeply embedded in French culture.
As for the Germans, they are among the least self-righteous people that I have met and whatever guilt they may feel for WW11 is only as a result of the denazification process at the war's end and a massive amount of finger-wagging by the allies over many years.
But whether we refer to the PC brigade as bien pensant, selbstgerecht or do gooders, their unfortunate influence is, as the essay points out, becoming increasingly noticeable in literature, not to mention elsewhere.

[Perandorrrr]

Very well written, AuntShecky. There were a bunch of things I wanted to say, but I got caught up in the latter sections. I always felt Oroonoko and Othello had over and undertones about immigration and multiculturalism, as of recently Prime Minister David Cameron said 'multicultrialism has failed' (http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/Multiculturalism+failure+Europe/4273602/story.html). Your piece is hardly an "American" piece, it reflects the world at large and as a good essay would never state having all the answers you simply are asking questions based on what you know or see. I do not believe Elliot was anti-Jewish nor anti-semitic (thorough students of history get what I'm saying). I don't think students or critics in general are being lazy all the time with their 'blurbs' I believe it is because most of what we see today does not deserve much deconstructing or attention. Absolutely stated and wonderfully pointed out is students's lack of understanding writing and believe it all as is said to the point of gospel. If you dare say something was an inside joke or mislead, you might have a mutiny in the classroom; It's one of those things I always thought, yet didn't know how to point it out or when. It was lengthy, but deserves attention. Very well done.

[Virgil]

Actually, the French are proud of their colonial history that had beneficial effects for the people living in their colonies, but of course the legacy of Rousseau and the revolution of 1789 is deeply embedded in French culture.
As for the Germans, they are among the least self-righteous people that I have met and whatever guilt they may feel for WW11 is only as a result of the denazification process at the war's end and a massive amount of finger-wagging by the allies over many years.
But whether we refer to the PC brigade as bien pensant, selbstgerecht or do gooders, their unfortunate influence is, as the essay points out, becoming increasingly noticeable in literature, not to mention elsewhere.
That does match my perception of the French but not my experience of the Germans. But I'm pretty sure you've met way more Germans than I have.


Very well written, AuntShecky. There were a bunch of things I wanted to say, but I got caught up in the latter sections. I always felt Oroonoko and Othello had over and undertones about immigration and multiculturalism, as of recently Prime Minister David Cameron said 'multicultrialism has failed' (http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/Multiculturalism+failure+Europe/4273602/story.html). Your piece is hardly an "American" piece, it reflects the world at large and as a good essay would never state having all the answers you simply are asking questions based on what you know or see. I do not believe Elliot was anti-Jewish nor anti-semitic (thorough students of history get what I'm saying). I don't think students or critics in general are being lazy all the time with their 'blurbs' I believe it is because most of what we see today does not deserve much deconstructing or attention. Absolutely stated and wonderfully pointed out is students's lack of understanding writing and believe it all as is said to the point of gospel. If you dare say something was an inside joke or mislead, you might have a mutiny in the classroom; It's one of those things I always thought, yet didn't know how to point it out or when. It was lengthy, but deserves attention. Very well done.
The thought about Merkel, Cameron, and now Sarkozy making their statements of the failure of multiculturalism crossed my mind as well. I'm not European so I can't know how big a problem it is, but where multiculturalism has been tolerated in the US, it has been problematic.

And yes, let's end this Eliot is an anti-semite nonsense once and for all.

[OrphanPip]

I don't know of any French colonies where the original inhabitants have benefited form the French presence. The Natives of Quebec, mostly dead, the natives of French Guiana, mostly dead, Vietnam and Laos, run into the ground by France, Burkino Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, Ivory Coast, ridden with war... Where exactly did the French have a positive influence on the people they oppressed and lorded over?

Edit: I can't discuss contemporary politics, but I'm none too fond of Frances' behavior in international politics lately either. As much as people slag off the USA's foreign policy, France has been a little profiteering supporter of oppressive regimes in its own right. (e.g. It did provide the weapons used in the Rwandan genocide, good job France!)

[JBI]

Very well written, AuntShecky. There were a bunch of things I wanted to say, but I got caught up in the latter sections. I always felt Oroonoko and Othello had over and undertones about immigration and multiculturalism, as of recently Prime Minister David Cameron said 'multicultrialism has failed' (http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/Multiculturalism+failure+Europe/4273602/story.html). Your piece is hardly an "American" piece, it reflects the world at large and as a good essay would never state having all the answers you simply are asking questions based on what you know or see. I do not believe Elliot was anti-Jewish nor anti-semitic (thorough students of history get what I'm saying). I don't think students or critics in general are being lazy all the time with their 'blurbs' I believe it is because most of what we see today does not deserve much deconstructing or attention. Absolutely stated and wonderfully pointed out is students's lack of understanding writing and believe it all as is said to the point of gospel. If you dare say something was an inside joke or mislead, you might have a mutiny in the classroom; It's one of those things I always thought, yet didn't know how to point it out or when. It was lengthy, but deserves attention. Very well done.

I do not see how that proves it international - the thread is about literary understanding, not cultural attitude - certainly there is guilt and shame everywhere (or in the American case, pride). The American academia for the most part is, from my understanding, more isolated than the European one, also, it has its own traditions - sure you can point to French theorists for giving the new "theory" a start, but it has gone way beyond that - when you look closely, Derrida was actually an excellent close reader (who even wrote a book on close reading lesbian pornographic images), and Foucault not particularly a literary theorist as much as a historian/philosopher.


The question of the Canonical being in danger though is a good one - I am not so sure about it - English departments have never been bigger. The question though is about now it being possible to get a degree in literature without actually reading classics much, or particularly on historical reading.

That is more true of some institutions than others - for instance, in my university, English students were required to fit categories - 2 year courses from medieval times until 1800, 1 course on American or transnational literature, 1 course on contemporary literature, 1 introduction course (the most of which were historically constructed), one course on Canadian literature, or Aboriginal literature, and then .5 course on theory and criticism.

Within that grid, it is impossible to not be exposed to the Canon really. The question is, do they like what they are reading, and is it presented to them in a manner which encourages appreciation -

Well, my experience says yes, including appreciation of works which I greatly dislike - others say no. The political correctness is brought up, but that did not stop a professor of mine from teaching Thomas Nashe, and talking about how he pretty much created prose fiction in English, despite The Unfortunate Traveler being undoubtedly racist and anti-semitic.

The question of rewriting a prettier history is not universally taught - some Americans try to, by burning anything with a thread of racism, they seek to purge it, whereas the bulk of places tend to just read it as part of an historical narrative.

[OrphanPip]

Duncan Campbell Scott wasn't just a racist, his personal letters reveal that he was borderline genocidal and he ruined the lives of thousands of aboriginal Canadians as director of Indian Affairs, and even with that evidence you'd have quite an uphill battle to try and get him removed from Can. Lit. courses. I took a Can-lit class once, and the impression I got from the prof was that DC Scott's racism was acknowledged, but he was also used as an iconic representation of Canadian Imperialism (A really dominant political ideology of 19th century Canada), and so he was also a vital piece of Canadian 19th century culture.

That's why I've never quite understood the tendency to censor major writers, or to act as if none of the racism is there. I don't understand why admitting racism exists in Twain would entail that Huck Finn can no longer be taught, rather it should be used as a basis for further discussion.

Edit:

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill."

Although, I think those who think multiculturalism has failed, or shouldn't be supported, could benefit from looking at the similarities of such rhetoric to D. C. Scott's own words.

[qimissung]

Hear, hear!

That reminds me of the old argument abut whether one would or would not listen to Wagner because of his antisemitism; or whether we think that Leni Riefenstahl should be acknowledged for her innovative film work even though she was closely associated with the Nazi party.

I think if the work involved is tainted with an overtly racist viewpoint I would have difficulty enjoying it, but otherwise I don't think it's a problem. Awork of art should stand on it's own merit, should be considered and valued for what beauty and enlightenment it gives us, even if it or it's author is somewhat flawed.

[Perandorrrr]

I do not see how that proves it international - the thread is about literary understanding, not cultural attitude - certainly there is guilt and shame everywhere (or in the American case, pride). The American academia for the most part is, from my understanding, more isolated than the European one, also, it has its own traditions

I don't think American academia is isolated in the general sense. I'm sure there are teachers who prefer to teach students "American" writing, but for what it's worth, most of my high school reading was by European authors. One of my college teachers almost killed me because I found Emerson and other transcendentalist's the biggest bore of my life and that I preferred European writing, but even South American e.g., Borges and De Vega. Money is also the big concept, it's much easier to teach a class a Mickey Spillane or Dan Brown book than even attempt to teach theory and criticism or Derrida as you mentioned. I loved Edgar Allen Poe growing up, I still do in fact, but once I studied Marlowe, Shakespeare, Joyce and the wise Ezra Pound I almost threw away my Stephen King books and looked down on Poe, slightly, along with the plethora of nonsense it accompanied on my book shelf. That is the isolationism I think you're talking about: the threat of discovering joy elsewhere. The teaching has a lot to do with it, if I didn't have agreat teacher in high school I might have slept on some great ideas in Shakespeare's plays. Money is a major factor, if I'm selling Dan Brown books, selling millions, I don't want those readers to discover the complexity found in novels outside the US because my pockets might suffer. Then we question entertainment versus "real" literature, maybe many of these people prefer being entertained -- which is about every contemporary novel I see today. They seem to be writing films within their books rather than create something that will last. If the US publishers couldn't make money on Harry Potter, despite it apparently (never read one) good books for kids I would've never heard of it. My younger brother purchased one, but couldn't get passed the first chapter.

I think some of the bigger concepts to evolve from some of the works metnoned, without a doubt has some connection to multiculturalism. You really think not? Maybe I took my examples too much to the heart. Of course the entire article isn't about that, I picked that piece out since I didn't respond to every point. This is without a doubt an international subject, many countries including the US have been cutting back on teachers and education, especially in my hometown, which already had a lackluster program. This is the perspective I'm coming from, you and others seemed to have had a great educational background, whether teachers were involved or you independently studied, it has paid off. I grew up in a melting pot, and it started out as everyone having their own identity, then sharing and influencing characteristics of one another, then a complete loss of identity as everyone looked outward instead of in to understand themselves. Everyone around me wanted to travel for a number of years to "find" themselves. It was a most common phrase used, in a serious sense. I kept wondering when they lost themselves. There is absolutely nothing wrong with embracing other cultures, it's the only way we will grow, but it seems now people are wondering if there should be a limit of sorts since multiculturalism on this scale may not have occured in history, except for the giant cities of empires such as Rome or Constantinople.

[AuntShecky]

That's why I've never quite understood the tendency to censor major writers, or to act as if none of the racism is there. I don't understand why admitting racism exists in Twain would entail that Huck Finn can no longer be taught, rather it should be used as a basis for further discussion.

.

Yes, Mark Twain's works should be taught. But I see that I have to say it again: Mark Twain was NOT a racist; in fact there is no other non-minority writer of his time that came down harder on racism and imperialism as Mark Twain.

[Emil Miller]

I don't know of any French colonies where the original inhabitants have benefited form the French presence. The Natives of Quebec, mostly dead, the natives of French Guiana, mostly dead, Vietnam and Laos, run into the ground by France, Burkino Faso, one of the poorest countries in Africa, Ivory Coast, ridden with war... Where exactly did the French have a positive influence on the people they oppressed and lorded over?

Edit: I can't discuss contemporary politics, but I'm none too fond of Frances' behavior in international politics lately either. As much as people slag off the USA's foreign policy, France has been a little profiteering supporter of oppressive regimes in its own right. (e.g. It did provide the weapons used in the Rwandan genocide, good job France!)

In answer to your question I would say practically everywhere. It is a facet of colonialism that an infrastructure is usually laid down to facilitate colonial rule: the benefits of which are indisputable. This is true for France as well as any colonial power. Apart from setting up educational institutions, they were also instrumental in dealing with conditions such as malaria and bubonic plague which were manifest in their colonies.

In 1835, an itinerant medical service of French doctors was created to look after the Arab population. At the beginning, this service was not restricted to areas controlled by the army. The objective was, quite simply, to let the infirmaries precede the army so that the population be controlled not only by military force but also be tied to the benefits of civilization. from: Disease, Medicine, and Empire by Roy McLeod and Milton Lewis.

I don't know about the natives of Quebec and I am unable to find anything that connects the French to the destruction of the indigenous peoples of French Guiana, but it is today a French overseas department and, as such, receives substantial financial aid from the French government.

Wikipedia on French colonial rule in Laos:

Laos was never important to France, except as a buffer state between British-influenced Thailand and the more economically important Annam and Tonkin.
During their rule, the French introduced the corvee, a system where every male Lao were forced to contribute 10 days of manual labour per year to the colonial government. In spite of Laos producing tin, rubber and coffee, it never accounted for more than 1% of French Indochina's exports. By 1940, only 600 French citizens lived in Laos.

Vietnam suffered far more from the USA's 14 year involvement than under 80 years of French colonialism. There were also a substantial number of Vietnamese catholics who didn't want the French to leave

Burkino Faso appears to have been neglected by the French but it's undeniable that since independence the country has gone the way of many other African states with fighting between rival groups for control.

The Ivory Coast was, at the time of independence, one of the richest African states but, 20 years on, took the same route as Burkino Faso and France's legacy of a stable economy has largely been squandered.

As for France selling arms to oppressive regimes, I worked for the British Government in their Defence Export Division and I can tell you from personal experience that the French are far from being alone in this respect.

[Drkshadow03]

I agree with that. "Political Correctness" is too simple a term, but that's what came to mind. The impulse to degrade writers of the past with the racist or anti-Semite label is more insidious, even pernicious, than "P-C".

I disagree. There is nothing wrong with looking at the writing of the past and labeling it anti-Semitic or racist or whatever, if it in fact demonstrates those attributes. Degrade is the wrong word; I prefer describe. As Orphanpip pointed out about Twain, it's something that should be part of the discussion, even if it shouldn't be the only point of the discussion. It only becomes a concern if that is the entire discussion at the expense of all the other wonderful things a text is doing.

A person can recognize that The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play, but still enjoy it. Everyone's terms of what is acceptable for themselves is, of course, going to vary.

[OrphanPip]

In answer to your question I would say practically everywhere. It is a facet of colonialism that an infrastructure is usually laid down to facilitate colonial rule: the benefits of which are indisputable. This is true for France as well as any colonial power. Apart from setting up educational institutions, they were also instrumental in dealing with conditions such as malaria and bubonic plague which were manifest in their colonies.

In 1835, an itinerant medical service of French doctors was created to look after the Arab population. At the beginning, this service was not restricted to areas controlled by the army. The objective was, quite simply, to let the infirmaries precede the army so that the population be controlled not only by military force but also be tied to the benefits of civilization. from: Disease, Medicine, and Empire by Roy McLeod and Milton Lewis.

