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

yay robin

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 (eephus)

Yeah in the distant nineties I remember hearing about how you need to read imperial Russian novels with a sense of the invisible serf / invisible peasant who enabled the lifestyles depicted in the text; I was like Whoa.

Then when you look at e.g. Woolf you might occasionally see the attempted seeing of the servants (however hazily sketched) but you still have to extrapolate the underlying economic structure that enabled all the introspection that the people were doing yeah blah blah zzzz. The politics of Glengarry Glen Ross yadda yadda, these schmucks are forced into their schmuckdom etc.

If you go down this road ad absurdum with objects, one can't really read Gone With the Wind without thinking of the oppression of the cotton plants. In Hamlet, the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Won't someone please think of the meat?

I'm not sure it helps anyone get smarter or the world get better, but I confess to feeling the pull of these lines of thought.

Trollope is a tonic.

the greatest trick derrida ever pulled was convincing the world deconstruction didn't exist

i need more trollope in my life.

People are not objects. Considering the oppression of cotton plants is not a natural extension of considering the oppression of slaves. There is no hidden story of the cotton plants because they are plants. This is my prospectus.

i need more trollope in my life.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 1, 2016

just read The Prime Minister. Never have I read 702 pages in five days.

i hate to admit this, but having kids made me SUPER critical of old movies and t.v. in a way that i never was previously because i was a nihilist and a drunken rotter. they also took my love of horror movies away from me because they made me value human life! damn kids.

also being married to a gender-fluid post-feminist wesleyan grad who was raised by radical feminist lesbians and whose doorstop-sized thesis was on east german women writers doesn't help. she doesn't miss a trick! having human reality checks around is a good thing though.

reading books and seeing movies through the eyes - even intermittently - of people who are not me is a late in life skill that i never even thought i would learn. and now i can't turn it off. it's not like i never noticed racism/sexism/etc in art before. i saw that everywhere. what i don't think i noticed before was how unaware and self-absorbed and incurious so many (mostly american) artists/filmmakers/writers are/were a lot of the time. nothing outside the bubble of whiteness matters/mattered much to them. if it did it was often a distraction or a threat. obviously there are exceptions, and i look for more curious art now. and art that challenges my perspectives. though i am finishing season two of The Last Ship right now...so, you know...

in the end, there are LOTS of ways to read a book! any book. and you can bring your own creativity to the process. and Yale lit and poetry professors can get more creative too. creativity in learning is key.

I looked at a discarded part of a stranger's meal today and thought, man, if that was part of my sister's leg, I would prefer it be treated better.

of course nobody in my family would ever get caught dead in a etc. etc.

yeah i always feel like i should have like all the Palliser books in order to dig in, but i should just dig in anywhere.

wait, does Tombot watch The Last Ship? post-plague Bay-fare. nothing like it on God's green earth.

the last episode i watched was directed by Peter Weller.

"There is no hidden story of the cotton plants because they are plants."

this is why i'm so grateful to science fiction. another late in life thing for me. that cotton plant could have a helluva story.

I watched a lot of Last Ship. Wasn't as fucking insane as that one-season submarine show with Andre Braugher, but pretty crazy. I forget why I stopped!

I should totally go back, binge The Last Resort and compose an essay in the voice of the submarine

i feel bad that andre can't seem to find the right fit. Homicide was a once in a lifetime thing. i guess Brooklyn nine-nine is as good as he's gonna get. Hack sucked. nobody remembers Gideon's Crossing. i didn't even see Last Resort. i don't even remember if i saw Men of a Certain Age...

actually Brooklyn Nine-Nine is fine for him. he's funny in it. it's a good steady gig for a guy in his 50's.

I wish FX would release that miniseries he did, Thief, on DVD. Or at least put it up streaming somewhere (Hulu?). I'd watch it again.

reading books and seeing movies through the eyes - even intermittently - of people who are not me is a late in life skill that i never even thought i would learn. and now i can't turn it off. it's not like i never noticed racism/sexism/etc in art before. i saw that everywhere. what i don't think i noticed before was how unaware and self-absorbed and incurious so many (mostly american) artists/filmmakers/writers are/were a lot of the time. nothing outside the bubble of whiteness matters/mattered much to them. if it did it was often a distraction or a threat. obviously there are exceptions, and i look for more curious art now. and art that challenges my perspectives. though i am finishing season two of The Last Ship right now...so, you know...

in the end, there are LOTS of ways to read a book! any book. and you can bring your own creativity to the process. and Yale lit and poetry professors can get more creative too. creativity in learning is key.

