Good luck! I hope you can resist the temptation to become a purely hippie punching grievance machine. It seems like so many groups that start out to correct the excesses of political liberalism in art or journalism just trade liberalism for conservatism. I think it’s a hard balancing act to manage because that’s what it always ends up being as readers and subscribers will push and pull. I think it’s a worthy cause though and you seem well equipped to take it on.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this, and purely from my own perspective - how does one push back and yet also turn and see if you dropped the real value somewhere just behind you? know what i mean? A statement you make might take you further from a falsehood, but not necessarily to the truth. Is this why people play Golf, haha.
You often wind up trading one ideological framework for another. Probably the most common ones on the right are religion, money, and nationality or race.
Christian criticism actually makes a lot of sense for older works--the Divine Comedy is a religious allegory, after all. I'm not sure what it would tell you for most modern secular works, though there are people who detect vestigial Catholicism in Sally Rooney, for example. I don't really have enough experience with either to say.
I don't think economics has that much to say about literature in general--writers don't make money except in a few rare cases, so it's rarely a concern--but there may be a fruitful angle for economic criticism of literature. I don't know what.
There are a lot of older nationalistic works, some of some quality--there are lots of nineteenth-century novels about nationalism and so on. Writers started leaning left at least as early as the 30s, though some pulp novelists leaned right into the 80s. (What would you call Ian Fleming's James Bond?)
I don't know how far you want to get into the racial stuff--you're going to go from calling Philip Roth evil because he was a sexist to calling Philip Roth evil because he was Jewish. (Somehow right-leaning Jewish writers like Bellow and Wouk get forgotten here.) There have been many excellent novels about race from the left, of course. I'm not saying reversing the left's analytical framework might not yield something--there's a lot to be said about the endless portrayal of anything European-derived as evil--but you might not want to start with that or you'll get more of a far-right fanbase than you think.
My best guess would be to figure out when literary criticism took the turn you hate and go back before then. (Hey, it worked for Raphael and the pre-Raphaelites!) Flipping through Wikipedia's articles on literary theory to get an idea of possible starting points, the big ones pre-60s seem to be archetypal criticism, who focus on recurring archetypes, the formalists and in the US and UK the New Critics, who view the text as a connected structure rather than a product of its environment, and the Chicago school, which focuses on Aristotelian ideas of plot, character, and genre.
There are attempts at Darwinian criticism, using evolutionary theory, but without a biology background I don't think that's going be all that useful for you. Psychoanalytic criticism has fallen from favor, but the theories have been discredited in the scientific world so I don't think you're going to get much buy-in from anyone apart from a few octogenarians on the Upper West Side.
I'm not you, but to me the archetypal ones and the Chicago school sound like the most fun and the least 'literature sucks!'. You want to focus on the role of the wasteland, you can compare T.S.Eliot to the Inferno and post-apocalyptic sci-fi (my geek is showing), and you can trace out plot and character all you like. But obviously it's up to you.
EDIT: you've summarized most of these way better than I was stumbling around trying to do! Well, you did get as far as a master's in this subject, sorry for being presumptuous. I'll leave this up in case it's useful somehow.
It is good to read of a young person who understands the worth of literature.
It comes as a shock to learn that the teachers one thought were venerable by virtue of the position that attained have so little love of the subject matter they devoted their lives to.
But they devoted their lives to its destruction. They despise the greats, to whom they can not compare their own pitiful work. These people are not scholars: They are barbarians.
I made a reading deal with someone one Christmas - I recommended Tolstoys 'Master and Man', and they 'Never let me go'. I tried to enjoy it and failed, i think because of the surrealness. They didn't get past the first few pages of the Tolstoy i think. They missed a great pay off!
I had to look up the latter. Have read the author's name before but nothing of his. If it's fiction and I read on the cover that it's gone to the top of the NY Times bestseller list in the past fifty years, I avoid it. I know what they like.
haha, i'll bear that shortcut in mind. meanwhile if it has decades of analysis, translation, adaptation, and finally criticism, it's probably worth picking up!
