Literature is itself, not grist for someone's theoretical mill, and it is reductionistic in the worst way to treat it as such. There is a tendency in modern intellectual circles to try to subsume other points of view under one's own theoretical umbrella. Physical science tries to subsume 'culture' under the 'universe,' while the prevalent culture criticism tries to subsume the 'universe' under 'culture.' Why does one thing have to eat all the others, like Chronus and his children?
My experience is somewhat like yours in a distorted mirror. I am much older and went to a Jesuit college and a public university back in the 1980s, but I observed some of the same things back then. There was less co-opting of literature for social theory than now, but there was some; there was also a tendency to run every book through the critical theory du jour whether that made any sense or not.
I have been on the border between the arts and the sciences for my whole life. I studied mathematics and physics in college, and also literature and philosophy, and I gave them equal time and importance. I wrote poetry all through my graduate work in mathematics. I left my mathematics PhD unfinished essentially for aesthetic reasons: what the faculty wanted me to work on was not beautiful enough. Mathematics is more akin to poetry than to the other sciences. It is pursued for its own beauty, created for its own reasons. Eliot's Waste Land has more in common with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem than with gender theory or critiques of the patriarchy.
I teach physics and mathematics at a university, and being naturally contrarian, I am the lone voice fighting the ridiculous overemphasis on STEM which is so prevalent. (Everyone seems to find this ironic for some reason.) The ideal curriculum seems to be STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, (a few other courses, for well-roundedness you know, it doesn't matter what), STEM, STEM, Career. It's as if we are trying as hard as we can to turn everyone into Babbitt. The humanities are important. Literature is important. And also, as you point out so well, literature needs to be allowed to be what it is: works of art in the medium of words, not case studies for the analysis of the most currently fashionable oppression.
I tend to express myself analytically, so I'll end with something more visceral. When I see a work of literature subjected to the kind of thing you describe, it breaks my heart. It is as if I were watching someone toss a baby into the air and catch it on a bayonet. It calls forth a cry of pity and fear, but unlike tragedy, no catharsis.
Sorry for the lengthy screed, I couldn't make it stop.
As someone with a literature degree (I also studied health sciences) back when they actually taught with integrity, I have observed these trends. I worked as a tutor and caregiver to a young man at a very liberal school later on. He needed me to read his literature reading assignment. However, I was appalled at what they were having him read, and resigned from this little side job when I could not in good conscience read the garbage they were calling literature out loud.
That sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s part of the weaponizing and propagandizing of literature. It’s not education. It’s more akin to communist re-education sadly.
100% agree with all of the above. My company has a tutoring branch, and I see this every day. It's even worse at the university level than the high school level, and the communist propagandizing is very real.
I don't think calling the various approaches subsumed under "Critical Theory" or "PostModernism" "communist propagandizing" is at all an improvement over the reductive approaches you quite correctly object to.
This marks you as yet another blathering Alt-Right philistine who wouldn't know "communist propaganda" if it came up and bit you on the knee.
You mean that imposing Marx on literature is not communist propaganda? I guess it must just be a deeply thoughtful literary approach from people with deeply thoughtful ideals. As someone who comes from a post-Soviet background, I think I would know what communist propaganda is better than you, buddy.
Calling everything "alt-right" that you don't agree with is exactly the sort of dangerous rhetoric I am calling out here. Words have meaning.
What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though? Marxists would argue that’s there’s nothing in these theories that have anything to do with class - except as an after thought in “intersectionality”. Marx wasn’t a suffragette, he wasn’t a fan of homosexuality, he didn’t even begin to think of trans or cis, and he would put all these people in the oppressor class if they owned capital.
He wasn’t a fan of making a living, personal hygiene (at one point, his filthy skin was so infected by erupting boils that he couldn’t sit), parenting (his two daughters committed suicide), and he was a hardcore racist. In fact, the only positive thing he did for civilization was when he died on 14 April, 1883, although at least 50 years too late.