Except that in reality, the conquering of North Africa involved decades of violent suppression.

http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/algeria

Algeria is probably the most egregious example. Whereas in Morocco the French instituted a pretty much Apartheid system, which was need to keep the Arabs in their place and off the good land for the French settlers!

Oh and those great schools where they were forced to learn French and French culture, and the superiority of their white overlords so that they could be easier to control. But at least they were introduced to "civilization."



I don't know about the natives of Quebec and I am unable to find anything that connects the French to the destruction of the indigenous peoples of French Guiana, but it is today a French overseas department and, as such, receives substantial financial aid from the French government.

In both places the indigenous population is almost entirely dead, and those that are left have been displaced. The remainder are ethnically and culturally French, or recent arrivals.





Laos was never important to France, except as a buffer state between British-influenced Thailand and the more economically important Annam and Tonkin.
During their rule, the French introduced the corvee, a system where every male Lao were forced to contribute 10 days of manual labour per year to the colonial government. In spite of Laos producing tin, rubber and coffee, it never accounted for more than 1% of French Indochina's exports. By 1940, only 600 French citizens lived in Laos.

Vietnam suffered far more from the USA's 14 year involvement than under 80 years of French colonialism. There were also a substantial number of Vietnamese catholics who didn't want the French to leave

French Indochina was nearly as bad as Africa. Once again harsh violent military pacification was the norm. They also had a nice system of forced labour and a switch to a plantation economy so that they could provide valuable trade commodities for France. The money gained from these businesses of course all went into the pockets of the French.

Then they are also pretty much responsible for the political instability that resulted in the Vietnam war, no matter what the Americans later went on to do, the French already had several decades of killing the locals in their own right.

And I'm sure Catholic collaborators with the French regime really didn't want them to leave.



Burkino Faso appears to have been neglected by the French but it's undeniable that since independence the country gone the way of many other African states with fighting between rival groups for control.

The Ivory Coast was, at the time of independence, one of the richest African states but, 20 years on, took the same route as Burkino Faso and France's legacy of a stable economy has largely been squandered.

West Africa was also operated under a forced labour system, most plantations owned by the French, and the large European settler population. And there was once again a use of military pacification of local populations, which involved general murder and slaughter of indigenous people who simply didn't want to be ruled by the French. Also, Burkino Faso's economy was run into the ground by the French until the point where it was partitioned off from the Ivory Coast, to make the Ivory Coast look better.



As for France selling arms to oppressive regimes, I worked for the British Government in their Defence Export Division and I can tell you from personal experience that the French are far from being alone in this respect.

The French are particularly egregious offenders though.

[Emil Miller]

Except that in reality, the conquering of North Africa involved decades of violent suppression.

http://www.enotes.com/genocide-encyclopedia/algeria

Algeria is probably the most egregious example. Whereas in Morocco the French instituted a pretty much Apartheid system, which was need to keep the Arabs in their place and off the good land for the French settlers!

Oh and those great schools where they were forced to learn French and French culture, and the superiority of their white overlords so that they could be easier to control. But at least they were introduced to "civilization."

The trouble with this black and white presentation is that it overlooks the fact that the atrocities were usually committed by Algerian conscripts. Colonies cost as well as make money and the French government refused to increase expenditure for an increase to the relatively few troops sent overseas. Therefore, natives were conscripted in large numbers.

The French Army recruited extensively from the Berber and Arab peoples of Algeria throughout the period of French rule (1830–1962). Most were employed as infantry (Tirailleurs) and cavalry (Spahis). Algerian troops saw extensive service in the Crimean War, Mexico, the Franco-Prussian War, various colonial campaigns in Africa, Tonkin and Syria, both World Wars, and the First Indochina War.

Moreover, they didn't only kill at the behest of the French; here's what happened after the French had left:

Violence in Independent Algeria

After 132 years of colonial subjugation and a bloody seven-year war for independence, Algeria went through a period of relative peace and economic development that lasted almost three decades. However, the country entered into another troubled era in the 1990s. As one of the nationalist leaders, Larbi Ben M'Hidi was quoted as saying to his compatriots in the 1950s: "the easiest part was to regain independence and the toughest one comes after that." The economic and political systems that were established in independent Algeria failed. This led in the early 1990s to a social rebellion headed by Islamist groups, which, after having been denied a legitimate electoral victory in 1991, opted for armed rebellion against the state. However, the war they waged for a decade extended also to the civilian population and foreigners. Between 1992 and 2002, over 150,000 people were killed, entire villages were abandoned, and the economic infrastructure was badly damaged. While most of the violence is attributed to the Islamists, the government also committed repression and reprisals and is responsible for the disappearance of thousands of people. Many also accuse the Algerian security service of using French-style torture and of the summary execution of suspected Islamist rebels or their supporters. Because there has not been a full and independent inquiry of the massacres and other violations committed during this internal war, the whole truth about the ongoing tragedy in Algeria remains unknown.

In both places the indigenous population is almost entirely dead, and those that are left have been displaced. The remainder are ethnically and culturally French, or recent arrivals.

As I said, I have no idea of the truth of this assertion.

French Indochina was nearly as bad as Africa. Once again harsh violent military pacification was the norm. They also had a nice system of forced labour and a switch to a plantation economy so that they could provide valuable trade commodities for France. The money gained from these businesses of course all went into the pockets of the French.

Much of the money was, in all probability, spent on building the infrastructure to maintain French control of the colony. Either way, it proved of great benefit to the Vietnamese following the French occupation.

Then they are also pretty much responsible for the political instability that resulted in the Vietnam war, no matter what the Americans later went on to do, the French already had several decades of killing the locals in their own right.

If you mean killing insurgents, then that's par for the course in all imperial regimes, including that of the UK, but it's pretty obvious that the amount of Vietnamese casualties resulting from US involvement far outweighs those inflicted under French rule.

And I'm sure Catholic collaborators with the French regime really didn't want them to leave.

Catholicism arrived in Vietnam during the 17th century, long before the French occupied the country.

West Africa was also operated under a forced labour system, most plantations owned by the French, and the large European settler population. And there was once again a use of military pacification of local populations, which involved general murder and slaughter of indigenous people who simply didn't want to be ruled by the French. Also, Burkino Faso's economy was run into the ground by the French until the point where it was partitioned off from the Ivory Coast, to make the Ivory Coast look better.

See my comment re insurgents above.

The French are particularly egregious offenders though.

No it's simply that the French have maintained a much closer contact with their former colonies and have a head start when it comes to selling them weapons. They also make reliable equipment which gives them a lead among customers other than their former colonies; much to the chagrin of the British, I might add. I would also point out that much of the killing in Rwanda, as elsewhere since WW11, was via the AK47, which is manufactured mainly in Russia and China.

[AuntShecky]

While the original poster appreciates the time and thought which the latest replies definitely show, please accept my respectful wish that we keep to the topic at hand, which is a discussion of contemporary criticism of literature,
specifically a unfair imposing of today's social mores and conventions of upon works produced in much earlier times, in some cases a century or more before ours. The other issues from the OP were the condescending ways in which literature is being taught on the secondary and college levels as well as-- in Vince Passaro's view-- deep-seated
resentment toward the ambiguity, irony, and complexity offered by (formerly) esteemed authors.

Although a historical discussion about colonialism and its ills is valid, may I respectfully suggest that those interested in continuing this spin-off discussion start a new thread in a different forum, perhaps "Serious Discussions?" Thank you.

[Virgil]

I disagree. There is nothing wrong with looking at the writing of the past and labeling it anti-Semitic or racist or whatever, if it in fact demonstrates those attributes. Degrade is the wrong word; I prefer describe. As Orphanpip pointed out about Twain, it's something that should be part of the discussion, even if it shouldn't be the only point of the discussion. It only becomes a concern if that is the entire discussion at the expense of all the other wonderful things a text is doing.

A person can recognize that The Merchant of Venice is an anti-Semitic play, but still enjoy it. Everyone's terms of what is acceptable for themselves is, of course, going to vary.
I agree that if a writer is racist or anti-semitic it should be identified. My point is that it better be clear and distinct or one is slandering another person's reputation. I do not believe that Huck Finn or Heart of Darkness is racist. It may be a little paternalistic but that doesn't make it racist.

Let me put it to the possible writers in this thread. If you were writing about a westerner that ventured into a culture that had women covered from head to foot, stoned children to death for religious violations, or had the death penalty for homosexuality, would you not come off as paternalistic? That paternalism happens every day today here in the western modern relativistic world by the most Liberal of journalists. Either they are paternalistic or they're anti-Semitic toward Islam. Which is it?

[mortalterror]

Let me put it to the possible writers in this thread. If you were writing about a westerner that ventured into a culture that had women covered from head to foot, stoned children to death for religious violations, or had the death penalty for homosexuality, would you not come off as paternalistic? That paternalism happens every day today here in the western modern relativistic world by the most Liberal of journalists. Either they are paternalistic or they're anti-Semitic toward Islam. Which is it?

Dear Diary, today I witnessed my first stoning. Awesome! I totally respect other peoples cultures, in spite of the way that they differ from my own.

[AuntShecky]

I agree that if a writer is racist or anti-semitic it should be identified. My point is that it better be clear and distinct or one is slandering another person's reputation. I do not believe that Huck Finn or Heart of Darkness is racist. It may be a little paternalistic but that doesn't make it racist.

Yes, it's certainly acceptable to identify a writer (or artist, film director, etc.) as racist, sexist, anti-Semitic whatever, as long as we make the distinction between the individual and the work he creates. This is one of the points I tried like holy hell to demonstrate in the "Railing at Greatness" essay. T.S. Eliot is a prime example, from what he espouses in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (http://amb.cult.bg/british/5/eliot/trad.htm) but especially in what is imbedded in
Four Quartets -- a mystical communion with divine love which is totally contrary to any human prejudices, including anti-Semitism. Vince Passaro is absolutely right in that anti-Semitism really does not exist in Eliot's poetry.

Again, let's try to keep the artist and his work separate.

[Drkshadow03]

Yes, it's certainly acceptable to identify a writer (or artist, film director, etc.) as racist, sexist, anti-Semitic whatever, as long as we make the distinction between the individual and the work he creates. This is one of the points I tried like holy hell to demonstrate in the "Railing at Greatness" essay. T.S. Eliot is a prime example, from what he espouses in
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" (http://amb.cult.bg/british/5/eliot/trad.htm) but especially in what is imbedded in
Four Quartets -- a mystical communion with divine love which is totally contrary to any human prejudices, including anti-Semitism. Vince Passaro is absolutely right in that anti-Semitism really does not exist in Eliot's poetry.

Again, let's try to keep the artist and his work separate.

Well, okay, but in many of these cases people are pointing to the work rather than the artist's background for their claims. The work is anti-Semitic, the work exhibits racism, the story revels in its misogyny, etc., hopefully with examples from the text and an explanation of why those examples constitute such an "ism."

Not to mention people fail to separate the writer from the work all the time when it's convenient for their argument. For example, you did so yourself. I think it's bit hypocritical to say Mark Twain had strong anti-Imperialist views, therefore his work cannot possibly be racist, and then be critical when someone does the opposite when they see evidence of an artist expressing stereotypes or hateful ideas about a group of people in their private life and then find evidence that these views find their way into their fiction.

[AuntShecky]

I think it's bit hypocritical to say Mark Twain had strong anti-Imperialist views, therefore his work cannot possibly be racist, .

How is the above statement logical, and more to the point,who said it? Vince Passaro didn't write that, and neither did yours truly.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

[OrphanPip]

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

The fact that Huck Finn has an anti-Racist message doesn't preclude the work from having racist undertones or from indulging in the promotion of patronizing racial stereotypes. I wouldn't be the only person to read Twain as using racial humour in a way that indulges in racism, even if Twain's humanist tendencies make him take a stance against the more sinister aspects of institutionalized racism.

It is not the N word alone that has caused people to react to Twain as possibly reinforcing racial stereotypes. The fact that it resists extreme forms of racism, which are already broadly unacceptable in contemporary culture, is hardly redeeming of the subtler aspects of racism that pervade the work.

It's not an either or thing, the work promotes certain elements of racism, just as it criticizes others.

[Drkshadow03]

How is the above statement logical, and more to the point,who said it? Vince Passaro didn't write that, and neither did yours truly.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows racism for the evil that it is, as manifested in the characters and prevailing culture which oppresses Jim. Simply showing racism in a culture is not the same as endorsing it!

The contemporary objection to that particular work is a specific epithet, considered to be anathema in the mores of the present day. Both Vince Passaro's article and my lesser essay which forms the first 4 postings in this thread attempt to point out the fallacy of expecting works written 100 years or more previously to reflect the same social values held today.

Actually you did:


Yes, Mark Twain's works should be taught. But I see that I have to say it again: Mark Twain was NOT a racist; in fact there is no other non-minority writer of his time that came down harder on racism and imperialism as Mark Twain.

Okay, I suppose what you wrote isn't exactly what I described above, but close enough. I suppose you could be implying that his work rather than his separate personal being came down hard against racism and imperialism. But this only goes to show why there isn't as hard a divide between the writer and his work as you're asserting. Although I understand the problems involved with relying too heavily on biography when interpreting and do essentially agree we need to rely on the work first and foremost.

But once you cut out the author and this problem leads to the very thing you're railing against since then the text needs to speak for itself. But what happens when a large portion of the population reads the text very differently than you do?

Obviously Mark Twain's work is criticizing slavery and certain forms of racism of his time, but as Orphanpip notes it's more than possible to criticize certain aspects of racism and reify others. I have no opinion right now on how I feel Twain handles it in his story because to be honest I haven't read Huck Finn since 11th grade. That would be almost 11 years ago.

[JBI]

And, by extension, even if it is racist, what effect is that of the work? And if it is an anti-slavery affirmation, what does that mean? You are writing on the reaction of contemporary readers, even if one is going to do what almost every critic and historian does and put the text and the acts within their historical frames as part of the time, there is still the question of what does that mean to a modern reader, who is reading a book, and usually a young reader at that who is not taking in history as a post-modern textbook reading, but rather as a narrative that is part of her - how is she to react?

I do not advocate censorship, but it is easy to see how the issue emerges within a frame that teaches the text before the background, yet emphasizes the background over the text.

The real problem with Finn is that the text, from what I can recall, is so much about racism and the American past, but the American past is now being distanced to "overcome" racism - simply, if one is not part of the historical background, to what extent is the historical background relevant as a text in itself.

