Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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.

oh I see

i think kids just want iphones?

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.

mordy otm re my view. of course those reasons & ways to read are valid & important (& always part of reading, which one never leaves behind or should); my point was, as you say in orbit, “Maybe not in lit study”— that should not be the focus of academic study

i.e. those reasons & ways are not appropriate criteria for texts as object of study & analysis at university level

don’t mean to disparage book club reading (let along personal pleasure reading!) per se. i myself get v involved, personally, emotionally, with texts i read & love. and oft when you read a text, a text reads you

but as ryan & alfred point out, among university instructor’s primary challenges & goals is to teach ways of reading & writing which transcend and sublimate (without extinguishing) the ‘personal’

you don’t read homer or dante (or example at issue, ovid) at university looking for wisdom, truth, therapeutic self-insight, guide to life, or ways to make a better world

nb learning to read in ways which transcend the personal doesn’t necessarily mean New Critical formalist detachment, it’s also essential for work of (rhetorical, sociopolitical) critique

imo it’s more ‘empowering’ for university students to learn to read/ analyze texts (as rhetorical objects)— even & maybe especially texts alien to their own values— than to read texts to which they can personally relate & derive personal validation

(which is not deny importance of the latter! but again, imo that should not be primary focus or criteria of lit study)

ps by ‘sublimate’ mean something like german ‘aufheben’— at once preserve, cancel, suspend, transcend (maybe better translated 'sublate')

Intellectual one-upsmanship being a new social currency.

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Saturday, May 9, 2015 11:48 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this always existed

i mean i think this does relate to what we expect kids to derive from ovid, and that isn't clear to me at all tbh

imo it’s more ‘empowering’ for university students to learn to read/ analyze texts (as rhetorical objects)—

I mean, the advocates of trigger warnings and pre-emptively making sure no-one reads anything horrible won't even let the most dull and worthy 'deconstruction of Ovid's ideology' take place.

Which is to say I thoroughly get that people might not want to enter into conversation with some actual person who goes around defending rape; that you might not want to engage with someone you think is a rotter, even if they're a reasonable rotter looking for 'open discussion'; etc; we all blank out certain people, such as ILX user Cardamon for example

Those interactions with those people tend to just be aggravating

But a text is not like a person - you can, with great profit, sit down and read a horrible book that you totally disagree with, from cover to cover, several times, and really broaden your horizons by writing down in fine detail exactly how horrible it is

TBH though - and here I'm thinking about things like the recent protests over the 'Are You Beach Body Ready' adverts for weightlifting supplements on the London underground - I think a lot of these, on one level obvious over-reactions from the left are to do with the omnipresence of thumping idiot ideology on all channels

I.E. I'm a bit of an idiot to sit here scratching my head saying 'Whhyyy can't they just rrread and crrrriticise the rapey ancient poemmmmmsss?' when what's really going on is people looking for some way, any way, to carve out a space that isn't just boom boom we're big men in suits fuck you lose weight guns guns money money

^ This is not my clearest ILX post ever but dunno, what do you lot think

invigorating use of vernacular idioms

it's empowering for students to learn to articulate their points of disagreement with the canon, and to do this in the context of a classroom environment that lets them know that their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study. if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

their voices are just as legitimate as the voices of the authors they study.

lol what earth are you from?

?

maybe columbia is mad backwards, but when i studied english and art history students were literally never encouraged to examine texts from a totally uncritical standpoint. in fact, when it came to the classics, postcolonial and feminist critiques were de rigeur assigned supplemental readings.

Achebe's Heart of Darkness essay is a perennial favorite.

And Edward Said on Conrad generally.

The only way I know of to read anything with pleasure and profit is to read in the light of my personal experience and my borrowed knowledge of the world. You could call this "reading critically" or just reading mindfully, but it shouldn't be something one needs to be reminded or encouraged to do. It should just be how one lives one's life. The alternative is just too depressing to contemplate.

if students come away from a literature class feeling dominated by the texts that is a failure of the teacher.

Depends. There's a great deal of context one needs to supply in order to interpret that statement fully.

I would agree that a student must feel adequate to the task of engaging an author and finding the source of their authority in the text, rather than in their reputation, if they are going to derive any lasting good from it. But most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts. The purpose of introducing them to such classic texts isn't to 'teach' them the texts, so much as to introduce them to the authors and begin the possibility of an enduring conversation with a few of them.

most undergraduate students are still too impoverished in life experience to justify anything beyond a tentative judgment on most classic texts.

i don't think this is true. their judgment is going to be different than what it will be later on, it will come from a narrower perspective, but i don't think this means it's worse. it's like the de man essay, "blindness and insight." sometimes you can see more by not seeing everything, and young people are really good at that if they are bold enough. i even find this with the high school students i teach.