Liberalism is more about freedom and less about imposing views onto others. Only the bravest rebel would be a neo-liberal in the humanities. Being a Marxist is the cool thing, or post-modern garbage. I would say that the Marxists have the benefit that if you agree with their loony assumptions, they actually have logical conclusions. The post-modernist, critical mindlessness seems to be nothing more than posturing.
I think the best example of where creative work is happening is to check out which classes people crash to enjoy the lectures. No one does this in English classes anymore, and they used to. I have seen them in history, foreign policy/government, and a few other fields. There is no Niall Ferguson or Paul Krugman in the humanities right now. They are frumpy old ladies who are easily offended and cannot bear to have anyone question their assumptions.
I actually think that the strangest aspect of humanities professors is that they are so similar to Victorian women. They are have the same thoughts, and none can bear to hear anything outside of their narrow views.
Indeed. Find me a literature student arguing Hume and Adam Smith were right about everything and I will be impressed. Tepid Marxism, not much.
What people often miss is that Marxism dropped the concern with social class as a source of oppression and exploitation and moved to other social differences while retaining the oppressor/oppressed framework. It stopped being about workers vs owners of capital when it was convenient.
> What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though?
Marx and his theories didn't stand still when Marx died. There's a lineage to today's. What if "Marx wasn’t a suffragette"? By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
> The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
As for the leftists, after the late 70s they ultimately they found class to be an inconvenient subject, and that they really despised the working class for not being sophisticated enough for their likeling (plus modern academy leftists want to hang out with the elites and get publishing deals, and grants, and such, that the elites control, which makes the whole class critique thing a no-go).
> By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
Not at all. Suffragettism was often looked at as just a side show for privileged women. Marxism did move on, but if it was merely following liberal trends then those trends were primarily liberal, not Marxist.
Labels flyin', now. All those static, static labels, shocking everyone to irritation. Well. How have definitions changed, and--here's the tricky part--what have been the defining forces within the world that changed them? What's dominated the world over the last 30 years? One of those -isms.
You are correct. Marxism reduces people to categories. Which is stupid. Less stupid in his time than it is now. Stupid then. But unimaginably stupid now. Modern ‘studies’ also does that. You are black, a woman, one eyed - whatever. Your surface characteristics, which is all they are override you as a human. You are put into a box and told that is your experience. Although gender/queer/race/feminist studies is not technically Marxist they emerged from Marxist professors and Marxists everywhere when it became obvious Marxism as an economic theory has terrible effects and can’t rationally be argued. So, they changed the categories and re-divided.
Ask yourself this - how many ‘_________ studies’ profs are also economically Marxist? All of them. Show me a gender studies prof who is a capitalist and I would eat my hat.
These people don't care about liberal thought—it was never about that. It's about creating a myopic narrative and shutting out all viewpoints that deviate from the tiny window they've created. Hence anything that is not grotesquely far to the left is labeled "alt-right." But we all know horseshoe theory, so clearly he is projecting.
I dunno man. I've been a Liberal since the 70s, a combination of McGovern and Truman. It's sad to see a proud tradition reduce itself into a reactionary collective. Which applies to both sides. I loved your insight, and reality doesn't have a political bias.
You're half right. It's not communist propaganda per se, it's the propaganda of the uniparty of "progress", adopted not just by leftists and self-identifying as "establishment critics" (lol), but by every corporation, career bureaucrat, fashionable public intellectual, journalist, and aspiration elite wanabees.
But you're also full wrong: it's origin is leftist thought, from the 60s and 70s, which peaked and pioneered most of the cliches served today. The rest is just incremental updates. And that thought identified as communist more often than not back then. It's just that today's leftists shed the pretense of caring about the working class and class struggle (at best they ask for more taxes for the rich, but cozy up to every elite narrative, and suck to mega-corps and moguls pandering to their slogans).