The power of Finn is in narratology, I would argue, not on its political themes, but you commit the exact same crime that those who criticize it do - you read it for the politics, and not for the narrative, and you instead make an affirmation to its political goodness within its own context, rather than its racism within a different context, when, arguably, if you wish to talk about greatness, you should affirm that its racist or not racist content are part of a discussion, but are not the essence of the book, the same way antisemitism is not the essence of the Merchant of Venice, despite that Shakespeare's writing of Shylock as such a powerful character has forced the play to be read as such (we all know the merchant is not Shylock, and the bulk of the plot is centered on a series of romances, rather than on Shylock's bond, which merely serves to bring a frame to the tragicomic - the end is not in Shylock's defeat, but rather in the lover's defeat.

Likewise, the power of Eliot is not in his Christian affirmation, or anti-semitism, and rarely do people read him for his antisemitism. The reason for a career decline is the fact that poetics moved differently in the United States than in Britain, as did culture - the great modern poets of the States were Frost and Stevens, not Eliot and Pound, and as such the tradition moved away from the Romantic works of Eliot, and the archaic works of Pound to the more Whitman-heavy works of Frost, and the more contemplative and meditative works of Stevens (with perhaps W. C. Williams coming in as a third voice).

In Europe, the take was perhaps different - Eliot holds a lot more with English poetics, so it is perhaps easier for someone like Geoffrey Hill to hold him in his great esteem - but there there is also a tradition of local born poets to put into the context - as such, Eliot went from being THE English poet, to one of a series of modernist voices - his antisemitism did nothing really, as his poems are relatively free of an antisemitic voice.

In terms of political correctness - the actual extent of it is quite misunderstood - it does not actually mean killing texts in the vast majority of its contexts - simply put, English departments are too big, and English Ph. D.s to numerous, so it became fashionable for trends to emerge - for instance, the Showalter followers who decided to just look for any female who ever penned a verse. What that did really was just to broaden the Canon for a couple of decades, with, other perspectives such as post-colonialism coming in, bringing more topics to discuss. Did that really kill reading greatness though? Well, I had an Edmund Spenser specialist explain that the amount of writing on him was never more numerous than in the past 50 years, but what it did was just to focus people's attention to other aspects of his work - mainly his colonialism, rather than the structuralist readings that dominated before.

Likewise, Shakespeare was never abandoned - nor was Conrad - reading greatness was never killed, though in certain institutions there was a shift more to look at contemporary works - that was the big strike to the canon, namely, American authors becoming a much bigger part of the American curriculum.

In that vein, the number of scholars working on Milton in American institutions are far lower than those working on 20th century American fiction. There was a post a few years ago detailing the simple fact that the more "dated" your specialty in English is, the less people there are competing for faculty positions - and I think that is the main root of the question. Why are we so preoccupied with fiction, and, by extension, 20th century fiction?

For people coming out of that mold, and students entering that mold, it is hard to ignore modern critical opinions, as they are so much of the context of the 20th century world. The older texts really haven't changed much, but the newer ones have gained undeserved exposure because of academic fixation - that is not true of all institutions, but it is particularly true of American ones, though still not all. The focus on American reading makes American modes of reading, and American issues in the forefront, whereas the focus on classical reading moves classical issues to the forefront.

But who is going to sit there and read books on Neoplatonic notions of love in Edmund Spenser's Four Hymns, or read the religious debates, still in archaic spelling, of Tyndale and More, which go on for pages, yet were the big issues of the time. And to what extent does that leak into the popular culture - the culture of the contemporary, from my reading, especially of the States, is one where an individual must contemplate the role of their country, and their society, and the issues of homophobia, racism, and sexism. Canada is different, as we have come above that to an extent, but still Canadian literature would focus on our issues, as that is what is of concern at the moment to the youth, who, seeking something from text, will turn to something that speaks to them.

Spenser is hardly accessible, he is difficult reading. In that sense, you go to the institution to learn about him, rather than read him at home at the age of 15, missing everything. Huck Finn is accessible, so it is criticized, since its context is not defined, and the relationship between it and its readers not one of distance but one of closeness - it speaks of current issues that should not be current issues, and is, as such, hard to contextualize - racism exists in the forms within the book, whereas colonialism in Spenser, or misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew are now so distant as to be read from a distance.

You call it railing at greatness, I call it yelling into the mirror. When one sees ones own flaws in a text it is easy to yell at the text - how can one affirm the greatness of Moby Dick without seeing in it the self-loathed repugnance that is a culture that contains the same tropes.

Beyond that, the rest of the world does not do that, as the rest of the world's literature is not the same, nor the world they live in. The States has issues, and expresses them through their academy - Canadian literature study is more keeping with a sort of post-post-modernism, that gets beyond the issues, which is where the American academy is heading, and many already have headed - the text of The Western Canon, or even of The Closing of the American Mind are so dated already that it is ridiculous.

Simply put, the essay to me seems to ride a bandwagon of 20-odd year old criticism that has gone as out of fashion as what it is criticizing. Even Harold Bloom seems to have shut up about it, and those who are still writing it are either aged, or, if young, archaic.

The canon did not die either, as it cannot die, nor has reading died, nor has the aesthetic died - merely, the shift in culture that was the post Cold-War generation has occurred - and now the post-post-Cold-War generation is finding its relationship to a) history, and b) literature.

The irony is, those critics who focused so much on yelling have shifted away too - nobody is writing the polemics they did before in the same way - it is now too an historical narrative, to an extent, which is emerging in a new aesthetic.

I read a couple of years ago in Canadian Literature of how Al Purdy is now published, along with other Canadian poets, in selected volumes that feature their best, and show a tradition - the point was his racism in his works was removed, and less focused, to bring a new audience to read Purdy as the elegiac poet of a shifting Canadian identity - he has moved, with the Canadian identity, through the transition, and as such the critic argued, so has the tradition, that looks at him as an historical pivot, rather than as themselves, and therefore goes over the racist undertone as historical, rather than personal.

By extension, similar things occur in Eliot, where to me mention of not liking him because of Antisemitism is as laughable as mentioning not liking Dickens because of antisemitism (I know people who went to private Judaic high schools who were taught him in class, without his antisemitism being an issue) - likewise, we have moved beyond even Marlowe's antisemitism, and Said himself stated his great love for the French writers who he criticized in his Orientalism, with an extended point that his book was aimed at addressing how the same tropes he found within them are still apparent, and not at killing the authors, nor at writing a "positive" view of the "orient" (a place he argues does not exist). The trend is to break things down until they become part of an historical narrative, not to bury them in the ground - Said's Flaubert is a great author, Said's Naipaul is a Racist "witness for the prosecution". The distance and history between the two figures is worth pointing out, where one is within a context that has been breaking for a while, whereas one is within a modern context who tries to reaffirm racism.

To sum it up, Huck Finn is read as racist, and therefore bashed as such, because the world it is read in is still so heavily dominated by its tropes - the critics and the political correct police will break away at that, and will be broken, and are being broken, and out of that emerges a literary historical context and identity, and a new cultural identity, rather than a new canon, as that was never the goal.

Hence why I pushed this far more on the American academic establishment, since they have a more repressed cultural identity that does not wish to really move forward, only bury things within the culture and ignore them. (and what better way than yelling at everything that could look offensive, rather than addressing how these things are still ingrained in the culture).

[Drkshadow03]

Hence why I pushed this far more on the American academic establishment, since they have a more repressed cultural identity that does not wish to really move forward, only bury things within the culture and ignore them. (and what better way than yelling at everything that could look offensive, rather than addressing how these things are still ingrained in the culture).

Oh, I don't know. I think most so-called "PC" critiques do more than just yell at anything that looks offensive and in many cases actually delve into how those things are still ingrained in the culture.

[JCamilo]

North America is no more PC than many countries in the world, neither invented it (a capriche of any culture powerful enough to consider others as their small kids needing protection). It is just the dominating culture in the western world and any aspect of it - be it revolutionary like in the 60's or conservative like now - will have a huger impact in the world.

[mortalterror]

Obviously Mark Twain's work is criticizing slavery and certain forms of racism of his time, but as Orphanpip notes it's more than possible to criticize certain aspects of racism and reify others. I have no opinion right now on how I feel Twain handles it in his story because to be honest I haven't read Huck Finn since 11th grade. That would be almost 11 years ago.

It's not just in Huck Finn. It's all throughout his work.


The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways.—They are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of "purchase!" for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue "regulations" requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve—his master is under no obligation to support him.

The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude "civilization." We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.
-Following the Equator


The earl put us up and sold us at auction. This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into life-long slavery without the circumstances making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block come into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish.
-A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

[Virgil]

North America is no more PC than many countries in the world, neither invented it (a capriche of any culture powerful enough to consider others as their small kids needing protection). It is just the dominating culture in the western world and any aspect of it - be it revolutionary like in the 60's or conservative like now - will have a huger impact in the world.

We don't usually agree Camilo, but we do here. Thanks.

[AuntShecky]

Re: Response #40 from MortalTerror (above.)

These were both good examples of Twain's condemnation of slavery, expressed in an ironic tone which most discerning readers would be able to catch. The irony is not unlike that Swift used in "A Modest Proposal."

cf. Reply #2 of this thread, in which Vince Passaro explains how irony is often misinterpreted:

". . .the issue of irony in the sense that some readers are incapable of recognizing irony when they see it--unlike potentially offensive passages which supposedly jump off the page into the eyes of those who make a practice of looking for them. Passaro’s takes irony to an exponential level; he believes that irony is “what we despise about literature, and what exhausts us about modern literature in particular,” and “ its acknowledgment that in. . .the beautiful process of creation is tinged with something slightly immoral, something exploitative of intimacies and experience, rude, vain, self-justifying, disloyal, brutal, unrestrained. . .Modern art insists on making something significant and even beautiful out of ugliness, dissonance, fever, hatred, anger, failure, and pain.”

[Cunninglinguist]

Perhaps to open up a new vein of discourse.....



I think it's part II and II of your post where you address … that we shouldn't encourage undergraduates to see canonical authors as "like" themselves … I'm more than fine with this approach. I encourage it. I think it's important for new and potential readers of literature to see how great artists and writers have dealt/expressed feelings or ideas similar to our own. Often such a companionship, between author and reader, is the start of a more advanced study. But more than that. . .it's where the "value" (an idea you don't like that much) of literature lay.

I disagree with your disagreement. There is a fundamental problem with embracing art as a “mirror,” as it were, unconsciously imposing a personal and cultural context onto a work. Of course we’re always bound to a context, but this is no excuse to indolently accept it, to enterprise no further than it. When you do not try to go beyond your context, you fail to see the work as it is, as the artist intended it, and you rob the artist of the very capacity to express. In believing that the artist is “just like us” we’re depriving him of his ability to persuade us, to show us something new; we’re lowering his art to a status of merely a static affirmation instead of letting it be a dynamic force of influence, causing us to entertain fundamentally new ideas about life. We believe that the artist cannot teach us anything new about the content of life; rather, he can only teach us how to better express that content. In a word, the conviction kills the art, or, at least, castrates it. Conversely, great art is done by those people who fundamentally differ. Those who see things from a highly unique perspective and have the ability to show others that perspective. It seems as if when people can’t shake that perfunctory assumption, their interpretative faculties are crippled, and they start censoring things that are superficially obscene.

[AuntShecky]

Perhaps to open up a new vein of discourse.....



I disagree with your disagreement. There is a fundamental problem with embracing art as a “mirror,” as it were, unconsciously imposing a personal and cultural context onto a work. Of course we’re always bound to a context, but this is no excuse to indolently accept it, to enterprise no further than it. When you do not try to go beyond your context, you fail to see the work as it is, as the artist intended it, and you rob the artist of the very capacity to express. In believing that the artist is “just like us” we’re depriving him of his ability to persuade us, to show us something new; we’re lowering his art to a status of merely a static affirmation instead of letting it be a dynamic force of influence, causing us to entertain fundamentally new ideas about life. We believe that the artist cannot teach us anything new about the content of life; rather, he can only teach us how to better express that content. In a word, the conviction kills the art, or, at least, castrates it. Conversely, great art is done by those people who fundamentally differ. Those who see things from a highly unique perspective and have the ability to show others that perspective. . .


Amen.

[sparrow6224]

Dear Aunt Shecky,

You'll be amused to know two things, I hope: the first being that just tonight, after supper, I was discussing with my Jewish in-laws the comedian Shecky Green and the Yiddish nickname Shecky: my lady's mom had a cousin named "Sheicky" and his real name was Littwak. That's as far as we got. The second is that I am the author of the Harper's piece you quote here and clearly have read with great interest and great care. And I am most grateful to find your thoughts on it, which are solid and provocative. I would throw two remarks into the discussion that followed: one, I cannot emphasize enough, the problem is not political correctness, the problem is much larger than that and it is identical on both sides of the political correctness debate: the problem is wanting literature (and now, I'd add, even "facts") to be limited to that which confirms one's already established beliefs; two, if I had it to do over, I'd give considerably more credit to the Goonetilike edition of Heart of Darkness, which really does have a lot of fascinating stuff in it, and helped my aforementioned mother-in-law, on her second or third try, to finally feel she had a grasp on the novel.

I should also tell you that while I disagreed with him on the small point you mention, Edward Said was a teacher of mine, and later a friend, very dear to me, himself a huge fan of Conrad; and quite simply he was the greatest literary mind I've ever been in the presence of, by a good margin, and I've been in the presence of some very good ones. I have written an Afterword to the Signet edition of Heart of Darkness/The Secret Sharer. It describes, in a way that will amuse you, how I first met Said. I was reading Heart of Darkness at the moment in question.

Thank you so much, lo these many years later, for your close and high-octane reading of my essay.

Vince Passaro

[ralfyman]

Too much commercial mass entertainment coupled with consumer spending.

[Virgil]

Thank you so much, lo these many years later, for your close and high-octane reading of my essay.

Vince Passaro

This is quite kind of you to stop by Mr. Passaro. Thank you for taking the time.


I would throw two remarks into the discussion that followed: one, I cannot emphasize enough, the problem is not political correctness, the problem is much larger than that and it is identical on both sides of the political correctness debate: the problem is wanting literature (and now, I'd add, even "facts") to be limited to that which confirms one's already established beliefs;

Yes, that's at the core of the issue, though I'm not sure why you say both sides are at fault. I think the people who refuse to succumb to political correctness are only asking that a writer be taken in his totality. Certainly a writer of the pre PC world could very well be anti Semitic or racist, and if so it should be pointed out, though his art might rise above it. However one should see the total man, his humanity in the context of what I'll call the natural law of human decency, not just on whether he used a stereotype here or an off color word there.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

And, by extension, even if it is racist, what effect is that of the work? And if it is an anti-slavery affirmation, what does that mean? You are writing on the reaction of contemporary readers, even if one is going to do what almost every critic and historian does and put the text and the acts within their historical frames as part of the time, there is still the question of what does that mean to a modern reader, who is reading a book, and usually a young reader at that who is not taking in history as a post-modern textbook reading, but rather as a narrative that is part of her - how is she to react?

