Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

here's a decentering idea 4 everyone -- "the west" as in europe / christianity has a tenuous hold on any claim to the greeks and romans because that lineage of culture really descended down throughout the muslim world during the middle ages so maybe we're teaching them wrong anyway?

that lineage of culture really descended down throughout the muslim world during the middle ages

wouldn't go that far, i.e. not entirely, but big part yes, one can say islamic culture gifts the west with itself (qua "the west") through work of arabic translation & interpretation of greek texts (many of which were lost to latin west in middle ages, e.g. much of aristotle)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_of_the_Greek_Classics#Arab_translations_and_commentary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle

xp

Huh? The Byzantines were not muslim and the great majority of greek and roman texts that were preserved into post-medieval times were preserved through them. Of course, quite a few ancient texts we have were palimpsests, parchments scraped off in Byzantine monasteries and written over with religious texts, but still...

And yes, I do know that the muslim world valued many greek texts, especially the medical or scientific ones, and helped to preserve those. But it would be incorrect to say that lineage of culture "really descended down throughout the muslim world."

well not only in terms of preservation but in terms of development and innovation.

what exactly is the theory of the case for the tens of thousands of rape survivors who were forced to read Ovid before trigger warnings entered the national consciousness? are we supposed to believe that they were all damaged by the reading but were too timid to speak up? were they oppressed w/ false consciousness? or is this PTSD triggered from Roman literature a transient mental disorder that only just appeared?

what is the recommended ovid pedagogy vis-a-vis students from low-income backgrounds

j -- yeah this is what i'm sort of stymied by. like there's nothing "rich, white ppl" about ovid per se. that's just the baggage that's been attached to ovid. i'm all for fucking up the canon but it should be done for the right reasons i guess?

Ovid being sent into exile by Augustus ought to give him some cred

maybe it's a 'not about their experience' thing

who has ever turned into a tree really

Y'know, Tiresias does get blinded because he is transgender!

what exactly is the theory of the case for the tens of thousands of rape survivors who were forced to read Ovid before trigger warnings entered the national consciousness? are we supposed to believe that they were all damaged by the reading but were too timid to speak up? were they oppressed w/ false consciousness? or is this PTSD triggered from Roman literature a transient mental disorder that only just appeared?

What I want to know is how many rapists, racists and other oppressors use Ovid as an inspiration or guiding text, and more generally how many use the classical canon as such

'Rich people use knowledge of the classics as an identifying mark or code to spot each other and exclude people who are not rich' sounds ... plausible I guess? But does even that fit with the contemporary forms of power?

& even if that is the case isn't it democratizing to teach everyone else the same ish?

My suspicion is that when people say things like

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

they're using confident, professional-sounding words to dress up what is really a desperate feeling of animosity toward 'the classics as a badge worn by rich cunts to look wise and permanent'

I want to say eff canon, there are many historical works that we ignore in favor of stuff that is less and less relevant imo. Then again if the class is specifically covering Western Literature then shielding students from potentially offensive material will result in a less comprehensive study. Nobody should be forced to sit through something they don't want to hear, but in the context of reviewing Western literary history, there would have to be a LOT of stuff to miss out on. Then again you could say by focusing on Western Lit one misses out on the rest of the world as well.

It is true that the classics are biased towards the ruling classes, in many ways towards oppression, but no more so than any work written before the invention of the printing press imo. Most people did not know how to read until only very recently, so perhaps teachers can point out the audience for these works is generally the people doing the raping/pillaging.

xp on second thoughts,

Don't get me wrong, I can see perfectly well why people don't like Ovid's Metamorphoses: that slow, elegant cycle from rape to rape, from murder to murder, going on and on unpunished and unstoppable, the general Fatalistic posing with no outside or ending ... I myself think the (most obvious) 'message' of the poem is unacceptable, unless you are actually someone who lives in the ancient world, in which case Fatalistic posing is forgivable as a trauma-response, a way of dealing with what must have been a bloody horrible life. I would not want that message taught as if it were a neutral 'life lesson'.