Yes, Communism, or at least Marxist-Leninism, had consistent analytical thought if you could hold your nose when agreeing to their assumptions. Most post-modernist BS is little more than mental masturbation. I still have no idea how Foucault became so respected. It is a struggle to find anything of his that was not an academic equivalent of trying to be cool in the high school lunch room.
I just quit a graduate education program after completing all the coursework for this reason. When we treat every child as if they are intellectually disabled and likely in need of gender affirming social emotional lessons on the daily, we are no longer teachers, we are propagandists.
How sad. I respect your decision. That would be very difficult. The time and resources spent, but I would not choose to be a tool of the propaganda machine either. It’s heartbreaking. We somehow need to see this madness stop.
How do you feel about the accusation that many of the individuals who have promoted this system are exercising misplaced maternal instincts? Many have noticed that spaces that have succumbed to this form of lunacy tend to be female dominated, especially rich, childless females. I am thinking of Cory Clark in psychology (not humanities, but I can remember her name), or others who have examined this subject. This feels wrong to me, but the evidence has seemed strong. I wonder how we as a society can remedy certain unproductive female biases in a manner than is not prejudicial, assuming that such biases exist.
I do see this pattern and have had similar thoughts myself. But I am childless and find telling others how to live their lives and manage their affairs abhorrent. I have never desired to become a moral scold.
So, I’m not sure I understand what drives this behavior. Perhaps you need to add self-righteousness into the equation. Or, at least a sense of arrogance.
Thank goodness my M.A. in literature dates back to 1976. I dabbled in mother-child psychobabble in my paper on Frankenstein, but for the rest it was the literature itself with its motifs and metaphors and historical and social milieus that interested me.
As an upper school teacher in the 1980s and 1990s, I began to hear deconstructionist stuff from my colleagues with Ph.Ds. Well, I thought, amused, to each his own.
When I changed schools and taught only middle schoolers, I didn't have to listen to pretentious talk any more. A mixed blessing: Not only did the younger teachers in my department not spout Derrida, but in fact they knew nothing at all. They hadn't read Vanity Fair in college, they didn't know who Trollope was, they hadn't studied English or American history. They didn't even know Civil Rights history: They hadn't heard of Emmett Till.
They were products of Teachers College, and before "writing units" they studied How to Write a Paragraph booklets. I lived in a state of professional astonishment: You're telling me you have to read up on how to write a paragraph?
What did they get their degrees in? Education? For which, I guess, the writing of paragraphs was optional.
I'm sorry for today's students, taught initially by undereducated elementary and middle school teachers and later by pretentious I don't know whats. We are seeing the results in far too many young people, empty vessels wearing pretty scarves and marching to the beat of a murderous unseen ayatollah.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections. It truly is tragic and wrong. Young people deserve a good education not propaganda and fluff. I taught college age before working in the counseling field. I hear you loud and clear. I still try to invest in young people and mentor some when possible. It’s sad.
Thanks. It was just a side job. I was glad to help this disabled student until it violated my principles so much I felt it better to resign. I had a full time job days, so I just did it to help.
For mass market silly literature, I highly recommend "How to be an Anti-Racist" or "White Fragility." The latter is not as terribly written, but it is difficult to imagine that the author could have gotten this published in any other era.
For general silliness, check out any book that sounds like a 1990's Lifetime Network made for TV movie. If you look at books with the words "deconstruct" and "queer" or "gender" in them, just open to a middle section and see how long the sentences are. If the are really long, it is probably a good candidate for a shit book.
In general, the quality of the writing has gotten so bad. History books are like a fun Brad Pitt movie compared to the dreadful prose in so many literary works, or worse, anything with the word "critical" in it. In general, certain fields are simply dead. If anything important were happening, people would have fought to preserve the mission, or at least the relevance of their fields and departments. Clearly no one cared.
The fact of the matter is that if every one of these departments were to disappear tomorrow, not one would notice. Presidential helicopters do come on to campus to pick up literary critics for emergency white house visits (my history honors program professor at university was buddies with Bill Clinton at Yale, and they picked him up like this sometimes). These fields were allowed to rot because no responsible adults were watching.