I do not advocate censorship, but it is easy to see how the issue emerges within a frame that teaches the text before the background, yet emphasizes the background over the text.

The real problem with Finn is that the text, from what I can recall, is so much about racism and the American past, but the American past is now being distanced to "overcome" racism - simply, if one is not part of the historical background, to what extent is the historical background relevant as a text in itself.

The power of Finn is in narratology, I would argue, not on its political themes, but you commit the exact same crime that those who criticize it do - you read it for the politics, and not for the narrative, and you instead make an affirmation to its political goodness within its own context, rather than its racism within a different context, when, arguably, if you wish to talk about greatness, you should affirm that its racist or not racist content are part of a discussion, but are not the essence of the book, the same way antisemitism is not the essence of the Merchant of Venice, despite that Shakespeare's writing of Shylock as such a powerful character has forced the play to be read as such (we all know the merchant is not Shylock, and the bulk of the plot is centered on a series of romances, rather than on Shylock's bond, which merely serves to bring a frame to the tragicomic - the end is not in Shylock's defeat, but rather in the lover's defeat.

Likewise, the power of Eliot is not in his Christian affirmation, or anti-semitism, and rarely do people read him for his antisemitism. The reason for a career decline is the fact that poetics moved differently in the United States than in Britain, as did culture - the great modern poets of the States were Frost and Stevens, not Eliot and Pound, and as such the tradition moved away from the Romantic works of Eliot, and the archaic works of Pound to the more Whitman-heavy works of Frost, and the more contemplative and meditative works of Stevens (with perhaps W. C. Williams coming in as a third voice).

In Europe, the take was perhaps different - Eliot holds a lot more with English poetics, so it is perhaps easier for someone like Geoffrey Hill to hold him in his great esteem - but there there is also a tradition of local born poets to put into the context - as such, Eliot went from being THE English poet, to one of a series of modernist voices - his antisemitism did nothing really, as his poems are relatively free of an antisemitic voice.

In terms of political correctness - the actual extent of it is quite misunderstood - it does not actually mean killing texts in the vast majority of its contexts - simply put, English departments are too big, and English Ph. D.s to numerous, so it became fashionable for trends to emerge - for instance, the Showalter followers who decided to just look for any female who ever penned a verse. What that did really was just to broaden the Canon for a couple of decades, with, other perspectives such as post-colonialism coming in, bringing more topics to discuss. Did that really kill reading greatness though? Well, I had an Edmund Spenser specialist explain that the amount of writing on him was never more numerous than in the past 50 years, but what it did was just to focus people's attention to other aspects of his work - mainly his colonialism, rather than the structuralist readings that dominated before.

Likewise, Shakespeare was never abandoned - nor was Conrad - reading greatness was never killed, though in certain institutions there was a shift more to look at contemporary works - that was the big strike to the canon, namely, American authors becoming a much bigger part of the American curriculum.

In that vein, the number of scholars working on Milton in American institutions are far lower than those working on 20th century American fiction. There was a post a few years ago detailing the simple fact that the more "dated" your specialty in English is, the less people there are competing for faculty positions - and I think that is the main root of the question. Why are we so preoccupied with fiction, and, by extension, 20th century fiction?

For people coming out of that mold, and students entering that mold, it is hard to ignore modern critical opinions, as they are so much of the context of the 20th century world. The older texts really haven't changed much, but the newer ones have gained undeserved exposure because of academic fixation - that is not true of all institutions, but it is particularly true of American ones, though still not all. The focus on American reading makes American modes of reading, and American issues in the forefront, whereas the focus on classical reading moves classical issues to the forefront.

But who is going to sit there and read books on Neoplatonic notions of love in Edmund Spenser's Four Hymns, or read the religious debates, still in archaic spelling, of Tyndale and More, which go on for pages, yet were the big issues of the time. And to what extent does that leak into the popular culture - the culture of the contemporary, from my reading, especially of the States, is one where an individual must contemplate the role of their country, and their society, and the issues of homophobia, racism, and sexism. Canada is different, as we have come above that to an extent, but still Canadian literature would focus on our issues, as that is what is of concern at the moment to the youth, who, seeking something from text, will turn to something that speaks to them.

Spenser is hardly accessible, he is difficult reading. In that sense, you go to the institution to learn about him, rather than read him at home at the age of 15, missing everything. Huck Finn is accessible, so it is criticized, since its context is not defined, and the relationship between it and its readers not one of distance but one of closeness - it speaks of current issues that should not be current issues, and is, as such, hard to contextualize - racism exists in the forms within the book, whereas colonialism in Spenser, or misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew are now so distant as to be read from a distance.

You call it railing at greatness, I call it yelling into the mirror. When one sees ones own flaws in a text it is easy to yell at the text - how can one affirm the greatness of Moby Dick without seeing in it the self-loathed repugnance that is a culture that contains the same tropes.

Beyond that, the rest of the world does not do that, as the rest of the world's literature is not the same, nor the world they live in. The States has issues, and expresses them through their academy - Canadian literature study is more keeping with a sort of post-post-modernism, that gets beyond the issues, which is where the American academy is heading, and many already have headed - the text of The Western Canon, or even of The Closing of the American Mind are so dated already that it is ridiculous.

Simply put, the essay to me seems to ride a bandwagon of 20-odd year old criticism that has gone as out of fashion as what it is criticizing. Even Harold Bloom seems to have shut up about it, and those who are still writing it are either aged, or, if young, archaic.

The canon did not die either, as it cannot die, nor has reading died, nor has the aesthetic died - merely, the shift in culture that was the post Cold-War generation has occurred - and now the post-post-Cold-War generation is finding its relationship to a) history, and b) literature.

The irony is, those critics who focused so much on yelling have shifted away too - nobody is writing the polemics they did before in the same way - it is now too an historical narrative, to an extent, which is emerging in a new aesthetic.

I read a couple of years ago in Canadian Literature of how Al Purdy is now published, along with other Canadian poets, in selected volumes that feature their best, and show a tradition - the point was his racism in his works was removed, and less focused, to bring a new audience to read Purdy as the elegiac poet of a shifting Canadian identity - he has moved, with the Canadian identity, through the transition, and as such the critic argued, so has the tradition, that looks at him as an historical pivot, rather than as themselves, and therefore goes over the racist undertone as historical, rather than personal.

By extension, similar things occur in Eliot, where to me mention of not liking him because of Antisemitism is as laughable as mentioning not liking Dickens because of antisemitism (I know people who went to private Judaic high schools who were taught him in class, without his antisemitism being an issue) - likewise, we have moved beyond even Marlowe's antisemitism, and Said himself stated his great love for the French writers who he criticized in his Orientalism, with an extended point that his book was aimed at addressing how the same tropes he found within them are still apparent, and not at killing the authors, nor at writing a "positive" view of the "orient" (a place he argues does not exist). The trend is to break things down until they become part of an historical narrative, not to bury them in the ground - Said's Flaubert is a great author, Said's Naipaul is a Racist "witness for the prosecution". The distance and history between the two figures is worth pointing out, where one is within a context that has been breaking for a while, whereas one is within a modern context who tries to reaffirm racism.

To sum it up, Huck Finn is read as racist, and therefore bashed as such, because the world it is read in is still so heavily dominated by its tropes - the critics and the political correct police will break away at that, and will be broken, and are being broken, and out of that emerges a literary historical context and identity, and a new cultural identity, rather than a new canon, as that was never the goal.

Hence why I pushed this far more on the American academic establishment, since they have a more repressed cultural identity that does not wish to really move forward, only bury things within the culture and ignore them. (and what better way than yelling at everything that could look offensive, rather than addressing how these things are still ingrained in the culture).
JBI, have you taken any literature courses in the US? Just curious.

[Drkshadow03]

Yes, that's at the core of the issue, though I'm not sure why you say both sides are at fault. I think the people who refuse to succumb to political correctness are only asking that a writer be taken in his totality. Certainly a writer of the pre PC world could very well be anti Semitic or racist, and if so it should be pointed out, though his art might rise above it. However one should see the total man, his humanity in the context of what I'll call the natural law of human decency, not just on whether he used a stereotype here or an off color word there.

But who actually does that? I've certainly pointed out that Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock is anti-Semitic, etc. that doesn't mean I dislike Shakespeare's works or even dislike The Merchant of Venice.

[JBI]

But who actually does that? I've certainly pointed out that Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock is anti-Semitic, etc. that doesn't mean I dislike Shakespeare's works or even dislike The Merchant of Venice.

There are a few critics who urge to burn books, but the vast majority just want to boost their careers by attacking books that ultimately will not be forgotten, and whose esteem will never change, despite a new section in an introduction dedicated to highlighting said "find".

The real ones who need to watch out are new authors, as non PC things in new works have two results - the book gets burned, or the book gets publicity. After all, people still bought copies and copies of Andrew Dice Clay standup back in the day, and his whole gimmick was to be as foul and bigoted as possible in our modernity. His career was basically bigotry.

Then again, someone like Philip Roth I believe is depressed to not see himself with a Nobel Prize because of his misogyny, so that is the flip side of the coin - his more masturbatory novels don't sell well at all, after all. Still, later authors are afraid to touch his material, and are afraid to write about anything related to sex or race because of the inherent fear of bringing on the negative backlash.


As for me taking any courses in the US, not yet, but I have read American scholarship, both theoretical and critical for several years now, as well as other traditions of scholarship. Likewise I have completed work with American academics on fields related to American literature.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Okay. I was wondering if you had anything to base that last absurd post on. I don't know why, it's just typical JBI anti-American shlock.

[Virgil]

But who actually does that? I've certainly pointed out that Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock is anti-Semitic, etc. that doesn't mean I dislike Shakespeare's works or even dislike The Merchant of Venice.
The new class of critics (New Historians, deconstructionists, and the like) has reassessed many of the great writers and lowered their worth based on PC. In some cases more successful than others. Shakespeare is untouchable, but he has a mixed record since he's perceived by some to have been homosexual (he wasn't). Milton is no longer as high as he used to be. Twain, Conrad, Hemingway, TS Eliot, and DH Lawrence have their problems with the PC crowd. At one time Lawrence was held to be the comparable to Joyce, but the feminist critics have destroyed him. They hate his guts. Perhaps rightly since Lawrence was consciously anti-feminist, but his great works are a high literary achievement.

Let me add that thank heavens those critics, though they dominate the post grad academe, are not the only critics around.



Okay. I was wondering if you had anything to base that last absurd post on. I don't know why, it's just typical JBI anti-American shlock.
I agree, that's JBI and his typical spouting without experience. :wink5:

[JBI]

Okay. I was wondering if you had anything to base that last absurd post on. I don't know why, it's just typical JBI anti-American shlock.

Back up your comment with relevant information or prepare to be burned. I have no patience right now for your name calling, as my statement is quite justified and is in no way hampered by nationality or academic background. If you wish to criticize its points, do so constructively, or prepare for more typical JBI shlock.

You have no basis in either criticism or theory to dispute me, only my nationality, and I am going to call that politically incorrect bigotry.

The American academy has trends, as perceivable within their scholarship, which I read, and in their academic establishment's order, which I am aware of and informed of, and read about. If somehow you automatically disqualify my judgement because of my nationality, and neither on my content nor my evidence, then all I can say to you is you are a ridiculous moron with too much free time and too little creativity. At least when St. Lukes does it he is a little bit interesting and includes a few interesting pictures. Yet I somehow suspect he could provide more than one aspect of evidence in support of the ridiculousness of race and culture in art politics in the United States (as he is oft to mention his colleague who refuses to be in All-Black exhibits that she feels delimit her based on her racial identity). Such comments from him are just as justified as ones from me, as they are informed by knowledge, rather than an assumption. There are times I am anti-American, but this post was hardly even close - something like the presence of an "African-American" literature in itself suggests to some extent I am right - that the culture needs an "African American Studies" as an integral part of understanding itself gestures to the repression and suppression within American identity.


It amazes me how educated people can dismiss points based on the fact that somebody else has a different academic background than they do, or even a different nationality. My comment was comparative, and what better grounds to make comparison than from a perspective that has something with which to compare? Get off your high jingoist horse and read something - if that something shows me to be wrong, or if you own opinions do, then say so, but until then, keep your heinous idiocy to yourself as it has no place on a board that explicitly bans arguments based on personal attacks, regardless of how ridiculous their superficiality.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Okay, maybe I was overly harsh, but I can assure you that my statement was not made because of your nationality, but because of your posting history. You admit it yourself; you've been anti-American in the past. I'm sorry, but any of your criticisms on America are hard to take seriously. Plus, that final comment hardly seemed relevant to the rest of your thoughtful and intelligent post. You just had to get in your little shot against America.

The biggest problem I have with your comments, such as the above one, is that you always generalize the whole of the US by claiming that a conservative ideology is representative in all of the US, when it's just not the case. Not everyone wants to "repress" out cultural scope--I would argue that most academics believe quite the opposite, all of the professors I've had included.

But, what's the point, JBI? You're not going to change your mind. Hy should I even bother? I've already wasted enough of my time on a futile purpose.

[KCurtis]

Dear Diary, today I witnessed my first stoning. Awesome! I totally respect other peoples cultures, in spite of the way that they differ from my own.
:lol: Good one! Cultural Relativism at it's worst!!! No I don't, nor will EVER respect Islamic cultures who practice evil towards women.


Meh, I would just say put the whole thing in brackets and put a big "AMERICA" beside everything - these trends are very deeply American, and, to me, stem less from a sense of political correctness than from a sense of repressed shame and repressed history (Martin Luther King is celebrated, bringing the racist history as a form of celebration of its overcoming, rather than a disgust at its existence). That simple classical American example of reworking events and its own narrative forces every artist and critic to watch out - they know that the repressed demon is lurking around the corner waiting to strike, and as soon as it does, out goes their career.

As for Irony, that also is dependant on culture - Canadian irony is still written and read, for instance, but irony takes the ability to laugh at yourself a little bit, something which Americans are reluctant to do, as they repress things and seem to prefer to silence things rather than face them.


JBI, you sure are fond of generalizing, aren't you? Now you are an expert on the United States. You never witnessed the America of the 1960's and before. How could you ever know the damage caused by slavery and racism-for both white and black populations. I doubt you have ever had a conversation with black populations in our country. (Note I have not used the term African American, that is a term imposed mostly by the PC media).
So when you say Americans prefer to silence things rather than face them, think again. We know of and are proud of the improvements and achievements made in the U.S.
Stick to being a China expert instead, or maybe not, since you are also unaware of communism.

[Alexander III]

:lol: Good one! Cultural Relativism at it's worst!!! No I don't, nor will EVER respect Islamic cultures who practice evil towards women.

