Rich Lowry on English literature degrees and The Great White Horror: In a petition to the English Department, Yale undergraduates declare that a required two-semester seminar on Major English Poets is a danger to their well-being. Never mind that the offending poets — Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, et al. — are the foundational writers in the English language. It is as if chemistry students objected to learning the periodic table of elements or math students rose up against the teaching of differential calculus… The petition’s implicit contention is that the major poets are too circumscribed by their race and gender to speak to today’s socially aware students, when, in fact, it is the students who are too blinkered by race and gender to marvel at great works of art. It takes a deeply impoverished imagination to read Shakespeare and regard him simply as an agent of the patriarchy.
Via Mr Muldoon, Robby Soave has more on this here. Also this.
The protesting students are, they say, “alienated” and “actively harmed” by the fact that a course of study titled Major English Poets actually features major English poets. So acute is the students’ distress at this shocking discovery that some feel obliged to “get up and leave the room.” Because, having chosen to take a degree in English literature - a language originated on a smallish island in the northern hemisphere and developed by the pallid Englishmen who lived there – it is of course outrageous that the key figures in the history of that language should quite often turn out to be pallid Englishmen. Indeed, such is the identitarian trauma of reading Shakespeare - whose work, of course, never, ever touches on such fashionable themes as gender, sexuality, race or disability - that the students are, they say, left “ill-prepared… even to engage with critical theory.” At which point, I can’t help feeling that someone should remind the Yale undergraduates that Angry Studies and “critical theory” are, to borrow a phrase, the lowest difficulty setting on campus.
davidthompson: Elsewhere (203)
Via Mr Muldoon, Robby Soave has more on this here. Also this.
The protesting students are, they say, “alienated” and “actively harmed” by the fact that a course of study titled Major English Poets actually features major English poets. So acute is the students’ distress at this shocking discovery that some feel obliged to “get up and leave the room.” Because, having chosen to take a degree in English literature - a language originated on a smallish island in the northern hemisphere and developed by the pallid Englishmen who lived there – it is of course outrageous that the key figures in the history of that language should quite often turn out to be pallid Englishmen. Indeed, such is the identitarian trauma of reading Shakespeare - whose work, of course, never, ever touches on such fashionable themes as gender, sexuality, race or disability - that the students are, they say, left “ill-prepared… even to engage with critical theory.” At which point, I can’t help feeling that someone should remind the Yale undergraduates that Angry Studies and “critical theory” are, to borrow a phrase, the lowest difficulty setting on campus.
davidthompson: Elsewhere (203)