Over the past few years, I've been looking elsewhere, to the writing avoided and even despised by academics. No James Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald, the darlings of perverse academic fetishists, to name but two, for me, thank you. I've found a gold mine of superior writing with marvelous ideas. Right now, I'm reading through fiction writers of the 1920s, like Galsworthy or Americans like Booth Tarkington. There is a wealth of material to enjoy that the academics have ascribed to "bourgeois middle-class dullards" with their typical contempt. Just stay away from the literary criticis in the academies and you'll find great material.
Haha! never heard of those! It is cool to discover greatness that didn't come with status or latter-day popularity - kind of rocks your world in a healthy way.
I realized some years ago that I loved reading the books I return to for the flow of the prose, the wordplay, the cadences of that author, as much or more as for the actual story. The books I return to over and over are as disparate in style as "Jane Eyre" or "Persuasion" (fairly dense prose) compared to PG Wodehouse's or Rex Stout's works (fairly light prose).
Just as tedious as a workmate who can't get out even a sentence without an F-word or two, I find it really annoying to be preached to in various ways about female empowerment, diversity, oppression, etc. when I'm trying to read in my leisure time - I suspect a lot of authors feel obliged to make sure they put their DEI plug in wherever they can, probably to get published.
A funny thing (to me, anyway) that I have become much more aware of in recent years, is how much authors - over the centuries - cite other contemporaneous authors or throw in what are essentially quotes from others, not to mention of course citing older sources, which you only catch if you have read deeply and widely enough to recognize them from the other sources - and composers of music have always done the same, borrowing back and forth.
I love my Chopin and Beethoven volumes of music, but I also have a volume of piano music by Hindemith that to be honest I value principally for its title (I can't even begin to play most of it!): "Ludus Tonalis" which is "Game of Tones", and I think that is descriptive of one way to look at music, each piece and often whole volumes a game of tones, as literature also is a game of words.
I'm excited to read more! I felt this way as an undergraduate at Princeton and never could understand why my thrill at discussing literature for its own sake was looked down upon as not sufficiently sophisticated. The struggle continued during graduate school at Columbia as I was forced to learn all the various ways of politically mangling the literature I loved. I can't wait to join you in this celebration of good writing!
I relate so much to what you wrote. About 20 years ago, I was taking graduate English Lit and Creative Writing courses. I had full intention to go on to a Ph.D. It was then, a creative writing professor publicly attacked me and my fiction because it "is the duty of a modern writer to advocate for a progressive [Marxist] world" and I clearly wasn't even trying. A different professor, this one of literary theory, told me that unless I was willing to apply a post-modern and Marxist theoretical framework on literary interpretation, I would never be accepted in any English program in the country.
He proved correct.
It's been now 20 years since my academic and career plans evaporated because I wouldn't go along with what struck me as complete nonsense. I wasn't willing to throw away my values and what I loved about literature in order to go along with what they wanted me to do.
I had a similar experience with academia, with both my students who tended to the far right, and faculty who leaned far left. I returned to academia at 60, after a 30 year career as a journalist, a public relations leader in New York City, and a corporate communications executive.
I felt such excitement to go back into the fold, and take that MA I had never taken the time to get. I expected vibrant debates about various strategies, and instead found an endless pile of old academic papers, which I was required to read and respond to. I could not find the vigour I had expected. The vast majority of students were undergraduates who rolled over to graduate school. Neither students nor faculty had ever stepped foot into the world of business communications, journalism or literature. It was so disappointing! So I very much look forward to investigating your approach.
I love this idea - like I love the History Reclaimed website. Self explanatory really! Looking forward to reading your work. Noticing the water we swim in is the first thing, and then finding the words to describe it comes next! Good luck!