What about christian cultures who practise vatican sponsored evil against women?

And yes it is hard to take anything JBI say about America seriously. But then again Mutatis, it is hard to take anything you say about america too seriously as well considering you have never lived anywhere besides Illinois.

I mean as an Italian living in england, the majority of english people think that because they are european, they know how Italy is. The only ones who aknowlege that they know very little about Italy are the ones who have lived in various countries.

So truley how much can a person who has lived in only Illinois know about California or Texas.

Everyone critizises JBI for his (clearly visible) bias, but you and possibly mortal(I don't know where he has lived and the extent of his travells) are just as limited in view when talking about America as JBI.

Just saying...


Shakespeare is untouchable, but he has a mixed record since he's perceived by some to have been homosexual (he wasn't).


Slow down cowboy. I agree it is sophistry to claim that William was gay or bi, but it is even more sophistry to claim he was not. There is evidence which suggests he was gay, and it would not be suprising considering that historicaly gay men are more prone towards artistic pursuits than not - as while only 8% of the male population is gay/bi when we look at the canon of art or music or literature the figure is much higher than 8% - nonetheless the only answer which does not sound stupid to my ears is that we don't know about his sexuality, even though from historic evidence it is more likely that he was bi or gay rather than simply straight.

Out of curiosity what impelled you to state that he was not gay? Was it just good old fashioned christian bigotry or was there some actual evidence you seem to have discovered and kept hidden from the scholarly world?

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

What about christian cultures who practise vatican sponsored evil against women?

And yes it is hard to take anything JBI say about America seriously. But then again Mutatis, it is hard to take anything you say about america too seriously as well considering you have never lived anywhere besides Illinois.

I mean as an Italian living in england, the majority of english people think that because they are european, they know how Italy is. The only ones who aknowlege that they know very little about Italy are the ones who have lived in various countries.

So truley how much can a person who has lived in only Illinois know about California or Texas.

Everyone critizises JBI for his (clearly visible) bias, but you and possibly mortal(I don't know where he has lived and the extent of his travells) are just as limited in view when talking about America as JBI.

Just saying
Are you serious? How am I as limited as JBI? JBI doesn't live in the US, I DO. are you seriously implying that every American must live in every state to understand America? I've been to Texas and California, an guess what? The people there are pretty much the same. There are a few liberals, a few conservatives, and a bunch of moderates just trying to make a decent life for themselves.

I also guess this means JBI can hardly comment on the whole of Canada, since it's a much larger country than the US with, possibly, an even larger cultural divide with their French speaking community.

I'm not sure why you think opinions across America vary so widely, but they don't. They do a little, but we are still one nation, and someone from Claifornia is not some sort of foreigner to someone from Texas.

Seriously, Alex, that's one of the most ridiculous posts I've read in a long time.

[JCamilo]

I think geography is hardly a very effective weapon to use in a duel, it does not kill nor protect. Unless of course, you want a Boris Grushenko kind of duel.

[KCurtis]

Are you serious? How am I as limited as JBI? JBI doesn't live in the US, I DO. are you seriously implying that every American must live in every state to understand America? I've been to Texas and California, an guess what? The people there are pretty much the same. There are a few liberals, a few conservatives, and a bunch of moderates just trying to make a decent life for themselves.

I also guess this means JBI can hardly comment on the whole of Canada, since it's a much larger country than the US with, possibly, an even larger cultural divide with their French speaking community.

I'm not sure why you think opinions across America vary so widely, but they don't. They do a little, but we are still one nation, and someone from Claifornia is not some sort of foreigner to someone from Texas.

Seriously, Alex, that's one of the most ridiculous posts I've read in a long time.
I definately agree. The United States are UNITED, the same country.:grouphug: It seems a lesson in the U.S. is necessary. In no way is the U.S.A. like the different European countries, which are SEPARATE COUNTRIES. :driving::seeya:


What about christian cultures who practise vatican sponsored evil against women?

Just saying...

Um- There is no comparison. And let's not be so PC. Many Islamic practices consider stoning women, forcing them to wear ridiculous coverings over their entire bodies, and killing them for minor offenses or imagined offenses. HOW DOES THIS compare to christian cultures? Oh, cultural relativism! Let's all practice that! Nope, not for me.

[Alexander III]

Are you serious? How am I as limited as JBI? JBI doesn't live in the US, I DO. are you seriously implying that every American must live in every state to understand America? I've been to Texas and California, an guess what? The people there are pretty much the same. There are a few liberals, a few conservatives, and a bunch of moderates just trying to make a decent life for themselves.

I also guess this means JBI can hardly comment on the whole of Canada, since it's a much larger country than the US with, possibly, an even larger cultural divide with their French speaking community.

I'm not sure why you think opinions across America vary so widely, but they don't. They do a little, but we are still one nation, and someone from Claifornia is not some sort of foreigner to someone from Texas.

Seriously, Alex, that's one of the most ridiculous posts I've read in a long time.


It is not about size, it is about diversity. The level of diversity in America cannot be compared to the level of diversity found in a single country, it is far more akin to the diversity found on a continent.

What the heck do you know about a mexican imigrants experiance in califronia, yet they make up a considerable amount of population. How about a southern balck and white man, or a urban think new york, black or white man. What is American culture? Before it could be said to be WASP culture becuase they were the dominant majority, but know it clearly is not.

In Italy there is a higly unified culture, in America this is not the case, there are far more realities and differneces. In Italy 90% of the population is white and catolic. The level of diversity in America is far more accentuated.

The fact that you found my post ridicoulous if anything proves my point. Ofcourse you would find it ridicoulous. Afterall I was critisizing you for thinking that America was much more culturaly homozygose that it is. So me pointing out it vasr heterodiversity is at huge odds with your view.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm not arguing with you over this, Alex. I know my country, and I know it better than you. I'm not having a huge circular argument that will lead nowhere.

[Alexander III]

I'm not arguing with you over this, Alex. I know my country, and I know it better than you. I'm not having a huge circular argument that will lead nowhere.

Fair enough, no point yelling at a wall on both our ends.

[JBI]

JBI, you sure are fond of generalizing, aren't you? Now you are an expert on the United States. You never witnessed the America of the 1960's and before. How could you ever know the damage caused by slavery and racism-for both white and black populations. I doubt you have ever had a conversation with black populations in our country. (Note I have not used the term African American, that is a term imposed mostly by the PC media).
So when you say Americans prefer to silence things rather than face them, think again. We know of and are proud of the improvements and achievements made in the U.S.
Stick to being a China expert instead, or maybe not, since you are also unaware of communism.

Of course I am generalizing, but this is hardly a major argument that has not surfaced in American discourse either. Just read Philip Roth's novel the Human Stain which discusses the same issues. He is American, and was there in the 60s.

It is ridiculous how a country that infiltrates our media, puts students and professors in our universities (Canada's), and then produces intelligent people who nonetheless come onto message boards and spout such idiocy.

When you make any statement about culture, you are necessarily generalizing. That however does not change the trend. I am privy to American news, American television, American cinema and American literary forms, as well as American music, and American people - hate to break it to you, I live near a border in an international city with plenty of Americans, and definitely its fair share of American exposure.

But what you tell me is this: you can come here and bash us, you can do trade with us, and link our economies completely, to the point where it is clear we are each other's most significant trade partners, you can push all your media on us, but when one little well read punk on the internet decides to express his informed opinion, you need to have a cry like a spoiled child. Now you tell me, big boy, who is trying to repress what? Who is trying to silence instead of address? Are you not just illustrating my point you?


:lol: Good one! Cultural Relativism at it's worst!!! No I don't, nor will EVER respect Islamic cultures who practice evil towards women.

Are you Muslim? Then how can you comment. Or better, I will assume you are female then?

Seriously, you are so thick. Besides, hate to break it to you, all cultures practice violence toward women. I am yet to see one that doesn't. Keep your bigotry unvoiced. Start by trying to fix your lot up, then worry about others'.

[Alexander III]

Are you Muslim? Then how can you comment. Or better, I will assume you are female then?

Seriously, you are so thick. Besides, hate to break it to you, all cultures practice violence toward women. I am yet to see one that doesn't. Keep your bigotry unvoiced. Start by trying to fix your lot up, then worry about others'.

Ohh come on, I ridicouled the bigoted view first, I put up my flag first, you can't just come and put your flag up as well, I did it first, that entitles me to exlusivity for at least the thread.

There are unspoken rules man, dont make me speak them ! :sad:

[JBI]

What about christian cultures who practise vatican sponsored evil against women?

And yes it is hard to take anything JBI say about America seriously. But then again Mutatis, it is hard to take anything you say about america too seriously as well considering you have never lived anywhere besides Illinois.

I mean as an Italian living in england, the majority of english people think that because they are european, they know how Italy is. The only ones who aknowlege that they know very little about Italy are the ones who have lived in various countries.

So truley how much can a person who has lived in only Illinois know about California or Texas.

Everyone critizises JBI for his (clearly visible) bias, but you and possibly mortal(I don't know where he has lived and the extent of his travells) are just as limited in view when talking about America as JBI.

Just saying...

No, Mortal may not agree with me, but he at least understands my opinion somewhat, and sees it as legitimate, as he has mentioned in the past. He knows he holds an opinion on French poetry, and he knows I will not disregard it because he is not French. Nor will I disregard his opinion on Roman poets because he's not Roman, as he is just as qualified to make the decision through his reading and analyzing of materials.

As for my bias, not particularly strong relatively speaking. I actually am a major fan of much American artwork, which is where I base my opinions from - I read the novels, poetry, plays, etc. and generate my responses - and I mix in critical and theoretical work by Americans to flesh it out too. The same way anybody studying anything, or reading about anything does so.

It is just ridiculous how people can comment that other people are not allowed to discuss their culture, meanwhile working to discuss others. It is especially ridiculous when you hear it knowing that Americans put their programming on all of your TVs, and their movies in all of your cinemas, and their books on all of your shelves - and yet by the rude responses, expect you not to make judgments which were not even evaluative keep in mind, about their work which they have, some would argue, forced on you anyway.

The ridiculous thing is, if anybody had taken the time to read my posts, which I made a while ago, they are not even about the United States particularly. My comment was, this observation, that the original poster had written into a paper, and quoted was not as prevalent outside of the United States, and I gave my reason why. Who better to know where something is not as prevalent than someone who isn't there? She spotted the phenomenon, I just commented on how it isn't universal.

As for whether I am right or wrong, well, that is to be decided by the comments themselves. So far the best I hear is, "You have been anti-American in your past, therefore you are automatically wrong." Well, read the damn posts, if anything I have been supportive of American texts, and have been discussing international concerns - I put a followup comment on one post, which seems to not even be particularly heinous, and then I get derided for something which misses the entire point, meanwhile reaffirming it.

This whole argument has merely just reaffirmed my comments as holding true. I am commenting on such things as reading Huck Finn only for its racist undertones, when I comment that it should be read as the story that it is. Then some punks come along, and read my comments only for that I am Canadian, and try to silence me accordingly. Now you tell me, is that not the same weird twisted logic of suppressing things that don't sound good regardless of their content?


Ohh come on, I ridicouled the bigoted view first, I put up my flag first, you can't just come and put your flag up as well, I did it first, that entitles me to exlusivity for at least the thread.

There are unspoken rules man, dont make me speak them ! :sad:

Don't worry, you can have his next tirade.

[Alexander III]

Um- There is no comparison. And let's not be so PC. Many Islamic practices consider stoning women, forcing them to wear ridiculous coverings over their entire bodies, and killing them for minor offenses or imagined offenses. HOW DOES THIS compare to christian cultures? Oh, cultural relativism! Let's all practice that! Nope, not for me.

I am not even going to answer this, as I am baffled as to were to begin.

So I shall be faetitious. As to look at your response in anything but a comic manner would cause many a man to despair.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/kyle_gerkin/objections_sustained/obj7.html


http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2011/1/15/748dde1b-2acc-4820-ab59-2c539ad74c53.jpg

[JBI]

Um- There is no comparison. And let's not be so PC. Many Islamic practices consider stoning women, forcing them to wear ridiculous coverings over their entire bodies, and killing them for minor offenses or imagined offenses. HOW DOES THIS compare to christian cultures? Oh, cultural relativism! Let's all practice that! Nope, not for me.

Yes, in "Christian Cultures" women do not get physically assaulted, beaten, or murdered, right? This is an "Islamic" thing. Now, this "Islamic" thing can perhaps be compared, right? So, somewhere like the Democratic Republic of Congo, a predominantly Christian nation, as you have stated (96% of the population according to Wikipedia with the most common denomination being Catholic) would be exempt. That isn't what the UN resolutions are saying anyway. Or do they not count?

Seriously, look at the trash in your backyard first.

[Alexander III]

Yes, in "Christian Cultures" women do not get physically assaulted, beaten, or murdered, right? This is an "Islamic" thing. Now, this "Islamic" thing can perhaps be compared, right? So, somewhere like the Democratic Republic of Congo, a predominantly Christian nation, as you have stated (96% of the population according to Wikipedia with the most common denomination being Catholic) would be exempt. That isn't what the UN resolutions are saying anyway. Or do they not count?

Seriously, look at the trash in your backyard first.

No no that is all wrong, Congo is full of black people, they are not real christians, they are the sons of Cain afterall and some of our very wise popes of yesteryear told us to keep them as slaves as the son's of Cain can never be true christians.

[KCurtis]

Yes, in "Christian Cultures" women do not get physically assaulted, beaten, or murdered, right? This is an "Islamic" thing. Now, this "Islamic" thing can perhaps be compared, right? So, somewhere like the Democratic Republic of Congo, a predominantly Christian nation, as you have stated (96% of the population according to Wikipedia with the most common denomination being Catholic) would be exempt. That isn't what the UN resolutions are saying anyway. Or do they not count?

Seriously, look at the trash in your backyard first.

What are you talking about?? I never stated anything about the Democratic Republic of Congo. My backyard?? What are you talking about? I'm not a Christian!!! Never said I was.


Are you Muslim? Then how can you comment. Or better, I will assume you are female then?

Seriously, you are so thick. Besides, hate to break it to you, all cultures practice violence toward women. I am yet to see one that doesn't. Keep your bigotry unvoiced. Start by trying to fix your lot up, then worry about others'.

You are, in my opinion, not very smart. This statement is so dumb. I am an an athiest. Ofcourse I can comment. I have free will to comment. I will not keep my so called "bigotry" against Islamic extremism unvoiced. I also will not keep any criticism of Christianity unvoiced, but the subject I responded to was on Islamic extremism, you can go back and read what I commented on, or then, don't-it's up to you. I don't believe you are breaking anything to me, all cultures do and have practiced violence. However, that was not what I was responding to. I assumed it was general knowledge that all cultures do this. I was commenting on one. And, I will not stop, because I really don't care what anyone thinks. That is the beauty of getting older, if there is any beauty in it at all.


