I want to believe that the pendulum is going to swing back because beautiful prose is beautiful prose, and while passing fads (like overdone wokeness in university English departments) may cloud that perspective, it's not possible to erase the truth about the literary canon. I will defend the relevance of Henry James to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And defending literature's past does *not* mean we don't also welcome new works by a variety of voices. This is not a zero-sum game!
I had a very similar experience, except my college career was drawn out for many years due to being in the national guard and having to take breaks due to basic training and deployment. As I kept leaving and coming back to school with months or years in between, the English Department became more and more unhinged. The final straw came when I took a course on grammar and composition as an elective (grammar and composition was not a requirement as an English major at my school) and all the works we looked at were obviously promoting extreme left viewpoints. The final paper I looked at before dropping out of school for good was about the amount of sexual discrimination women face in STEM fields and how they aren’t taken seriously because they are young and wear makeup. The author then went on to say that women shouldn’t be afraid to heroically wear as much makeup as they want to at the workplace as a way to fight oppression and the patriarchy. I remember asking the Teacher’s Assistant how privileged, sheltered, and delusional you would have to be to consider professional attire in a scientific workplace, like a lab, to be oppression. I then spent the rest of the class being lectured on the patriarchy and my male privilege.
Had a similar experience many years previous at Yale, where the English department then had been taken over entirely by the deconstructionism of Derrida, etc. I was so out of synch with the notion that the texts we were reading were to be understood for anything other than the stories and the characters themselves reaching out across the years. I dropped English as a major after my first term. We have no choice but to resist.
F-ing Derrida and differance. The professors loved to use him to make convenient and escalatory definition changing a hallmark of their propaganda machine. They also used him to justify making any text say anything you want, but only if it included a Marxist slant.
"Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.
But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence"
Construct, Context, Perspective. The pale blue dot photo. The planet Earth as tabla rasa as regards human activity. Is the entire human ethos a construct? From which is derived all meaning. (Existential). Is meaning intrinsic discoverable? Creatible? Derived from powers we cannot know. Can none be found (Nihilist). Is art meant to be reflect, elevate, examine, critique? So many questions. I feel what you describe is a kind of corruption. Force me to think a certain way. What am I in church? A Hitler youth meeting? Study should be a multi faceted examination of the world and exploration. Thank you for writing.
Well-written, and sad! You are brave to applaud a traditional perspective. Personally, as a reader and writer, I find a "leftist," anti-colonialist take on literature to be interesting and sometimes perceptive, though never at the expense of an author's intentions and use of language and structure; never at the expense of the sheer pleasure of reading; and never as a result of wish fulfillment on the part of the theorist.
I want to believe that the pendulum is going to swing back because beautiful prose is beautiful prose, and while passing fads (like overdone wokeness in university English departments) may cloud that perspective, it's not possible to erase the truth about the literary canon. I will defend the relevance of Henry James to anyone, anywhere, at any time. And defending literature's past does *not* mean we don't also welcome new works by a variety of voices. This is not a zero-sum game!
I had a very similar experience, except my college career was drawn out for many years due to being in the national guard and having to take breaks due to basic training and deployment. As I kept leaving and coming back to school with months or years in between, the English Department became more and more unhinged. The final straw came when I took a course on grammar and composition as an elective (grammar and composition was not a requirement as an English major at my school) and all the works we looked at were obviously promoting extreme left viewpoints. The final paper I looked at before dropping out of school for good was about the amount of sexual discrimination women face in STEM fields and how they aren’t taken seriously because they are young and wear makeup. The author then went on to say that women shouldn’t be afraid to heroically wear as much makeup as they want to at the workplace as a way to fight oppression and the patriarchy. I remember asking the Teacher’s Assistant how privileged, sheltered, and delusional you would have to be to consider professional attire in a scientific workplace, like a lab, to be oppression. I then spent the rest of the class being lectured on the patriarchy and my male privilege.
Had a similar experience many years previous at Yale, where the English department then had been taken over entirely by the deconstructionism of Derrida, etc. I was so out of synch with the notion that the texts we were reading were to be understood for anything other than the stories and the characters themselves reaching out across the years. I dropped English as a major after my first term. We have no choice but to resist.
F-ing Derrida and differance. The professors loved to use him to make convenient and escalatory definition changing a hallmark of their propaganda machine. They also used him to justify making any text say anything you want, but only if it included a Marxist slant.
See Professors and the Pornography of Power:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/56415.html
...in which I quote Jonathan Haidt:
"Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.
But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence"
Construct, Context, Perspective. The pale blue dot photo. The planet Earth as tabla rasa as regards human activity. Is the entire human ethos a construct? From which is derived all meaning. (Existential). Is meaning intrinsic discoverable? Creatible? Derived from powers we cannot know. Can none be found (Nihilist). Is art meant to be reflect, elevate, examine, critique? So many questions. I feel what you describe is a kind of corruption. Force me to think a certain way. What am I in church? A Hitler youth meeting? Study should be a multi faceted examination of the world and exploration. Thank you for writing.
Well-written, and sad! You are brave to applaud a traditional perspective. Personally, as a reader and writer, I find a "leftist," anti-colonialist take on literature to be interesting and sometimes perceptive, though never at the expense of an author's intentions and use of language and structure; never at the expense of the sheer pleasure of reading; and never as a result of wish fulfillment on the part of the theorist.
Wonder why the declining enrollment in the humanities and the dismal economic prospects of liiberal arts graduates. Eesh.
Humble. I was going to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 😆