Hi Liza, and welcome to Substack! Sorry to hear that the “ivory tower” was incapable of accommodating your passion for literature. But I’m curious about your conclusion that the contemporary study of literature on college campuses encourages students to feel that “literary study must necessarily rest on far-left ideologies” or that “fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism have become dominated by ideological extremists who use literature to promote lopsided agendas.” You also speak of your rather ambitious desire to “dismantle the idea that literature must necessarily be understood through arbitrarily political lenses” and to “strive to refocus literary study on the humanistic tradition,” to “make a change in the way that we think about literature in the 21st century.” All of this to “promote literary education and foster appreciation for the written word,” and to “restore the idea of literature as a work of art rather than as a political vehicle.”
I’m not being facetious, Liza, when I say “My, my!!” In the writing that I have done, and in my decades of reading over many genres, it has never occurred to me that literature was in such dire straits! My experience has been that great literature, in countless cases, can be deeply political - also true of poetry, prose, and any other form of written expression. I’ve always assumed that it was up to the writer, not the form or the tradition, to infuse their work with their chosen content, without external restriction. Of course, I haven’t had the benefit of the type of education that you’ve been exposed to, so I can only say that I await, with bated breath and great anticipation, to learn from the enlightening insights that will surely be forthcoming as a result of your efforts! Again, welcome, and thank you in advance…..!
When I was getting my MFA in theatre, in the late 1980s, there was a PhD student teaching one of the huge undergrad survey courses. He saw every work of art though a Marxist critical lens, and taught every play from that perspective only. I always felt sorry for the hundreds of kids who had great works of art reduced to the same, single, flat dimension.
Those critical lenses can be interesting, but no one of them provides The Truth about a piece of art (or an aspect of the world). Why can't professors arm students with a variety of tools and let them find their own way?
Yeah, it's kind of like trying to categorize every chemical compound by its melting point. They have melting points (well, some things turn into gas or break into something else when you heat them), it's just not the only thing about them.
Good luck! I hope you can resist the temptation to become a purely hippie punching grievance machine. It seems like so many groups that start out to correct the excesses of political liberalism in art or journalism just trade liberalism for conservatism. I think it’s a hard balancing act to manage because that’s what it always ends up being as readers and subscribers will push and pull. I think it’s a worthy cause though and you seem well equipped to take it on.
Yeah, I've been thinking about this, and purely from my own perspective - how does one push back and yet also turn and see if you dropped the real value somewhere just behind you? know what i mean? A statement you make might take you further from a falsehood, but not necessarily to the truth. Is this why people play Golf, haha.
Depends.
You often wind up trading one ideological framework for another. Probably the most common ones on the right are religion, money, and nationality or race.
Christian criticism actually makes a lot of sense for older works--the Divine Comedy is a religious allegory, after all. I'm not sure what it would tell you for most modern secular works, though there are people who detect vestigial Catholicism in Sally Rooney, for example. I don't really have enough experience with either to say.
I don't think economics has that much to say about literature in general--writers don't make money except in a few rare cases, so it's rarely a concern--but there may be a fruitful angle for economic criticism of literature. I don't know what.
There are a lot of older nationalistic works, some of some quality--there are lots of nineteenth-century novels about nationalism and so on. Writers started leaning left at least as early as the 30s, though some pulp novelists leaned right into the 80s. (What would you call Ian Fleming's James Bond?)
I don't know how far you want to get into the racial stuff--you're going to go from calling Philip Roth evil because he was a sexist to calling Philip Roth evil because he was Jewish. (Somehow right-leaning Jewish writers like Bellow and Wouk get forgotten here.) There have been many excellent novels about race from the left, of course. I'm not saying reversing the left's analytical framework might not yield something--there's a lot to be said about the endless portrayal of anything European-derived as evil--but you might not want to start with that or you'll get more of a far-right fanbase than you think.
My best guess would be to figure out when literary criticism took the turn you hate and go back before then. (Hey, it worked for Raphael and the pre-Raphaelites!) Flipping through Wikipedia's articles on literary theory to get an idea of possible starting points, the big ones pre-60s seem to be archetypal criticism, who focus on recurring archetypes, the formalists and in the US and UK the New Critics, who view the text as a connected structure rather than a product of its environment, and the Chicago school, which focuses on Aristotelian ideas of plot, character, and genre.