It's been too many years ago...but I remember thinking to myself that reading these crass words out loud to a young man was not something I was willing to do. He and his family were sad to see me resign, but I couldn't in good conscience read those. The university was a well known liberal arts college in my area. The only reason I took the job was to help out someone with a disability so they could do the basic things necessary to attend college. I was glad to help until those raunchy books made it too much of a conflict internally. I honestly can't remember the titles. But I thought to myself that if this is what he's paying thousands of dollars tuition to study, our country is going downhill fast.
A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have believed these kind of stories. I was lucky to have throughout high school and most of college good professors who would judge your writings not based on the content itself but rather in it’s structure, the strength of the arguments and cohesive writing. But for some reason in the last few years this new breed of “professionals” invaded all educational spaces with the sole purpose of making sure everyone had the same viewpoints as them. I haven’t encountered them ever since I graduated but I am worried about the future of education.
'There is something grotesquely wrong with people who devote their lives to English literature—and I have since figured out that it is because they somehow never realize that they’re not doing literature.' yep - they're philistines.
Do you have a sense of why and how literature departments took this direction? My background is in philosophy, and when I’ve read things by US literary scholars it often strikes me as a super idiosyncratic school of political philosophy. I’ve wondered a lot why this is the case. Is there a good way to learn their idiom?
(When I read critical theory, my inner monologue tends to go “what does ‘totalizing’ mean and why does it axiomatically lead to totalitarianism, what does ‘closure’ really mean, why is it assumed without argument that ‘closure’ sucks, et cetera.”)
I wrote a piece a few months back on the history of literary theory! I tried to stay fairly objective there, but it chronicles the development of literary theory and explains how we got to where we are today. Check it out if you have a moment, might be a great place to start to answer your question :)
Thanks for that link. It brought back a few memories from university literature courses. At the time it all seemed terribly profound but now it seems like losing the essence of literature which I believe is story telling. Thanks for the summation.
Thank you for writing this wonderful essay. I’m a painter and a published Poet. Who are your favorite painters? Who are your favorite Poets? I managed to successfully navigate the M.F.A. experience in painting after fighting with my original 3 faculty advisors. Grad school was all about producing an exhibition with an easily recognizable theme. Stupid me had deviated from that and was almost expelled. As for being published - fortunately there are hundreds of publishers, it’s a matter of finding the sweet spot: where your work fits their sensibilities. For the newbies - avoid all contests - waste of time and the money sent to Submittable. Once again thank you for your insights and scholarship.Shona Tovah.
Had you been expelled for not conforming you would have been the Howard Roark of painters/poets, for that you should be proud. I am also an artist, more of a hobby, and have zero clue as to how people who love to create can conform to someone else's standards. I can only create that which resonates within my soul, tell me to draw/paint something you want and it's almost impossible for me to do so as I need to be inspired in order to create. More and more each day I view Ayn Rand as a prophet, she lived through the Bolshevik revolution and tried to warn America about what was coming.
Absolutely wonderful essay, yet heartbreaking, too. I love world literature and was tempted to study it in university, but some instinct warned me to stay away, and so I studied economics instead (where Keynes was worshipped). The Long March through the intuitions has borne poisonous fruit.
LOL @ Keynes worshippers. Relatable. Glad you were able to stay in touch with literature regardless and sounds like you made a smart choice! Thank you for your kind words!
There is an issue of this all over academia. In college I found myself on the outside looking in a lot of the time. I was a theatre major and my advisor was highly political in the sphere, but it was always the same political issues of women and race. When the director who would become a mentor to me put on the show Assassins, he got a lot of flack from that side of things because he was putting on a show that on paper had majority white men in it. But the cast ended up all female or non-binary and so was the crew, he pushed what we thought we knew about being an American in a way that I had never experienced in another college theatre class because so much of the discussion was on race and gender. Not that those things aren't important, but they aren't the only thing important about art.