I am not even going to answer this, as I am baffled as to were to begin.

So I shall be faetitious. As to look at your response in anything but a comic manner would cause many a man to despair.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/kyle_gerkin/objections_sustained/obj7.html


http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2011/1/15/748dde1b-2acc-4820-ab59-2c539ad74c53.jpg
Okay, don't answer it then. I'm glad you find me funny, thank you. Try spelling correctly. As for the stupid pic of Puff Daddy, I really can't stand him. Oh, does that make me a racist?


It is not about size, it is about diversity. The level of diversity in America cannot be compared to the level of diversity found in a single country, it is far more akin to the diversity found on a continent.

What the heck do you know about a mexican imigrants experiance in califronia, yet they make up a considerable amount of population. How about a southern balck and white man, or a urban think new york, black or white man. What is American culture? Before it could be said to be WASP culture becuase they were the dominant majority, but know it clearly is not.

In Italy there is a higly unified culture, in America this is not the case, there are far more realities and differneces. In Italy 90% of the population is white and catolic. The level of diversity in America is far more accentuated.

The fact that you found my post ridicoulous if anything proves my point. Ofcourse you would find it ridicoulous. Afterall I was critisizing you for thinking that America was much more culturaly homozygose that it is. So me pointing out it vasr heterodiversity is at huge odds with your view.
I can't really understand your spelling very well, too many mistakes.

[Mr.lucifer]

Whenever I see an american bashing Canada, I think they're just angry that they're not Canadian.

[KCurtis]

I'm not arguing with you over this, Alex. I know my country, and I know it better than you. I'm not having a huge circular argument that will lead nowhere.
I'm with you. Nor will I, not anymore. I think......


Whenever I see an american bashing Canada, I think they're just angry that they're not Canadian.
I'm Canadian too. I lived there until I was three-beautiful place.




But what you tell me is this: you can come here and bash us, you can do trade with us, and link our economies completely, to the point where it is clear we are each other's most significant trade partners, you can push all your media on us, but when one little well read punk on the internet decides to express his informed opinion, you need to have a cry like a spoiled child. Now you tell me, big boy, who is trying to repress what? Who is trying to silence instead of address? Are you not just illustrating my point you?

There you go, generalizing again and making yourself look small. I'm not telling you any of the above. And, I am not a "big boy", I'm a 54 year old Canadian-American. And you don't speak for Canadians.

[JBI]

You are, in my opinion, not very smart. This statement is so dumb. I am an an athiest. Ofcourse I can comment. I have free will to comment. I will not keep my so called "bigotry" against Islamic extremism unvoiced. I also will not keep any criticism of Christianity unvoiced, but the subject I responded to was on Islamic extremism, you can go back and read what I commented on, or then, don't-it's up to you. I don't believe you are breaking anything to me, all cultures do and have practiced violence. However, that was not what I was responding to. I assumed it was general knowledge that all cultures do this. I was commenting on one. And, I will not stop, because I really don't care what anyone thinks. That is the beauty of getting older, if there is any beauty in it at all.

Then on what grounds dare you comment on my position you hypocrite.


There you go, generalizing again and making yourself look small. I'm not telling you any of the above. And, I am not a "big boy", I'm a 54 year old Canadian-American. And you don't speak for Canadians.

Did I claim to? I speak for myself, who is Canadian.

[KCurtis]

Then on what grounds dare you comment on my position you hypocrite.

Why shouldn't I comment on your anti-American slant? As for being called a hypocrite-what you call me doesn't bother me, I know I am not what you think I am, so it doesn't matter.
See you in Toronto,
a beautiful place.

[JBI]

Why shouldn't I comment on your anti-American slant? As for being called a hypocrite-what you call me doesn't bother me, I know I am not what you think I am, so it doesn't matter.
See you in Toronto,
a beautiful place.

Are you anti-islamic then? or Anti-Christian? Or just a bigot? Are you not making generalizing sweeping statements? As I said before, do not comment if you are not willing to comment on yourself. I do not hide my dislike of certain aspects of American culture, identity, policy and politics. Everyone knows this. That does not make my comments necessarily Anti-American (of which those in particular were not), nor does it disqualify my opinions from being relevant.

Have fun rocket man, I will not respond to you again.

[JCamilo]

Railing at greatness became Railing at JBI :D

[JBI]

Railing at greatness became Railing at JBI :D

It's difficult to discern whether it is mere trollishness, or whether they are actually serious in their endeavor. But it seems too commonplace here to just attack me as Anti-American without reading anything that I write. It is far more ridiculous when the comments that I make are not particularly anti-American, nor particularly polemic, or controversial.

As for my own greatness, well, I am able to reduced 54 year old grown men to pathetic name calling and idiocy, so I guess I have some charm.

[KCurtis]

Railing at greatness became Railing at JBI :D:smilielol5::rant::leaving:

[JuniperWoolf]

Are you Muslim? Then how can you comment. Or better, I will assume you are female then?

*whispers* This assumption was actually correct, she's a "grown woman," not a "grown man."

[JBI]

That only illustrates how superficial and stupid such restrictions are, man or woman, he or she is still as entitled to his/her opinions of others as I am, which was my point all along.

[Alexander III]

As for my own greatness, well, I am able to reduced 54 year old grown men to pathetic name calling and idiocy, so I guess I have some charm.


Once again I think I put my flag there first :patriot:

[JBI]

Once again I think I put my flag there first :patriot:

I concede.

[JCamilo]

It's difficult to discern whether it is mere trollishness, or whether they are actually serious in their endeavor. But it seems too commonplace here to just attack me as Anti-American without reading anything that I write. It is far more ridiculous when the comments that I make are not particularly anti-American, nor particularly polemic, or controversial.

As for my own greatness, well, I am able to reduced 54 year old grown men to pathetic name calling and idiocy, so I guess I have some charm.

Dont worry, it is you and Chomsky. Even if he got a bit gaga, still a good company :D

[AuntShecky]

Oh my gosh, irony in action!

A heartfelt plea to my fellow Litnutters:

This thread, originally posted a year ago, was meant to spark a lively debate about the kind of criticism which veers away from assessing and appreciating literary works for their artistry and excellence.

Please, please do not circumvent the original intention of this thread by engaging in personal banter and political discussions.

Thank you.

Auntie
(original poster)

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Was calling me a punk necessary? :lol: Probably an apt description, in any case.

I'm not going to fan the flames of this argument. I apologize for even starting it. Ironically, I agree with JBI's statements about Huck Finn. I'm tempted to do a purely narrative and aesthetic reading if I ever revisit it.

[KCurtis]

*whispers* This assumption was actually correct, she's a "grown woman," not a "grown man."

:iagree:

[Buh4Bee]

Auntie, Nice job using your teacher skills to remind the children to stop throwing sand or they will have to leave the sandbox.

[KCurtis]

Oh my gosh, irony in action!

A heartfelt plea to my fellow Litnutters:

This thread, originally posted a year ago, was meant to spark a lively debate about the kind of criticism which veers away from assessing and appreciating literary works for their artistry and excellence.

Please, please do not circumvent the original intention of this thread by engaging in personal banter and political discussions.

Thank you.

Auntie
(original poster)

Oh my goodness! You are right, now I feel like an old biddy.:auto: whatever that is. I never meant to dis-respect your thread.

[Scheherazade]

Oh my gosh, irony in action!

A heartfelt plea to my fellow Litnutters:

This thread, originally posted a year ago, was meant to spark a lively debate about the kind of criticism which veers away from assessing and appreciating literary works for their artistry and excellence.

Please, please do not circumvent the original intention of this thread by engaging in personal banter and political discussions.

Thank you.

Auntie
(original poster)On that note...


W a r n i n g

Please discuss the topic at hand; not each other.

Further off-topic comments will be removed without further notice

and

those who insist on making such posts will receive infraction points.

[stlukesguild]

I'm not sure why you think opinions across America vary so widely, but they don't. They do a little, but we are still one nation, and someone from Claifornia is not some sort of foreigner to someone from Texas.

I'll give you California... but truly Texas is some other nation... if not planet... altogether.:lol:

[stlukesguild]

It is not about size, it is about diversity. The level of diversity in America cannot be compared to the level of diversity found in a single country, it is far more akin to the diversity found on a continent.

Ummm... Alex... The United States IS a single country. Certainly there is a wide level of diversity... perhaps more than exists in many single European nations... as a result of the influx of immigrants from around the world. We have large populations of Asia, Black, Hispanic, etc... and these vary in scale and ratio from place to place. There are also differences resulting from climate and employment... but these certainly even exist in countries as relatively small as France. Major cultural/economic centers like Paris differ from major industrial towns, or mining towns... and these differ highly from the small farming towns or tourist towns on the Mediterranean. There is more difference here between the small town I grew up in and the urban city of Cleveland where I live than between Cleveland and Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Washington, or Atlanta (and yes... I have been to all of them... for greater of lesser spans of time).

[Virgil]

What about christian cultures who practise vatican sponsored evil against women?

Like what? Vatican sponsored what? That sounds like the most ignorant statement I've seen in a long time. What are you talking about that Christians do to women? Perhaps i should go check your age to see how young you are, but I might be shocked that you're actually an adult.


Slow down cowboy. I agree it is sophistry to claim that William was gay or bi, but it is even more sophistry to claim he was not. There is evidence which suggests he was gay, and it would not be suprising considering that historicaly gay men are more prone towards artistic pursuits than not - as while only 8% of the male population is gay/bi when we look at the canon of art or music or literature the figure is much higher than 8% - nonetheless the only answer which does not sound stupid to my ears is that we don't know about his sexuality, even though from historic evidence it is more likely that he was bi or gay rather than simply straight.

Out of curiosity what impelled you to state that he was not gay? Was it just good old fashioned christian bigotry or was there some actual evidence you seem to have discovered and kept hidden from the scholarly world?
More likely that he was gay? How do you come to that conclusion? He was married with children and in the over thousands of pages he wrote, there are about two lines from two sonnets that could possibly, possibly suggest he was gay.

Have you even read Shakespeare? I'm not even going to bother with you. You're not worth my time.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Virgil, the theory of Shakespeare being homosexual is hardly anything new or much a fringe belief, yet you treat it as such.

[OrphanPip]

I don't think Shakespeare is gay, but a gay reading of the sonnets is pretty much an enshrined cultural tradition, it was latched onto by gay readers in the late 19th century precisely because it was so obvious to them that there was something mildly homoerotic about the Fair Youth sonnets. However, the openness to homoerotic readings of the sonnets is not itself evidence of Shakespeare having same-sex attractions or that the sonnets are even intended to be homoerotic.

As to Christians endorsing violence against women, we could look at Hutterites or the Amish, who do require their women to stay in the home and cover everything but their face in public. Or to certain Mormon sects that endorse child marriages and unequal polygamous arrangements. There are also a number of Christian sects that believe that women should be subservient to men.

On the other side, there are a number of Islamic countries where women are not oppressed.

[KCurtis]

I am sorry if I played a part in causing any hard feelings on this thread.
I read through my posts, and I am not particularly proud of them. It doesn't matter if I think I was right or not. I was off topic, and played a part in hi-jacking a thread. I just don't feel good about those posts, and I do realize that posting on a public forum is quite different than voicing my opinions face to face with people, which is really the ideal way to argue with people.

[stlukesguild]

Pip: have you ever read Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun? He posits a number of interesting theories and fleshes them out into a fictive narrative:

Shakespeare's "shotgun wedding" to an older Anne
His homosexual affair with a young aristocrat
His wife's infidelities with Shakespeare's brothers
The death of the only child that was truly his: Hamnet
His affair with a black/mulatto actress (the "dark lady")

It is a fascinating novel based on possibilities.

[JCamilo]

The best still that he was Cervantes. You shall read it anyday.

[stlukesguild]

No... Musicology had that beat. He had Shakespeare, Goethe, probably Cervantes, Mozart, Haydn, young Beethoven, Handel, Elvis, and the attacks of 9-11 as all the product of a consortium of Jesuits, Free Masons, Knights of Malta, and New York advertising executives.

[JCamilo]

Everything is around St.Germain, Stlukes, that unknown guy that nobody heard about...

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

No... Musicology had that beat. He had Shakespeare, Goethe, probably Cervantes, Mozart, Haydn, young Beethoven, Handel, Elvis, and the attacks of 9-11 as all the product of a consortium of Jesuits, Free Masons, Knights of Malta, and New York advertising executives.

Oh, how I do miss our old friend Musicology.

[Emil Miller]

Pip: have you ever read Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun? He posits a number of interesting theories and fleshes them out into a fictive narrative:

Shakespeare's "shotgun wedding" to an older Anne
His homosexual affair with a young aristocrat
His wife's infidelities with Shakespeare's brothers
The death of the only child that was truly his: Hamnet
His affair with a black/mulatto actress (the "dark lady")

It is a fascinating novel based on possibilities.

But not probabilities.

[Darcy88]

Oh, how I do miss our old friend Musicology.

I have my own musicology for a brother and room-mate. Yesterday he told me that the illuminati held a near total monopoly over all scientific inquiry and that were it not for their influence we would have developed the atom bomb back in the 18th century.

I just face-palm it and wait patiently for him to cease speaking.

[Virgil]

Yes, I know that it's commonly thought that Shakespeare was gay, based on the 20 or so sonnets to his financial patron, a certain young Lord. And even in those 20 something sonnets there are only about two, possibly three that suggest an attraction, and in none is there any mention of physical desire. On the other hand there were over a hundred sonnets to a mysterious dark lady, where physical attraction is frequently mentioned. One can never prove a negative, so I can't prove he was gay if he wasn't, but given his marriage, his children, the frequent, even bawdy heterosexuality in the plays, the fact that the young man in question was his patron, and the language toward that patron is rather conventional idolatry of a young man in the Adonis type (a trope), and there is no other suggestion of homosexuality with any other man, there really isn't much to go on to suggest Shakespeare was homosexual.

If Shakespeare was gay, so be it. I have nothing against it. It doesn't change his work one bit. But this claim to homosexuality is part of the political dynamics of today's literary academe.

Oh here's Wikipedia's entry on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_William_Shakespeare

Oops, after reading that, apparently I was wrong on the number of sonnets. The hundred or so were addressed to the young man, the fewer to the dark lady. I thought it was the other way around. Still, I don't think there is much to really cite on his homosexuality.