There are attempts at Darwinian criticism, using evolutionary theory, but without a biology background I don't think that's going be all that useful for you. Psychoanalytic criticism has fallen from favor, but the theories have been discredited in the scientific world so I don't think you're going to get much buy-in from anyone apart from a few octogenarians on the Upper West Side.
I'm not you, but to me the archetypal ones and the Chicago school sound like the most fun and the least 'literature sucks!'. You want to focus on the role of the wasteland, you can compare T.S.Eliot to the Inferno and post-apocalyptic sci-fi (my geek is showing), and you can trace out plot and character all you like. But obviously it's up to you.
EDIT: you've summarized most of these way better than I was stumbling around trying to do! Well, you did get as far as a master's in this subject, sorry for being presumptuous. I'll leave this up in case it's useful somehow.
It is good to read of a young person who understands the worth of literature.
It comes as a shock to learn that the teachers one thought were venerable by virtue of the position that attained have so little love of the subject matter they devoted their lives to.
But they devoted their lives to its destruction. They despise the greats, to whom they can not compare their own pitiful work. These people are not scholars: They are barbarians.
I made a reading deal with someone one Christmas - I recommended Tolstoys 'Master and Man', and they 'Never let me go'. I tried to enjoy it and failed, i think because of the surrealness. They didn't get past the first few pages of the Tolstoy i think. They missed a great pay off!
I had to look up the latter. Have read the author's name before but nothing of his. If it's fiction and I read on the cover that it's gone to the top of the NY Times bestseller list in the past fifty years, I avoid it. I know what they like.
haha, i'll bear that shortcut in mind. meanwhile if it has decades of analysis, translation, adaptation, and finally criticism, it's probably worth picking up!
Over the past few years, I've been looking elsewhere, to the writing avoided and even despised by academics. No James Joyce or Scott Fitzgerald, the darlings of perverse academic fetishists, to name but two, for me, thank you. I've found a gold mine of superior writing with marvelous ideas. Right now, I'm reading through fiction writers of the 1920s, like Galsworthy or Americans like Booth Tarkington. There is a wealth of material to enjoy that the academics have ascribed to "bourgeois middle-class dullards" with their typical contempt. Just stay away from the literary criticis in the academies and you'll find great material.
Haha! never heard of those! It is cool to discover greatness that didn't come with status or latter-day popularity - kind of rocks your world in a healthy way.
On my gosh, you are in for a treat! There are thousands of novels and novellas no one reads now that you will enjoy and even treasure.
I would also love to see resources compiled for writing spaces / community and education that align with your mission. I myself could use them.
Working on a few right now, stay tuned :)
I realized some years ago that I loved reading the books I return to for the flow of the prose, the wordplay, the cadences of that author, as much or more as for the actual story. The books I return to over and over are as disparate in style as "Jane Eyre" or "Persuasion" (fairly dense prose) compared to PG Wodehouse's or Rex Stout's works (fairly light prose).
Just as tedious as a workmate who can't get out even a sentence without an F-word or two, I find it really annoying to be preached to in various ways about female empowerment, diversity, oppression, etc. when I'm trying to read in my leisure time - I suspect a lot of authors feel obliged to make sure they put their DEI plug in wherever they can, probably to get published.
A funny thing (to me, anyway) that I have become much more aware of in recent years, is how much authors - over the centuries - cite other contemporaneous authors or throw in what are essentially quotes from others, not to mention of course citing older sources, which you only catch if you have read deeply and widely enough to recognize them from the other sources - and composers of music have always done the same, borrowing back and forth.
I love my Chopin and Beethoven volumes of music, but I also have a volume of piano music by Hindemith that to be honest I value principally for its title (I can't even begin to play most of it!): "Ludus Tonalis" which is "Game of Tones", and I think that is descriptive of one way to look at music, each piece and often whole volumes a game of tones, as literature also is a game of words.
I'm excited to read more! I felt this way as an undergraduate at Princeton and never could understand why my thrill at discussing literature for its own sake was looked down upon as not sufficiently sophisticated. The struggle continued during graduate school at Columbia as I was forced to learn all the various ways of politically mangling the literature I loved. I can't wait to join you in this celebration of good writing!
Definitely looking forward to seeing where this goes.
I relate so much to what you wrote. About 20 years ago, I was taking graduate English Lit and Creative Writing courses. I had full intention to go on to a Ph.D. It was then, a creative writing professor publicly attacked me and my fiction because it "is the duty of a modern writer to advocate for a progressive [Marxist] world" and I clearly wasn't even trying. A different professor, this one of literary theory, told me that unless I was willing to apply a post-modern and Marxist theoretical framework on literary interpretation, I would never be accepted in any English program in the country.
He proved correct.
It's been now 20 years since my academic and career plans evaporated because I wouldn't go along with what struck me as complete nonsense. I wasn't willing to throw away my values and what I loved about literature in order to go along with what they wanted me to do.
I'm starting my courses as an English major this week! I found this post at just the perfect time, this was very encouraging!
Dear Liza,
I had a similar experience with academia, with both my students who tended to the far right, and faculty who leaned far left. I returned to academia at 60, after a 30 year career as a journalist, a public relations leader in New York City, and a corporate communications executive.
I felt such excitement to go back into the fold, and take that MA I had never taken the time to get. I expected vibrant debates about various strategies, and instead found an endless pile of old academic papers, which I was required to read and respond to. I could not find the vigour I had expected. The vast majority of students were undergraduates who rolled over to graduate school. Neither students nor faculty had ever stepped foot into the world of business communications, journalism or literature. It was so disappointing! So I very much look forward to investigating your approach.
This is a fight worth having. Well done.
Hope you have a good start here
Taking up the good fight. More power to you.
I love this idea - like I love the History Reclaimed website. Self explanatory really! Looking forward to reading your work. Noticing the water we swim in is the first thing, and then finding the words to describe it comes next! Good luck!
Just coming across your Substack now - what a great find!
Hi Liza, and welcome to Substack! Sorry to hear that the “ivory tower” was incapable of accommodating your passion for literature. But I’m curious about your conclusion that the contemporary study of literature on college campuses encourages students to feel that “literary study must necessarily rest on far-left ideologies” or that “fields such as publishing, academia, and journalism have become dominated by ideological extremists who use literature to promote lopsided agendas.” You also speak of your rather ambitious desire to “dismantle the idea that literature must necessarily be understood through arbitrarily political lenses” and to “strive to refocus literary study on the humanistic tradition,” to “make a change in the way that we think about literature in the 21st century.” All of this to “promote literary education and foster appreciation for the written word,” and to “restore the idea of literature as a work of art rather than as a political vehicle.”
I’m not being facetious, Liza, when I say “My, my!!” In the writing that I have done, and in my decades of reading over many genres, it has never occurred to me that literature was in such dire straits! My experience has been that great literature, in countless cases, can be deeply political - also true of poetry, prose, and any other form of written expression. I’ve always assumed that it was up to the writer, not the form or the tradition, to infuse their work with their chosen content, without external restriction. Of course, I haven’t had the benefit of the type of education that you’ve been exposed to, so I can only say that I await, with bated breath and great anticipation, to learn from the enlightening insights that will surely be forthcoming as a result of your efforts! Again, welcome, and thank you in advance…..!
When I was getting my MFA in theatre, in the late 1980s, there was a PhD student teaching one of the huge undergrad survey courses. He saw every work of art though a Marxist critical lens, and taught every play from that perspective only. I always felt sorry for the hundreds of kids who had great works of art reduced to the same, single, flat dimension.
Those critical lenses can be interesting, but no one of them provides The Truth about a piece of art (or an aspect of the world). Why can't professors arm students with a variety of tools and let them find their own way?
Yeah, it's kind of like trying to categorize every chemical compound by its melting point. They have melting points (well, some things turn into gas or break into something else when you heat them), it's just not the only thing about them.