Kind of heartbreaking. I know what you mean, though. Literature as a field of study is perhaps the one that most suffers from the current narrowing of minds in the Humanities… that said, I suspect the *where* you were studying it also matters. (Maybe? Not sure.)
Ironically, all the papers and topics for exploration you’ve mentioned sound rather worthwhile to me. As a prof, I’d have been curious to read them. When I myself taught undergrads (not literature, but religious studies, which is close enough, especially in the politicization department), I always tried to walk that line that respected a wide variety of opinions, but also to provide pushback, so students can hone their arguments and lean the difference between making a case for something and merely reciting dogma or opinion. Unfortunately there’s a worrying trend in universities that seems to favour dogma over inquiry and debate (not all debate is in good faith, but I don’t mean people who are just being trolls).
I do hope it’s not all fatal to the study of literature as such—or to any other field. It’s probably going to take the pendulum swinging in the other direction, or conversations to move outside academia for a while, though. Intellectual incest, as it appears, is not good for anyone.
Dogma over inquiry — exactly. When I was young, this same ethos in my very religious family and community pushed me into the arms of the left. But, I only understood the left superficially and could not see what was burgeoning.
Now, I see that the will to power and authority can warp any belief system — no matter how good the original intentions. The end game is always dominance and coercion. There appears to be something intrinsic to human nature that some of us don’t feel safe unless we are dominating others and controlling the narrative. I’ve never held this desire and don’t understand it.
In one post you have not only make me proud of my (largely “themeless”) approach during my HS teaching days but you also validate the 18+ years of near-weekly classic literature podcast episodes I’ve hosted and released. (We’re about to finish “Emma”. I think most of the former Emma-haters have gotten over it by now 😛)
NOW when I hear listeners describe the show as hosted by, “the English teacher you always wished you had” it’ll make more sense why so many of them are young.
I’m horrified to hear that an uncompromising love of Humanities appears to be dead (another thing Boomers shoved out of the way then knifed in the back?) in schools I would have expected to know better—like Columbia—but maybe opportunities to learn and Find Your People is finding a more egalitarian path to people’s brains. The humanities are firmly entrenched on YouTube. Between Philosophy Tube, Contrapoints, HBomberguy, and Alexander Avila I feel like I’ve covered a good chunk of philosophy and sociology that I missed in school—and they’re pretty clear, they’re “giving away their University Education” for us to access and enjoy for free.
Honestly, they’re so enjoyable to watch I rarely notice how much I’ve learned, but it’s quite a bit.
I’ll be sharing your Substack with my CraftLit listeners. I hope they visit and let you know you aren’t quite so alone in the way you love literature.
Still, I’m sorry you had to watch the lifeblood drain out of the Humanities during your time at Uni. No one should have to witness a crime like that. (Not even a Thackeray lover 😏)
(Btw, one of the most interesting students I taught in lower Manhattan was a white boy, homeschooled his whole life, who finally had to start coming to a public high school—because math —and had just finished reading Vanity Fear for the second time (“For fun”) before he began as a freshman.
This kid scared the bejujus out of most teachers. I loved him in all his snarky glory. And I loved that he became a hero of the school because he was such an excellent freestyle rapper! Wonderful what classic lit can do for a brain!)
Would you mind sharing links to the resources you mentioned as well as your podcast? I never had the money for a university degree and would love to partake. Thank you!
Wow. Intense. Had a very similar freshman experience — finger wagging and a C on my first paper for a wrong opinion. I did go on to do a PhD in literature, but it was a battle every step. Eventually fired after a decade as a university prof — more wrong opinions. ✌🏻
Re: “There is something grotesquely wrong with people who teach English literature…”
There’s something grotesquely wrong with your argument’s logic: it rests on a hasty generalization. I suspected this when I read your Note announcing your publication in my feed. Reading this post rather confirms it.
You attended Columbia, probably the most “lefty” university in the country. But even so, I find very suspect your story that you got a C on your first college paper because the professor just didn’t like your ideas and not because it was, you know, your first college paper, it likely sucked — I know mine did — and your prof was showing you the bar you had to meet. You didn’t graduate (to go by what you wrote here), but you walked away with the notions that literature is being taught like this everywhere, English teachers are universally obsessed with politics, and English departments across the country are crawling with leftists demanding their students adopt their politics (like the straw man prof demanding students become atheists in “God’s Not Dead” — something that never, ever happens and is only real in the imaginations of evangelicals with a persecution complex).
You are suffering under a terrible and enormous misapprehension. In fact, literature is almost never taught like this. Maybe in your hoity-toity high school it was. (Private school kid?) But in ordinary schools and colleges across this country, teachers and professors consider it a big lift to get students to analyze “the text in itself” per the New Criticism of the 1940s. When I was an English major at first a community college and then a state university that focused on liberal arts, I took only two classes in four years in which any mention of feminism was even made — one was a single-author course on an explicitly feminist writer, and the other was my critical theory course where I was obliged to learn different theoretical frameworks, including feminism.
As students should be obliged … because in fact there is good literature out there with feminist dimensions to it which ought to be studied. Just because you saw feminism applied to an absurd degree in cases ill-suited to it doesn’t mean the theory has no meaningful application. The same goes for other critical theories. In grad school at a state flagship university, I saw how critical theory could be misapplied. I saw postmodernist "cultural critics" talk their way up their own asses. Yeah, I'm aware all of that happens now and then. But much more often, I saw theory smartly applied, used to crack open interesting lines of inquiry about works of literature.
Before making such sweeping, slanderous claims about the teachers of literature, who are largely well-meaning people who love books and try to pass their passion along, you really ought to expand your experience so you’re not so prone to fallacy. In your Note, you said you had “left academia” — this implied to me that you were a former professor who had enough of what you saw there, and that’s what intrigued me enough to come here and read this post. (I’m a former composition prof who left because of perennially low pay that kept me poor.) But it turns out you’re just a dropout with an axe to grind over that — which makes me wonder whether your experience of college wasn’t largely brought about by the axes you were grinding there.
Jeff, her having dropped out doesn't invalidate Liza's argument, but it's not irrelevant. It's context for the argument. Even Liza thinks so, or she wouldn't have made it part of the story.
I went to grad school much more recently, graduating a decade ago. I'm aware theory is ubiquitous. (That's not the nub of my objection. See Heather's reply re: "data points" and my response to it; that's the nub.) I'm no big fan of theory, either. Even as an undergrad, I believed it often diverted attention away from better uses of scholars' time and thought. In grad school, as I mentioned, I saw theory misapplied at times. I saw literature subjected to "pretzel logic," leading to bizarre interpretations. And not always for the sake of liberal politics: conservatives play that game, too. But it's one thing to say theory is misapplied in some cases, quite another to say it's useless garbage and literature should be "left alone." The refusal ever to look at literature "through a theoretical lens" is itself a political act: it's a conservative, deliberately myopic act. It's all pretense, too, because really it does hew to a particular theory, namely the school of thought which says "the text in itself" is all that exists and all that scholars or students need to concern themselves with. What's needed is not the either-or thinking which either accepts or rejects theory wholesale, but a nuanced, critical application which recognizes when and where it makes sense to use this or that bit of theory, an application which has a solid, not tenuous, rationale for using theory.
I'll give you an example. Referring to Liza's story, is it true that patriarchy never benefited women in any way? No, of course not, that's absurd. Frankly, I don't think even most feminist critics make this claim. A nuanced, critical application of feminist theory to The Iliad would not insist on this claim. Instead, it would present evidence from The Iliad to probe both the ways patriarchy circumscribed women and the ways it benefited women and how all of that can inform feminist thought. In other words, you don't put a book in a theoretical "box," insisting it conform to theory; rather, you treat it as a contributor to a better understanding of theory, even if that calls certain theoretical tenets into question. This is how I've seen theory smartly applied.
I need an editor? Dude, I am an editor. If you just mean I'm verbose, well, thank you. I do try to pay people the compliment of taking their ideas seriously and responding in detail.
I’m not sure you read the OP very thoroughly, but I’d still like to give you props for an excellent life-choice—
by starting at a community college you saved yourself some misery AND you had quantifiably and qualifiably better teachers.
(In fact, you probably had *trained* teachers as well. That’s sadly not a requirement for 4-year-uni professorships.)
I taught at a very non-elite state university In the Southwest for several years in the late ‘aughts and saw the seeds of what Liza reports here.
I don’t think her take is necessarily untrue or inappropriately applied outside of an elite university setting simply because her starting data-point was observed at an elite venue.
Any hypothesis derived from a single data point has the potential to be plausible, but of course, it will need to be expanded on and expected to morph and refine as new data points are added.
Expecting more from a reading of her personal observation would include engaging in several logical fallacies on your part — and you don’t strike me as someone who likes to dally with fallacies in your own thinking.
I hope you’re right about the state of the larger education landscape, but what Liza wrote tracks with what I’ve heard from other young lit lovers.
I appreciate the intelligence and care in your reply, Heather. My basic nit is that, working from her “single data point,” Liza has made a claim (not just here but in the Note where I first came across her writing) embracing colleges and universities writ large. I agree her experience ought not to be dismissed out of hand. But she doesn’t seem to be treating it as the basis for a hypothesis — rather, for a theory (in the scientific sense of the term). And as you point out, we need a lot more data for that. This wouldn’t bug me so much if criticism from the Right didn’t so regularly paint higher ed with this broad brush — using outliers to typify it — and vilify profs as “indoctrinators.”
Last year, I taught at the community college I attended twenty years ago. So now I’ve gone all the way up the ladder of higher ed — community college, mid-level state uni, flagship — and down again as both a student and a teacher. So I’d say I’ve got a few more data points than Liza to work with. In all those institutions, I met some profs who wore their politics on their sleeves — conservatives lower on the ladder (e.g. my mentor in community college), liberals higher on it (e.g. the director of my MFA program) — but what I’ve never seen is anything that looked like indoctrination, much less a prof conditioning a grade on toeing an ideological line. Having taught many freshmen, though, I can well imagine Liza earned her C on her first college paper some other way — writing that didn’t meet the bar for that program, maybe, or argument littered with fallacy — but she zeroed in on one thing her prof said as the reason. And he may only have been pointing out that she hadn’t proved her claim, not that it was impossible to make. I’ve had students who jumped to conclusions like this.
What’s a bit telling to me about her story is that, having come in for such biased treatment, she didn’t go to anyone higher up in the department, like the chair, and lodge a complaint. She may have found people to be much more reasonable than she was assuming. Instead, in her story, she flipped her position in her next paper and earned an A. I smell a correlation-causation fallacy. What else was different about that second paper? Did she meet the writing bar or make a tighter argument? Did she actually learn something useful about college-level writing from her prof but walk away with the idea she’d been mistreated? I’ve had students do that, too.
I don’t necessarily disbelieve Liza. But, going on experience, I suspect we’ve gotten a cherry-picked version of events for the sake of an argument. And going on hard-won wisdom about how students’ minds work, I suspect she’s been less than generous about people’s motives.
Thank you for writing out what I was thinking. "Are you sure that's why you got a C? Are you sure you actually proved that argument just because you spent days on that essay?"
I also found the supposed proof she shared in her note rather suspect.
Crazy how many hoops leftists will go through to deny literal photographic evidence of a widespread problem that 300+ people agree with just to conform to a myopic and dangerous worldview.
Literal photographic evidence? Where? If there’s photo evidence backing your story’s claims, I’ve yet to see it. I saw no such thing in the post when I read it, at least. ???
A lot of people have been writing about this, my friend. My English Lit teacher from high school just quit after 40 years because he couldn't handle the hard left political ideology infecting the school. It's all over the place at this point. This isn't anecdotal.