[JBI]

Yes, I know that it's commonly thought that Shakespeare was gay, based on the 20 or so sonnets to his financial patron, a certain young Lord. And even in those 20 something sonnets there are only about two, possibly three that suggest an attraction, and in none is there any mention of physical desire. On the other hand there were over a hundred sonnets to a mysterious dark lady, where physical attraction is frequently mentioned. One can never prove a negative, so I can't prove he was gay if he wasn't, but given his marriage, his children, the frequent, even bawdy heterosexuality in the plays, the fact that the young man in question was his patron, and the language toward that patron is rather conventional idolatry of a young man in the Adonis type (a trope), and there is no other suggestion of homosexuality with any other man, there really isn't much to go on to suggest Shakespeare was homosexual.

If Shakespeare was gay, so be it. I have nothing against it. It doesn't change his work one bit. But this claim to homosexuality is part of the political dynamics of today's literary academe.

Oh here's Wikipedia's entry on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_William_Shakespeare

The notion of "gay" is problematic, as that is very much a 19th century reckoning of sexuality. It is also possible that there was a promiscuous male-male sexual scene within the theatre itself that Shakespeare engaged in. Likewise, it is quite possible, that like Philip Sidney, and various other poets at the time, neither the Young Boy nor the Dark Lady were actual persons, but rather just concoctions of Shakespeare's imagination - the same way Stella was in part based on a seemingly real person, but the actual relationship would, by history seem to not have been anything like that between Astrophil and Stella.

Either way, I do not think it matters. There are moments in Shakespeare where such issues of sexuality are perhaps alluded too - relations between certain characters seeming to have questionable intentions. Still, the actual Shakespeare, like the sexuality are quite mysterious. I know not gay nor straight, I, like every other reader, knows nothing. At least we know that Christopher Marlowe had pedophile tendencies toward young men, he was explicit - Shakespeare absolutely silent.

I think the issue is saying he was straight though. Why say that? Why the urge to call him straight or gay? How does that actually effect his plays? that is the real question - the actual debates on the identity of the author are so useless to the text itself that it is punishing to see every text of Shakespeare try to mention it.

[Virgil]

The notion of "gay" is problematic, as that is very much a 19th century reckoning of sexuality. It is also possible that there was a promiscuous male-male sexual scene within the theatre itself that Shakespeare engaged in. Likewise, it is quite possible, that like Philip Sidney, and various other poets at the time, neither the Young Boy nor the Dark Lady were actual persons, but rather just concoctions of Shakespeare's imagination - the same way Stella was in part based on a seemingly real person, but the actual relationship would, by history seem to not have been anything like that between Astrophil and Stella.

I'm not sure about the dark lady, but I think the youth has been identified as one of his patrons, the earl of south hampton.


Either way, I do not think it matters. There are moments in Shakespeare where such issues of sexuality are perhaps alluded too - relations between certain characters seeming to have questionable intentions.
The only time I have ever come across any homosexual suggestion in the plays are those plays were there is cross dressing to hide characters. That's a rather conventional dramatic technique. Shakespeare there is playing on appearance and reality, not that characters desire to change sex or secretly desire someone of the same sex. Reading those plays as homosexual suggestiveness makes no sense at all.


Still, the actual Shakespeare, like the sexuality are quite mysterious. I know not gay nor straight, I, like every other reader, knows nothing. At least we know that Christopher Marlowe had pedophile tendencies toward young men, he was explicit - Shakespeare absolutely silent.
He was quiet because he didn't have those tendencies. That's even more evidence toward contradicting he was gay. If you look through my writing, you won't find those tendencies either. :lol: You can't prove a negative.


I think the issue is saying he was straight though. Why say that? Why the urge to call him straight or gay? How does that actually effect his plays? that is the real question - the actual debates on the identity of the author are so useless to the text itself that it is punishing to see every text of Shakespeare try to mention it.
It's not that big deal. However, (1) historical accuracy would be nice. (2) Academic political dynamics is rather irritating and one hates to give in to it. (3) But more importantly, the context of an author's life colors the meaning of his work. If it were absolutely proven he was gay, we would probably read the plays differently. On the other hand, if it were proven that James Baldwin was really straight, then we would have to re-look at every thing he wrote.

There is currently growing evidence that Shakespeare was actually a Roman Catholic. The Wikipedia entry on this sells it a bit short. It's much stronger than the entry puts forth, though I agree not conclusive yet. Read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_religion

If it is proven that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic in an era of Catholic persecutions, there may have to be a lot of re-assessing of his work with that in mind. I have always felt Shakespeare had a Catholic outlook to his plays, but I mostly took that as the relative closeness in theology between the Anglicans and the Catholics, and that Shakespeare had more of a remnant religious outlook. That may still be true, but a number of books have come out recently supporting Shakespeare's possible Roman Catholicism. You know, I don't think any of his plays are actually set in a protestant setting, but many are set in Italy, France, and pre reformation England. It's rather curious. Anyway the point being, an author's life is important to understanding his work.

[kelby_lake]

Certainly a writer of the pre PC world could very well be anti Semitic or racist, and if so it should be pointed out, though his art might rise above it. However one should see the total man, his humanity in the context of what I'll call the natural law of human decency, not just on whether he used a stereotype here or an off color word there.

The distinction also has to be made between commonly-held beliefs of the time that we today see as racist and an unusually high amount of racism. We might be tempted to call older writers racist now as some of the archaic attitudes are no longer acceptable, but this is not accurate.

[kelby_lake]

Shakespeare is untouchable, but he has a mixed record since he's perceived by some to have been homosexual (he wasn't).


How do you know that he wasn't to any extent homosexual?

[Sancho]

I am sorry if I played a part in causing any hard feelings on this thread.
I read through my posts, and I am not particularly proud of them. It doesn't matter if I think I was right or not. I was off topic, and played a part in hi-jacking a thread. I just don't feel good about those posts, and I do realize that posting on a public forum is quite different than voicing my opinions face to face with people, which is really the ideal way to argue with people.

No apologies necessary, K. Getting off topic is the spice of life. I mean just look at this whole Shakespeare/gay thing going on now - that's completely off the reservation, but it's fun to read, eh?

Anyhoo, ah-hem, back on subject. I enjoyed the essay(s), Auntie. You clearly put a lot of thought and hard work into it (them). What do you think of James Wood's criticism? I'm sure you already know - he's a literary critic for The New Yorker, and he also has a book out - How Fiction Works - which is slightly mis-titled. A better title would be: How Certain Mechanisms in Fiction Work. But that's a bit cumbersome.

[Virgil]

How do you know that he wasn't to any extent homosexual?

Kelby, I roughly explained in posts 101 and 103 above. You can also read the Wikipedia entry on the subject here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare%27s_sexual_orientation

The whole question of his possible homosexuality rests on a few lines from a few sonnets to his patron, and if you really look carefully the suggestions are rather ambiguous. Given Shakespeare was a married man with children, given in the thousands of pages he wrote only these handful suggestions can be cited, given a rather bawdy heterosexuality in places, I really find the possibility rather remote. Is it possible? Sure, but unlikely. Look at the sonnets in question and read them and see what you think. I think Sonnet 20 is the one most cited. That's the only one that credibly supports the homosexual argument. But then think of this: the whole concept of praising his young patron is a sort of game, a trope, and once inside the trope, then the language stretches to beyond reality. The author begins to role play. That explains the handful of sonnets that suggest homo-eroticism.

[JBI]

I'm not sure about the dark lady, but I think the youth has been identified as one of his patrons, the earl of south hampton.


The only time I have ever come across any homosexual suggestion in the plays are those plays were there is cross dressing to hide characters. That's a rather conventional dramatic technique. Shakespeare there is playing on appearance and reality, not that characters desire to change sex or secretly desire someone of the same sex. Reading those plays as homosexual suggestiveness makes no sense at all.


He was quiet because he didn't have those tendencies. That's even more evidence toward contradicting he was gay. If you look through my writing, you won't find those tendencies either. :lol: You can't prove a negative.


It's not that big deal. However, (1) historical accuracy would be nice. (2) Academic political dynamics is rather irritating and one hates to give in to it. (3) But more importantly, the context of an author's life colors the meaning of his work. If it were absolutely proven he was gay, we would probably read the plays differently. On the other hand, if it were proven that James Baldwin was really straight, then we would have to re-look at every thing he wrote.

There is currently growing evidence that Shakespeare was actually a Roman Catholic. The Wikipedia entry on this sells it a bit short. It's much stronger than the entry puts forth, though I agree not conclusive yet. Read here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_religion

If it is proven that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic in an era of Catholic persecutions, there may have to be a lot of re-assessing of his work with that in mind. I have always felt Shakespeare had a Catholic outlook to his plays, but I mostly took that as the relative closeness in theology between the Anglicans and the Catholics, and that Shakespeare had more of a remnant religious outlook. That may still be true, but a number of books have come out recently supporting Shakespeare's possible Roman Catholicism. You know, I don't think any of his plays are actually set in a protestant setting, but many are set in Italy, France, and pre reformation England. It's rather curious. Anyway the point being, an author's life is important to understanding his work.

True to an extent, I will not debate points, but it misses the fundamental question of how necessary is the person Shakespeare to the body of work that is Shakespeare?

I do not see how questions about who Shakespeare may or may not have been, who he may or may not have been writing to, or about have anything to do with the enjoyment, or understanding of his work. As such, I think we are all probably better to ignore such questions, and just work on enjoying the work that is Shakespeare, as we are not in need of some long-winded theory by some academic to dictate how a perceived life of Shakespeare could possibly influence a large, varying and contradictory body of work.

The power of Shakespeare, most would agree, lies in his creation of unique personalities and worlds. That the same person can come up with Cleopatra as Juliet, Romeo as Lear is what makes the artist perceived as such a God amongst men. I don't need to know he may have been a catholic (that seems a bit of an odd reading, considering the first "uncatholic" person on the throne of any significance was Queen Elizabeth anyway), nor does it seem to effect any appreciation of the Bard.

[Scheherazade]

R e m i n d e r

Please remain faithful to the original aim of the thread.

There are many threads dealing Shakespeare's sexuality, where you can carry on with this discussion.

Off-topic posts will be removed without further notice.

[lawpark]

Wow! What a thread. It took me a week on-and-off to finish reading what everyone has said, but well worth it (well, maybe except for the JBI-bashing portion). Thanks Auntie for starting the well thought-out post.

On the question: do we need to understand the author to understand the work? Auntie, and also in quoting T.S. Eliot's own words, and JBI do not think so. Yet, Virgil, and if one were to interpret broadly, Vince Passaro seems to think that it matters (cf. the reference of him knowing Edward Said in person). I don't have a very well thought-through position here, but I am inclined to see that anything that might potentially add to one's understanding of the text should not be ruled out; the political stance, religious affiliation, and sexual orientiation -- all are potentially relevant. I guess Auntie was really reacting to, was that they can't be ALL that is relevant for the understanding of the text. Maybe it is just a matter of degree, that needs to be judged, on a case by case basis.

On the debate of "whether the great authors are 'like us'" - well, clearly most of 'us' cannot write the Commedia in Italian; but that may be beyond the point. If one is told that a piece of "serious writing" (meaning, a text that needs some efforts to plough through and understand) is generated by a computer algorithm (an example of "not like us"), would one be motivated to read the text carefully? Thus I feel that in the classroom context, to generate interest and first efforts, reading the great authors "like us" is not objectionable. And in reality, whether a text was introduced as a great piece of literature to be venerated because it is part of the Canon, or whether it was introduced as a work that one can relate to, ultimately the reader would have no other way to approach the text other than starting from the reader's current frame of reference, i.e. themselves. I am more with Commedian on this point.

On literature departments needing to justify its value - I actually think it is a good thing. If literature's value is purely in aesthetic enjoyment, I would argue that its learning should be funded more privately (like learning to play the piano) than being part of the core curriculum of all high schools and higher institutions of learning. Yes, literature needs training to be understood; but why it should be funded by general taxpayers' money is a legitimate question that the university departments should justify and ultimately the communities / ministries need to decide. And it has been mentioned before, ultimately, the meta-discussion should be on the justification as to what is truly necessary for someone to be considered "educated". It is not clear how much difference there are among "piano-playing", "chemical formulas", "differential equations", "Plato" or "Shakespeare". And geographies / generations may also play a role here.

[Virgil]

True to an extent, I will not debate points, but it misses the fundamental question of how necessary is the person Shakespeare to the body of work that is Shakespeare?

I do not see how questions about who Shakespeare may or may not have been, who he may or may not have been writing to, or about have anything to do with the enjoyment, or understanding of his work. As such, I think we are all probably better to ignore such questions, and just work on enjoying the work that is Shakespeare, as we are not in need of some long-winded theory by some academic to dictate how a perceived life of Shakespeare could possibly influence a large, varying and contradictory body of work.

The power of Shakespeare, most would agree, lies in his creation of unique personalities and worlds. That the same person can come up with Cleopatra as Juliet, Romeo as Lear is what makes the artist perceived as such a God amongst men. I don't need to know he may have been a catholic (that seems a bit of an odd reading, considering the first "uncatholic" person on the throne of any significance was Queen Elizabeth anyway), nor does it seem to effect any appreciation of the Bard.

The critics of New Criticism of the first half of the 20th century argued that way, that the author's biography was not important to understanding the work. DH Lawrence argued similar. While I am supportive of most elements of New Criticism, I have to disagree with them there. While an author's bio is not the predominant element to understanding his work, it is part of it. Even on the face of it, Shakespeare only makes sense in the context of Renaissance Europe, and the context of his life certainly shapes the reading. Shakespeare could not possibly be a modern writer.

And I disagree about the Catholicism not being significant. The distinction between how Catholics view suffering is different than most protestants, though I'm not sure about Anglicans. King Lear is about suffering and how to handle suffering. If that scene where Lear strips himself naked in the storm is truly an allusion to St Francis of Assisi stripping himself down to face the world, then we might read the play completely different.

Here's another. Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, the Protestant center of learning during the Renaissance. However, the ghost from Purgatory is clearly only a Catholic belief. Countless ink has been spilled over the last century trying to understand Hamlet as a Protestant hero trying to understand the nature of the world. But if Shakespeare is Catholic, then we can see the irony that is implied, the undermining of protestant reason. Trying to understand the nature of our world only through reason is a failure, as Hamlet ultimately realizes. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophy ever dreamed of." and "There's divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." If Shakespeare is Catholic, I would say it's a completely different reading.

And finally I was thinking about this earlier today. I've been reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman's sexuality has never been confirmed, but it's generally acknowledged he was homosexual, and I would say that is correct. No question one can see the homosexuality in the work and one appreciates the poems more when one can feel the suggestions. I'm not sure if the reading changes any if we suddenly found him to have been straight, but I think the texture of the poems would change.

No I disagree. Biography is important to fully understanding an artist.



