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

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

on what non-authoritarian basis can you make those particular concerns the concerns of literature?

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature! I mean I had some corny old Marxist lit profs when I was in lolcollege and they were like "when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so

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 with which to get tenure

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature! I mean I had some corny old Marxist lit profs when I was in lolcollege and they were like "when you read this novel don't just think about who's in love with who, think about who needs money from who and who has power of who" and that opened my mind a lot and I thought it was good advice about reading novels and I still think so

― Guayaquil (eephus!),

yah and Edward Said was doing int with Conrad and Austen thirty years ago. New generation, etc.

not in academia so idk how much of the object/ecology stuff is a parody of some kind, like what hidden systems are reified when juliet slut-shames the moon or whatever, and how much should be defended on the grounds that ways of thinking about ecology/"the environment"/relationships w the nonhuman sphere are hardly disconnected from ways of living, or more pointedly not-living, in modern society

this is another anecdotal claim but i get the feeling there's a real sense of cynicism and fatalism in the discipline right now.

if you step back into a Weberian kind of framework (something i've been trying to do lately) you don't really see a discipline developing positively or negatively, really, but just, "developing" as things are wont to do in modernity. this quote in particular interests me:

All research in the cultural sciences in an age of specialization, once it is oriented towards a given subject matter through particular settings of problems and has established its methodological principles, will consider the analysis of data as an end in itself. It will discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts in terms of their relationships to ultimate value-ideas. Indeed, it will lose its awareness of its ultimate rootedness in value-ideas in general. And it is well this should be so. But there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought. It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors.

xp yes that's what they try for, the latter, tho you could hardly expect them to give up on the former while they're at it?

I don't think you have to make them concerns of literature -- they just already are concerns of literature!

i only meant that they need not be set in advance as the only concerns of literature.

i haven't figured out how all this relates to other institutional issues but it's something like when you're engaged in such moral decadence as not paying your teachers living wages and bilking your students for all their worth the only criticism you can do is bullshit criticism

It follows those stars which alone are able to give meaning and direction to its labors.

prescient

xp to treeship: presumably popularity of this turn is anticipating that there WILL SOON be objects, namely machines, that enjoy a kind of subjective experience

ps also in lolcollege I took a course about animals in medieval europe which very much highlighted the way animals were seen as agents in ways they generally aren't in modern US. Where modern = 1990 so this turn is not such a new thing and if it were going to destroy the study of literature it would have done so by now

re: the object stuff, i think like most new trends there's a kernel of value/insight there. but there is a law of diminishing returns to consider.

mordy at the very least on the scent of some money imo

prescient

lol, again.

i'd have to read some of this stuff, but from the outside it seems like it would make a mockery of feminist and postcolonial critical projects. the marginalization of objects -- even animals -- is not the same thing as the marginalization of women and minorities.

i think you'd find quite a bit of argument to the contrary--the discourses of race and gender are not that distinct from discourses of species.

The way I look at it Fear of Music-era David Byrne presaged the analysis of objects by a generation.

objects, man. like OBJECTS.

this is what happens when you bring kids up on java

there's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore. the question is more pragmatic: why question that particular distinction at this particular juncture and to what end?

here's a post-deconstructive sense in which distinctions or "framings" can be made and unmade at will, so i think simply troubling a distinction between human and non-human (or any other) is not that interesting in and of itself anymore.

I think my tricks do this to me all the time.

Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella