The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

I like that when the right tries this, it's the professors who pulls out the move: 'Although this email was upsetting to us, we could only imagine what it was like for these students.' Or, y'know, you could ask?

wow david auerbach is a moron https://twitter.com/AuerbachKeller/status/723234848010285058

David Auerbach
‏@AuerbachKeller
Whether it's women's bodies or whiteness or Islam or the patriarchy, marking something as toxic and filthy produces VERY powerful reactions.
http://img.waggish.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/davidheadshot.jpg

CONCEPT CREEP is your new band name by the way.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/concept-creep/477939/

kinda the best sentence i've read all year:

"So many residents of Santa Monica, California, claim to need emotional support animals that the local farmer’s market warns against service dog fraud."

These articles are idiotic (much like Friedersdorf). A shadow of interesting idea completely obscured by epic concern trolling and hyper-generalization.

Concept Creep would make a great band name.

concept creep
concept weirdo

^^^ Radiohead b-side

what % of the atlantic's traffic is driven by campus concern trolling? surely someone here writes for them

i don't dislike it or anything. tbh i prefer overwrought, tendentious opinion pieces more than reasonable ones.

what's Andrew Sullivan's username?

Treeship

what is andrew sullivan up to these days anyway?

Trees

i just read the concept creep article. i agree that people like that girl who complained about her teacher on facebook should just get away with doing that stuff. i'm down with people being as sensitive as they want, to demand as much conscientiousness as they want, but i get off the bus when it comes to using institutional power to discipline people for doing things that aren't nice but that absolutely do not rise to the level of abuse

let the kids talk shit

Bullshit trís and you know it

Falling back on the quickly-tiring institutional/imbalance of power as a catch-all isn't a worthy nor correct response to the example in question and the individual teacher involved deserves better than such a reflex

Also that article is toddler-stupid imo

Line the bottom of a saucepan with a kitchen towel. Fill the pan with enough water to come just below the rim of the coddlers. Place over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil.

Butter the insides of each coddler. Pour 1/2 teaspoon heavy cream in each. Add one mind; season with salt and pepper. Screw on lids tightly. Carefully place mind coddlers into boiling water.

Reduce heat to medium, and simmer for 4 minutes. Turn off heat, cover pan, and let stand for 6 to 7 minutes. Remove coddlers from water, unscrew lids, and serve immediately.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/01/yale-english-students-call-for-end-of-focus-on-white-male-writers?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/05/24/yale_students_want_to_remake_the_english_major_requirements_but_there_s.html

Comment made me chuckle:

Shakespeare was emphatically NOT transphobic

yeah i'm facebook friends with that guy, under his real name he's an english professor, with a pretty great intro to literature course from the materials i've seen for it.

the students should really be making the argument, 'we shouldn't have to have anything to do with tradition if we don't want to'

Slate responds more or less makes that point:

You’ve written that “it is possible to graduate with a degree in English language & literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men.” It is possible to graduate a lot of ways, and every English major is responsible for taking advantage of the bounty of courses the department offers to attain a full and deep education. What is not possible is to reckon with the racist, sexist, colonist poets who comprise the canon—and to transcend their failures—via a “see no evil, hear no evil” policy.

They want the university to abolish the major English poets requirement, and to refocus the course’s pre-1800/1900 requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity”

i made it all the way to a phd without considering gender, race, sexuality, ableism, or ethnicity in my work (but i stand on the shoulders of those who have considered it). i recognize this might be a problem in my own work (and god knows i've paid for it on the job market) but i hate these kinds of statements because they tend to foreclose in advance any number of other things that literature can be "about"--in other words, why stop at gender, race, sexuality, etc? on what non-authoritarian basis can you make those particular concerns the concerns of literature?

this is so dumb

when do the history majors beat them up

xps

(it's also kind of interesting to read those kinds of statements because they lag behind what's going on in "cutting edge" literature departments, which have moved on to the "non-human." so we could argue that that list needs to be extended to include species and the like.)

it's funny cuz i was just reading the paris review interview with james baldwin and he can't stop blabbing about henry james and balzac.

everybody has a race gender sexuality, ryan

not everybody has a whatever dumb thing you care about that's not even a thing

it's about universality man

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly and convincingly?

BALDWIN

Yes, though I have no overwhelming evidence in hand. But I think of the impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or history as written by whites, and claim it all—including Shakespeare.

my favorite literature is about whatever dumb thing that's not even a thing

lol, j.

to be fair to the yale students, however, that course does seem rather old-fashioned.

In April, Miele wrote a column in the Yale Daily News in which she criticised the course because while students “are taught how to analyse canonical literature works”, they “are not taught to question why it is canonical, or the implications of canonical works that actively oppress and marginalise non-white, non-male, trans and queer people

i am almost certain this is not true across the department.

yale is the home of harold bloom but it was also the home of deconstruction.

in any event, students should learn multiple ways of approaching the canon. they should examine the social function of the "canon" and the ideologies embedded in the texts that comprise it. but they should also be open to the fact that the best texts in the canon exceed, evade, or even undermine this institutional function through their own indeterminacy. it's pretty stupid to see wordsworth solely as a reactionary tory, even though he was those things too. the point of literature is that it is a repository for experiences that can't be easily assimilated into other social/political discourses. if you're not open to the fact that books and poems are complex, and that they can teach you things you wouldn't have thought of on your own, you shouldn't be an english major.

which is totally fine by the way. i regret studying english 100% myself.

(it's also kind of interesting to read those kinds of statements because they lag behind what's going on in "cutting edge" literature departments, which have moved on to the "non-human."

would be interested in hearing more about this btw. have no idea what it means.

i dont have any empirical proof of this, but things like animal studies, ecology and environmental literature, and "object-oriented" criticism seem like the big growth areas these days. there's a collection called the "non-human turn" that tries to address this but it's not that good imo.

like what if your pet rock wrote a roman à clef about itself

a lot of this can be chalked up to the larger trend of criticism seeking more and more marginal or excluded positions from which to engage with a text as a way to guarantee or ground the possibility of the critical POV in the first place. this is how, over time, "Shakespeare and Gender" becomes "Shakespeare and the Animal."

and, finally, "Shakespeare's Objects" (i don't have the stomach to google this but i bet it's out there)

ah gotcha. that's interesting. i knew that deep ecology was having a moment -- people using the word "antrhopocene" all the time -- but i didn't know this had penetrated lit departments

oh god has it ever.

xpost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlSVNxLB-A

at the university i was just working at a good majority of the incoming first-year phd students were doing something related to Objects or Ecology or the Anthropocene--granted that's the nature of the department there but i dont think it's totally anomalous.

oh so you mean moving further away from the real world

sounds like the (liberal) arts alright

wanna hear how the rock-animal symbiosis enlightens me on the dichotomy of living and not-living in modern society

well it still follows the waves of theory, right. gotta have new frameworks to apply, interrogate stuff with, rethink the political

that sounds like hell

also potentially nihilistic.

feminist and marxist interrogations of the humanities felt hostile at the time, but they were ultimately about broadening our understanding of the human condition, uncovering suppressed experiences and perspectives embedded in the canon, etc. radical critiques focused on overturning anthropocentrism in western literature probably won't have this sort of effect. there is no hidden knowledge of the object.

sounds like an indication of really healthy field developing in v positive ways