On the question: do we need to understand the author to understand the work? Auntie, and also in quoting T.S. Eliot's own words, and JBI do not think so. Yet, Virgil, and if one were to interpret broadly, Vince Passaro seems to think that it matters (cf. the reference of him knowing Edward Said in person). I don't have a very well thought-through position here, but I am inclined to see that anything that might potentially add to one's understanding of the text should not be ruled out; the political stance, religious affiliation, and sexual orientiation -- all are potentially relevant. I guess Auntie was really reacting to, was that they can't be ALL that is relevant for the understanding of the text. Maybe it is just a matter of degree, that needs to be judged, on a case by case basis.

Yes, that's a good way to phrase it, "it's a matter of degree." Whether an author is a man or a women is certainly on the face an important fact. Knowing that Ralph Ellison is a black man writing in the middle of the 20th century is an important fact to putting Invisible Man into context.

[Mr.lucifer]

Isn't it quite common for writers to base their on some element of their life?

[mortalterror]

The critics of New Criticism of the first half of the 20th century argued that way, that the author's biography was not important to understanding the work. DH Lawrence argued similar. While I am supportive of most elements of New Criticism, I have to disagree with them there. While an author's bio is not the predominant element to understanding his work, it is part of it. Even on the face of it, Shakespeare only makes sense in the context of Renaissance Europe, and the context of his life certainly shapes the reading. Shakespeare could not possibly be a modern writer.

And I disagree about the Catholicism not being significant. The distinction between how Catholics view suffering is different than most protestants, though I'm not sure about Anglicans. King Lear is about suffering and how to handle suffering. If that scene where Lear strips himself naked in the storm is truly an allusion to St Francis of Assisi stripping himself down to face the world, then we might read the play completely different.

Here's another. Hamlet is a student of Wittenberg, the Protestant center of learning during the Renaissance. However, the ghost from Purgatory is clearly only a Catholic belief. Countless ink has been spilled over the last century trying to understand Hamlet as a Protestant hero trying to understand the nature of the world. But if Shakespeare is Catholic, then we can see the irony that is implied, the undermining of protestant reason. Trying to understand the nature of our world only through reason is a failure, as Hamlet ultimately realizes. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophy ever dreamed of." and "There's divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." If Shakespeare is Catholic, I would say it's a completely different reading.

And finally I was thinking about this earlier today. I've been reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Whitman's sexuality has never been confirmed, but it's generally acknowledged he was homosexual, and I would say that is correct. No question one can see the homosexuality in the work and one appreciates the poems more when one can feel the suggestions. I'm not sure if the reading changes any if we suddenly found him to have been straight, but I think the texture of the poems would change.

No I disagree. Biography is important to fully understanding an artist.

Maybe the guy who wrote the text Shakespeare is adapting was a Catholic. Just the other day I was reading some of Walter of Chatillon's 12th century Latin epic the Alexandreis, and in the second book of the poem King Darius sends Alexander the Great some balls to play with as more fit for his youth than warfare. Now, anyone who has read Henry V will recognize the famous tennis ball scene of Act I scene 2, and notice throughout the rest of the play that Henry is very Alexander like. As for Hamlet, there is some speculation about an Ur-Hamlet popular in Shakespeare's day, and anyway the story is an obvious adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia. And anyone who's read both Hamlet and The Oresteia will remember that the ghost of King Agamemnon appears to his son Orestes and appeals to him to kill the usurper, his brother, but to spare the Queen for her part. But Aeschylus was neither Catholic nor Protestant so what are we to make of his ghosts? As for Lear and his madness, Shakespeare only had about twenty different sources for that play, so who knows whose innovation that was.

[JCamilo]

This is simple, do you keep wondering why was Ovid banished and this would affect your understanding of his verses?

[mortalterror]

This is simple, do you keep wondering why was Ovid banished and this would affect your understanding of his verses?

Not really. I'd be more interested if he had left a sort of artistic method or some kind of statement about how he worked as an artist. I think those usually shed more light on the work than a biography. Think Horace's Ars Poetica, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical ballads, T.S. Eliot's non-fiction essays like Tradition and the Individual Talent, Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, or Torquato Tasso's Discourses on The Art of Poetry. Hemingway frequently discusses his technique and philosophy and here and there praises this writer or that, which I think is much more valuable than knowing about his rocky relationship with his mother.

[stlukesguild]

I'm going to have to go with Mortal on this one. While I'm not about to completely dismiss the value of an artist's biography, I think Romanticism and Freud have had too much impact upon our notion of interpreting art as some sort of autobiographical confession. Taken further, I think far too many readers look to art to reinforce their own experiences, thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc... The reality is that not all art is about the artist... or the audience.

[JCamilo]

And considering we enjoy Ovid a lot, his imense impact, knowing why he was bashished must be the most irrelevant thing ever. Of course, it may be a funny story, but do we need? No.

And yes, some of those essays are among my favorites reading, great writers writting about their work. So much about the academic critic that, like i saw once, said literary criticism have 100 years or so. The kind of criticism that need some fantasy in form of theory, not the kind of criticism that is a small masterwok by itself.

[AuntShecky]

On literature departments needing to justify its value - I actually think it is a good thing. If literature's value is purely in aesthetic enjoyment, I would argue that its learning should be funded more privately (like learning to play the piano) than being part of the core curriculum of all high schools and higher institutions of learning. Yes, literature needs training to be understood; but why it should be funded by general taxpayers' money is a legitimate question that the university departments should justify and ultimately the communities / ministries need to decide. And it has been mentioned before, ultimately, the meta-discussion should be on the justification as to what is truly necessary for someone to be considered "educated". It is not clear how much difference there are among "piano-playing", "chemical formulas", "differential equations", "Plato" or "Shakespeare". And geographies / generations may also play a role here.

I'm fear that I disagree with you here. It isn't really fair that the study of literature be accessible to only the "1%" (the ruling class whose members can afford it.) We'd like to keep discussions in this particular thread on-topic, however, so if you wish to continue discussions of accessibility, please refer
to the thread which attempts to address those questions:

Escaping the Surround of Force (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58020&highlight=Escaping+Surround+Force)


Isn't it quite common for writers to base their on some element of their life?

Not really because were that the case, every creative work would be an
autobiography. For instance:



The reality is that not all art is about the artist... or the audience.

[lawpark]

I'm fear that I disagree with you here. It isn't really fair that the study of literature be accessible to only the "1%" (the ruling class whose members can afford it.) We'd like to keep discussions in this particular thread on-topic, however, so if you wish to continue discussions of accessibility, please refer
to the thread which attempts to address those questions:

Escaping the Surround of Force (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=58020&highlight=Escaping+Surround+Force)


yes, on literature and arts, yes, it would be great that everyone have access. But, the issue here is priority. And the world is not fair. Personally, I think teaching how to cook is more important in education than teaching literature - since everyone eats, and it satisfies something more basic in Maslow's hierachy. The fact the educational world considered literature more than cooking skills defines what an "educated person" is - that I consider unfair elite arrogance.

[stlukesguild]

Isn't it quite common for writers to base their (art) on some element of their life?

Is it? Is all art little more than a veiled form of autobiography?

[Virgil]

Maybe the guy who wrote the text Shakespeare is adapting was a Catholic. Just the other day I was reading some of Walter of Chatillon's 12th century Latin epic the Alexandreis, and in the second book of the poem King Darius sends Alexander the Great some balls to play with as more fit for his youth than warfare. Now, anyone who has read Henry V will recognize the famous tennis ball scene of Act I scene 2, and notice throughout the rest of the play that Henry is very Alexander like. As for Hamlet, there is some speculation about an Ur-Hamlet popular in Shakespeare's day, and anyway the story is an obvious adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia. And anyone who's read both Hamlet and The Oresteia will remember that the ghost of King Agamemnon appears to his son Orestes and appeals to him to kill the usurper, his brother, but to spare the Queen for her part. But Aeschylus was neither Catholic nor Protestant so what are we to make of his ghosts? As for Lear and his madness, Shakespeare only had about twenty different sources for that play, so who knows whose innovation that was.
Mortal, you make too much of sources and adaptations. That doesn't prove anything, either for or against Shakespeare's religion. The playwright takes the source and then shapes it to his wishes.

[Virgil]

Isn't it quite common for writers to base their (art) on some element of their life?

Is it? Is all art little more than a veiled form of autobiography?

There are no rules. Sometimes yes, sometimes, no. You have to look at the artist and the work and make a judgement. One can't say that an artist's biography is irrelevant. Sometimes it's relevant and sometimes not.

[Drkshadow03]

There are no rules. Sometimes yes, sometimes, no. You have to look at the artist and the work and make a judgement. One can't say that an artist's biography is irrelevant. Sometimes it's relevant and sometimes not.

While I'm not disagreeing with the principle that some work is autobiographical or at least contains elements from the author's real life, I think it's a tad hypocritical to say if Shakespeare was a Catholic it should change our view of his works and should matter to us, but if he was an anti-Semitic racist sexist homophobe whatever it shouldn't change our view of his work and shouldn't matter to us.

[Virgil]

While I'm not disagreeing with the principle that some work is autobiographical or at least contains elements from the author's real life, I think it's a tad hypocritical to say if Shakespeare was a Catholic it should change our view of his works and should matter to us, but if he was an anti-Semitic racist sexist homophobe whatever it shouldn't change our view of his work and shouldn't matter to us.

Did I say Shakespeare was a anti semetic, racist sexist homophobe? Did I say we shouldn't judge an author if he had those hateful qualities? I said you had to judge the total man in context. I do not think Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad were hateful people, and neither were racist. If some language came out that would not be acceptable today but common in their day should not be a stain against the men's reputation if the general core of his person (and yes that could be a little subjective) was not hateful.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm a huge Conrad fan . . . but I think he was a pretty legit racist.

[JBI]

Did I say Shakespeare was a anti semetic, racist sexist homophobe? Did I say we shouldn't judge an author if he had those hateful qualities? I said you had to judge the total man in context. I do not think Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad were hateful people, and neither were racist. If some language came out that would not be acceptable today but common in their day should not be a stain against the men's reputation if the general core of his person (and yes that could be a little subjective) was not hateful.

Yes, well, that may be and true for his time, but we are reading him our own time, and something needs to be accounted for, as our time is not his own, and our own moral sense is not his [Twain]. If a book tells me I am inferior, or is morally degrading to me, I don't think the autobiography can be made to be used as an excuse. I think the issue needs to be addressed within our own context as well, as that is where the text now exists.

[Drkshadow03]

Did I say Shakespeare was a anti semetic, racist sexist homophobe? Did I say we shouldn't judge an author if he had those hateful qualities? I said you had to judge the total man in context. I do not think Mark Twain or Joseph Conrad were hateful people, and neither were racist. If some language came out that would not be acceptable today but common in their day should not be a stain against the men's reputation if the general core of his person (and yes that could be a little subjective) was not hateful.

You don't have to judge the man in context. You have to judge his work in context. Big difference. The sad truth is most people who make racist statements are NOT closeted KKK members. It doesn't matter if they were hateful people, it matters what they actually said and wrote.

The objections to Twain's text by those who accuse it of racism extend far beyond a simplistic, "they use the n-word so it's bad." It's a bit more sophisticated then just a reaction against a single word. Maybe you should do some research on it.

[stlukesguild]

The problem I have with judging a work of art by such non-aesthetic measures as morality is that it pretentiously presumes that we are making such a judgment from a position of moral superiority. This ignores the fact that by the standards of other eras our culture might be equally seen as quite morally deficient, and surely our own achievements will face the same judgments by a future generation who quite likely may be repulsed by our own moral shortcomings.

This does not mean that I don't believe that the issues sparked by a work of art (be they moral, ethical, theological, sociological, gender-related, racial, etc...) should not be discussed. Such is certainly one of the values of literature... and the arts in general. However, I bristle at turning a moral judgment into an aesthetic judgment: The Heart of Darkness is racist thus The Heart of Darkness is is bad... or worse yet, the notion of banning books that we find morally lacking or which raise questions and issues that make us uncomfortable. I personally despised a vast majority of what Plato had to say in The Republic (and wrote comments quite voluminously in the margins to that effect)... but I would not for the life of me wish to see the book banned, deem it poor literature, or wish I had never read it.

[mortalterror]

Yes, well, that may be and true for his time, but we are reading him our own time, and something needs to be accounted for, as our time is not his own, and our own moral sense is not his [Twain]. If a book tells me I am inferior, or is morally degrading to me, I don't think the autobiography can be made to be used as an excuse. I think the issue needs to be addressed within our own context as well, as that is where the text now exists.

I think that a close reading of Twain's work would find him still morally superior to much of today's world. He was a tireless champion of racial equality, pacifism, and passionately railed against the evils of child abuse and religious hypocrisy. His books are moral as the Bible.

[Pierre Menard]

The problem I have with judging a work of art by such non-aesthetic measures as morality is that it pretentiously presumes that we are making such a judgment from a position of moral superiority. This ignores the fact that by the standards of other eras our culture might be equally seen as quite morally deficient, and surely our own achievements will face the same judgments by a future generation who quite likely may be repulsed by our own moral shortcomings.

This does not mean that I don't believe that the issues sparked by a work of art (be they moral, ethical, theological, sociological, gender-related, racial, etc...) should not be discussed. Such is certainly one of the values of literature... and the arts in general. However, I bristle at turning a moral judgment into an aesthetic judgment: The Heart of Darkness is racist thus The Heart of Darkness is is bad... or worse yet, the notion of banning books that we find morally lacking or which raise questions and issues that make us uncomfortable. I personally despised a vast majority of what Plato had to say in The Republic (and wrote comments quite voluminously in the margins to that effect)... but I would not for the life of me wish to see the book banned, deem it poor literature, or wish I had never read it.


I strongly agree. It seems that sometimes folk (not necessarily people in this thread) think they've reached the pinnacle of morality, therefore all art should be judged according to their morality. That is of course nonsense and in 300 years people will be no doubt laughing at our own cultural taboos and whatnot.

[kelby_lake]

I strongly agree. It seems that sometimes folk (not necessarily people in this thread) think they've reached the pinnacle of morality, therefore all art should be judged according to their morality. That is of course nonsense and in 300 years people will be no doubt laughing at our own cultural taboos and whatnot.

Indeed, unless the work is so vehemently racist or misogynistic that its quality is undermined by its blatant prejudice.

[Pierre Menard]

Indeed, unless the work is so vehemently racist or misogynistic that its quality is undermined by its blatant prejudice.


I think it may be possible such works exist, especially when the work focuses more on those themes than being an actual work of literature (plot, character, style, whatever, etc) however, I've never have come across a novel I found that vehemently bad.

Out of curiosity, have you or anyone else here encountered such a book?

[JCamilo]

misogynistic such as some greek myths or biblical stories? Racist as El Cid? No, never.

[AuntShecky]

A continuation of the discussion introduced at the beginning of this thread can be found in "Jungles and Deserts: An Addendum to "Railing at Greatness"

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1120188#post1120188