― scott seward, Wednesday, June 1, 2016 8:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is super otm.

i think if the yale dept is really as stuck-in-a-rut as it sounds, then there's a perfectly legit case to be made for opening the canon, changing the curriculum etc and there have been running wars on this since the late 50s really. the language used by the students today might open itself up for more mockery or whatever but the debate doesn't change. otoh i appreciate the point about the reasons central figures stay central, tho i wonder how disputed that is at all.

it does make the argument though that wanting to appreciate say The Tempest as such is very different than wanting to appreciate The Tempest as it develops as a text which was struggled with / reinterpreted / borrowed from / paid tribute to by the Caribbean writers trying to figure out their voices as at once in the colonizer's tongue but apart from it. And its totally legit to want to make your starting point the latter set of questions.

You see them on the low hills of Barbados
bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sailor drowned again.
Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense
than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind
whatever grief bent them was all the same,
since they were trees with nothing else in mind
but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;
but we live like our names and you would have
to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain,
to love those trees with an inferior love,
and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend
like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain
like sailors’ wives. They’re classic trees, and we,
if we live like the names our masters please,
by careful mimicry might become men.”

^^ like, teach a course on the canon via _that_.

I wrote this a few years ago:

For years I read fiction and poetry with the expectation that “connections” with the material were besides the point. I’d empathize with characters and scenarios and study the prose rhythms and mimic them in my own work but that’s it. When I told a friend I was reading George Eliot and h/she would say “Ugh, no, I can’t relate,” I’d recoil. I’d think “What does that have to do with anything? Can’t you use your imagination and enter this complicated mid 19th century rural world?”

When I accepted my sexuality I realized these responses were in part stunted. For some novels and poems my neutrality stemmed from my inability to point at a heterosexual romance and “relate” to it. To some extent I still do it and as some of you know I’m still loath to consider intentions as a valid way to judge work. For a gay Hispanic man with a quarter century lived the act of reading demands a constant negotiation with contrary impulses, animal curiosity about the way literature is assembled, and awareness of privilege. I still have much to learn.

there's reasonable historical cover for it, of course (hard for lots more contestants to take the field in the time since), but positioning eliot at the end of their major-poets anchor seems like an admission that for the time being, the whole idea/function of a 'major poet' is outmoded. like, he got to be because he and his peers and the academy made him one, in that historical succession of majors. but after, just historically speaking, there aren't those. you might be able to find some that can be identified as sufficiently innovative, influential, working with the appropriate scope, and so on, but not while maintaining at least the fiction that gets play with the earlier figures that their elite pasttimes could be representative of englishness or anglo-saxon literary humanity or whatever. really the chain stops circa the victorian era, when all those novelists and the post-romantic english poets had their day, but also when the u.s. was making its biggest early claims to literary independence, so having to pick a loser american expatriate like eliot to be an honorary English poet is just a way of acknowledging that the Tradition was so specific a function of geopolitics (often in a very tight neighborhood of literary/political/religious activity) that it couldn't muster the forces to maintain itself in historical continuity across the division in power/influence of the anglophone world in the nineteenth century.

i read / am told that the last slot in that course is often at the instructor's discretion, it'd be interesting to see a list of their choices.

I am generally for opening up/questioning the canon and generally against "cleansing" the canon by removing all works that can be seen as in any way tinged by racism/genderism/colonialism/homophobia etc., or not so but written by authors with attitudes not acceptable today. Of course it's hard to say how far to go -- there's some value in continuing to read the books that people have been reading through the generations but there's also a tyranny of precedent that can result in perpetuating an ideology you don't want to perpetuate. Also the canon has always been in flux.

We can certainly throw names aroundof canonical authors: Morrison, Heaney, Bellow, De Lillo.