It's just ... the classics have not been taught in that way since before the year 2000, have they? And am I far wrong if I say that probably the last time the obvious, explicit message of a classical poem was handed to down to modern people uncritically, in a western university, was before the 1960s?

It seems like overkill for left-leaning academia to go condemning Ovid now, when we are long past the time when the really powerful people pretended to a classical, literate, unworldly culture. And as well there is another 'message' in Ovid if you scratch beneath the official surface of the poem, i.e. that all status and all states are subject to change and falling apart, no-one's power lasts forever, etc; and that other reading of the poem is something we'll never get to if we cordon it off as unacceptable enemy propaganda.

This is before we even get on to the grunting, clucking stupidity of people who are only interested in the 'message' of a poem, and attacking or defending that 'message'; perhaps that type of reader/reading is actually where the real problem lies

These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.

feel like this is at least as true about any worthwhile text that attempts to address "exclusion and oppression" as the dominant mode of western lit.

It is true that the classics are biased towards the ruling classes, in many ways towards oppression I know that when I think of the wealthy + powerful ruling classes I think of people who read a lot of ancient literature.

a lot of ppl ITT seem not to have been able to read since very recently tbh

fred, what are ppl saying about the latest developments?

This is before we even get on to the grunting, clucking stupidity of people who are only interested in the 'message' of a poem, and attacking or defending that 'message'; perhaps that type of reader/reading is actually where the real problem lies

^yes

message, relevance, relatability to students' personal lives, how text affects their feelings, whether it contributes to ideological good of society: college literature courses as version of oprah's book club

it's a shallow blinkered narcissistic moralistic view of literary study (and in a way weirdly old-fashioned, like victorian)

canonical texts are canonical for one thing bc they are nodes of literary & cultural intertextuality, not bc they are 'upworthy'

this sculptor made his finest work. you won't believe what happened next.

shallow blinkered narcissistic moralistic view of literary study = most humanities now

i mean, isn't that always how students approach texts--my idea of being a prof was basically to steer them away from that at all costs.

It's important to realize you can read a book without having to agree with everything it says.

Or anything it says.

hell, you can even table agreement/disagreement, first you gotta analyze the thing!

@Mordy: Well, as I said, we are really fanatically free speech...

I haven't really followed so much, I've been to a funeral. My short impression is that most news-stories present it as more anti-busses than anti-israel (the anti-israel statement was 'Boycut Israel - Free Gaza', so it's about the same as the censored ads). They burned busses from the wrong bus-company though...

Also, and this is pure speculation, I think there is a certain sense that Movia is sorta to blame for this. Not because they removed the ads, but because they've constantly based their arguments on the tone of the reactions, rather than the ads themselves. To support their descision to remove the ads, they mentioned that the complainers said the ads said the same as the nazis. Then they used the fact that the controversy became so heated to further support that the ads were needlessly offensive. But then the director said that he was sorry, because the reaction was damaging their reputation. They've basically said, that if you want them to do something, you only need to react as over-the-top as posssible. At this point, I'm guessing they will ban all political ads, and censor the boobs as well.

message, relevance, relatability to students' personal lives, how text affects their feelings, whether it contributes to ideological good of society

If you're saying these are bad reasons to read, or bad ways to read, you're excluding most of the reasons that people read. Maybe not in lit study okay fine, but still...this discussion is dumb.

I think she means (sorry if I'm being presumptuous here, drash) that people learn how to read those ways when they're learning to read, and as they progress through elementary, junior high and high school. By the time they get to college it's important for them to learn more scholarly skills - like understanding the text in a historical and literary context, applying various ideological/philosophical critical constructs to it, etc. The other ways of reading aren't "bad," but they shouldn't be the focus of adults in an academic setting. By contrast, a book club is the perfect place for those kinds of inquiries!

If you're saying these are bad reasons to read, or bad ways to read, you're excluding most of the reasons that people read. Maybe not in lit study okay fine, but still...this discussion is dumb.

After a few years of teaching I had to find a middle ground between students who said "I don't like this story because I couldn't relate to it" and my saying, "You should read this; it's good for you" i.e. the broccoli school of education, the best reaction to which at a student' age would be, "Fuck right off."

Yes but the person reading the text is not erased by adding new layers of understanding--the scholar adds to the identities of the reader, it doesn't supplant the pre-existing ones. I don't have a perfect analysis of what that would or should mean vis a vis every academic policy decision ever but I think it's silly and unrealistic to argue from a position of the perfect way to relate to the text is not to be human about it.

That was technically an xp

I've read many great scholarly pieces that included some form of "this is how I was impacted by the text," but always as a starting point for sifting out more meaning from their personal experience. I think if any of these students wanted to write about rape in Ovid and how it reflects particular cultures that might span geographies and histories, they would have a lot of material for a paper. The problem is getting to the part where they're upset and then deciding that is the end of their encounter with the literature - that's okay if you're reading for fun but scholarship I think requires some level of discomfort.

I've written about this often on ILE: how as a gay man of Cuban descent 98 percent of lit and pop songs weren't written about or for me, therefore in my early years I assumed this New Critical garb and worshiped form, disparaging people for caring so damn much about content. This was a shortsighted and stupid approach, abandoned a few years after coming out (and there was, make no mistake, a relationship between my coming out and changing how I approach art). I haven't changed my habits though -- "relatibility" plays little if any role in my reading, listening, and watching. To some degree, I do cling to that Eliot-esque approach whereby to read is to escape from oneself; the whole point, for me, is to read about foreign lands and customs, some of which are in my own state and country. But I also recognize the difference between reading and teaching reading. When teaching it's hard to impress on students the notion of reading as a pleasure, done for its own sweet sake (not for edifying or holistic purposes i.e. To Make One a Better Person) when they've got a syllabus in front of them.

xposts -- i think the middle ground is to allow yourself to be "human" about your response to the text but then be able (in an academic environment) to reflexively analyze the text + your reaction to it. this is sort of the baseline gesture of the kind of critical analysis you'd want students to take away from a literature course. in a classroom i think it's fine to even foreground those human reactions (it's boring, offensive, etc) as a way to generate the whole analysis portion of what we're trying to do. one without the other would be not only impossible but pointless.

You guys keep arguing against something I'm not saying. I'm NOT saying, people should object to reading books if they're "hard." I'm saying that even in a scholarly encounter, there's a human being reading a text who may have reactions they're not in rational control of and it's possible that some of those reactions will be subjectively too deep to continue or continue without forcing a person to a point of engagement where they may not choose to be at that time.

I don't know that that concern should necessarily be the whole basis for policy, but if you form policy with an acceptance of that possibility it would look different than if you did it without.

In a graduate course on Victorian women poets, we experienced a welcome moment of levity four weeks into the semester when a colleague cracked about George Eliot's somnolent poems, "These things are just yucky." The class cracked up, including the professor, one of the country's foremost Eliot scholars. She held up her hardcover edition and said, "As you can see, the spine is barely cracked, so Karen, you're....not wrong!"

i think the endgame of all this is essentially the elimination of compulsory humanities courses, for better or worse.

maybe for better!

If it's a compulsory course for all majors I don't see anything wrong with making broad allowances for students. I don't think you can be a literature major if you aren't able to read everything on the syllabus.

you can eliminate compulsory science courses too, since it's possible that students will have reactions to material on e.g. creation or global warming that they're not in rational control of, and that they would choose not to engage if they could

Basically everyone otm here. Feel like post-internet culture raises kids that go through the teenage/student self-definition period using ideology rather than material goods as signifiers.

Most interactions take place virtually, so material culture is not the social measuring stick it once was. Students going through the process of post-adolescent self-definition can use ideology in its place.

when haven't they?

Serious question. If you're a woman, gay, black, when hasn't ideology been a prism?

I'm not any of those, so I don't want to speak for them.

I don't know if I fully understand what's meant by that question in this thread tbh and I'm only one of those things.

I didn't quite understand Adam's binary either. I think teens have always used material goods and ideology! My mistake in my response was conflating sexuality and ideology.

Eh my point was it's even moreso, comparing my non-internet adolescence w an adolescence that is living w instant communication.

Intellectual one-upsmanship being a new social currency.