Eliot tried to make himself a canonical figure from the start, hence those hilarious and rong essays about James, Milton, the Romantics, etc.

the ones in their 'majors' sequence are basically the ones who wrote themselves into the 'english epics' Tradition, right?

and that would always remain a sticking point for anyone afterward, i take it: 'well, did they write a "prelude"?' playing the central-form/-genre card.

i thought for sure that the revive would be about the new yorker article http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges

“On or about December, 2014, student character changed,” Roger Copeland, a professor of theatre and dance, announced early one afternoon. We were sitting at a table in the Feve, a college-town grill. Copeland was wearing an extremely loud Hawaiian shirt. He has thinning silver hair, glasses that darken in the sunlight, and a theatrical style of diction that most people reserve for wild anecdotes at noisy cocktail parties. At one point, I looked up from my notepad to find that he had donned a rubber nose and glasses.

i think we should do a close reading

People who can't relate to George Eliot need to wait a couple years and try again.

and George Eliot did so much to understand faiths and peoples unfamiliar to her.

wat if english literature modarn day? john dryden hav ipad

the end of the english canon is seinfeld2000

http://jezebel.com/in-the-culture-war-between-students-and-professors-the-1781580133?rev=1467054414224

'how to teach an ancient rape joke' prof returns

i really, really do not like the way that author stereotypes his students into a few stock roles and then proceeds to explain how the students in those roles inhabit the social structure etc. of course students can fall into groups, but in my experience those groups are both more numerous and more complex than his sketch allows.

he's right about this, i suppose:

Too many of us have spent an exhausting semester mediating between those two kinds of students, only to discover at the end that both gave you negative evaluations: one saying that you inappropriately allowed your personal politics to influence classroom discussion, one saying you didn’t do enough to make the classroom a safe space for everyone

but he also seems to cast anyone who might find the "activist's" (telling choice of word there) in-class objections irritating or not-useful as "apathetic" and elitist. granted even dumb comments/"contributions" can be made very useful for discussion, but sometimes people can get really bullheaded and insistent that the conversation be steered back in the direction they wish, and sometimes that is not productive. i've experienced such folks as a student and a teacher.

anyway.

this point in re student evaluations is very important:

Maybe the instructor really, really deserves that bad evaluation. But students, in their attempts to protest oppression and marginalization in the university, often inadvertently perpetuate it. What students and instructors have in common is that we must participate in a system that often disproportionately punishes the very people we’re hoping to advocate for.

she.

i don't see why there's anything wrong with talking about student 'types' heuristically. i would consider it a sketch of knowledge-in-practice that the teacher has, and not at all exhaustive of it, meant more to represent the fact of that knowledge to others than to communicate its content.

it's the nature of the 'types' that she describes and the way she slots them into larger political forces... it seems both overly simplistic and a little uncharitable.

I taught Antigone just last semester. And I hope that students never stop being disturbed by it. If you’re mocking students for having a strong emotional response to that text, you haven’t read it.

this feels like consistently the key point to me. some literature is supposed to fuck you up. ppl that don't understand that don't actually know the literature v. well. the same conservatives freaking out over trigger warnings or whatever with regards to this stuff are equally likely to denounce teaching entirely modern lit that's actually no more fucked up if you sort of clear away the cobwebs of time.

https://twitter.com/ChicagoMaroon/status/768561465183862785

give them a medal already

hoo boy

i kept reading for the "That said..." graf but came it not

something kind of irresponsible about the scorched-earth (by academia standards) tone of that letter. there are good reasons to oppose "trigger warnings" (mostly because even restricted to their original context, that of PTSD sufferers, there are no good studies that suggest they are valuable), but the letter sounds more like the dean is settling imaginary scores than actually addressing policy questions.

yes

"If I want to take your money and give it to somebody I wish I was friends with as a massive honorarium for reading pablum at your graduation you'll STFU and like it"

There's only one group of people being coddled here.

If I had to guess, I'd put the University of Chicago low on the list of schools who have problems with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the rest of that kind of thing.

none dare call it signaling

After seeing that thing, I want to start a thread, but this is a good place as any...

Is there literally ONE good argument AGAINST "safe spaces." I honestly don't understand why any rational, empathetic human beiung would have a problem with a group of kids getting together on their own time to hang out in a room where someone isn't allowed to scream "FAGGOT" at them or whatever