Liza, great post! if you need any support or could use any help from a bona fide English professor, who agrees with you about the study of literature, let me know.
Nice. My high school English teacher, who I'm still good friends with after 22 years, finally just quit after 40 years of teaching. He couldn't take the progressive mutilation and politicization of the classics.
The strangest aspect of this is how progressive activism so strongly points its venom towards liberals. I am a proud liberal, and I never find myself being shouted out of the room by conservatives. It has always been nutcase Progressives who appear to have so much money and so little sense. I have come to instinctively expect drama and pointless animosity with any self-described "activist" that I meet. It is sad to see roles that were once such a positive force now becoming caricatures of revolutionaries. These little rich white kids pretend to be radicals and prevent adults from fixing anything. I honestly do not know what to do.
I have met a number of people who introduce themselves with "I'm a social justice warrior." (Well, I'm in Seattle, so what would you expect?). As you might guess, I react in much the same way I would if they had said "I have bubonic plague."
You listed Eliot and Pound first in your list of favorite poets, and my mentor in grad school published a well regarded book on the Cantos.
The Waste Land and Four Quartets were the most influential poems for me personally. And there's a wonderful recording of Four Quartets narrated by Ted Hughes that I listen to once a month.
I'm perfectly aware of Ezra Pound's rampant antisemitism and the fact that he accepted the position of Mussolini's spokesperson that landed him in prison after WWII. And I regret Eliot's Waste Land tribute to Pound as "the superior craftsman."
But my aforementioned grad school mentor, Max Halperen, was both Jewish and atheist as well as a Pound expert. One of the most memorable moments in my educational life was Dr Halperen's prefatory announcement before a class discussion of Four Quartets that "Atheist though I am, I always cry when I read "Little Gidding."
Imagine the sound of enthusiastic applause.
Literature is itself, not grist for someone's theoretical mill, and it is reductionistic in the worst way to treat it as such. There is a tendency in modern intellectual circles to try to subsume other points of view under one's own theoretical umbrella. Physical science tries to subsume 'culture' under the 'universe,' while the prevalent culture criticism tries to subsume the 'universe' under 'culture.' Why does one thing have to eat all the others, like Chronus and his children?
My experience is somewhat like yours in a distorted mirror. I am much older and went to a Jesuit college and a public university back in the 1980s, but I observed some of the same things back then. There was less co-opting of literature for social theory than now, but there was some; there was also a tendency to run every book through the critical theory du jour whether that made any sense or not.
I have been on the border between the arts and the sciences for my whole life. I studied mathematics and physics in college, and also literature and philosophy, and I gave them equal time and importance. I wrote poetry all through my graduate work in mathematics. I left my mathematics PhD unfinished essentially for aesthetic reasons: what the faculty wanted me to work on was not beautiful enough. Mathematics is more akin to poetry than to the other sciences. It is pursued for its own beauty, created for its own reasons. Eliot's Waste Land has more in common with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem than with gender theory or critiques of the patriarchy.
I teach physics and mathematics at a university, and being naturally contrarian, I am the lone voice fighting the ridiculous overemphasis on STEM which is so prevalent. (Everyone seems to find this ironic for some reason.) The ideal curriculum seems to be STEM, STEM, STEM, STEM, (a few other courses, for well-roundedness you know, it doesn't matter what), STEM, STEM, Career. It's as if we are trying as hard as we can to turn everyone into Babbitt. The humanities are important. Literature is important. And also, as you point out so well, literature needs to be allowed to be what it is: works of art in the medium of words, not case studies for the analysis of the most currently fashionable oppression.
I tend to express myself analytically, so I'll end with something more visceral. When I see a work of literature subjected to the kind of thing you describe, it breaks my heart. It is as if I were watching someone toss a baby into the air and catch it on a bayonet. It calls forth a cry of pity and fear, but unlike tragedy, no catharsis.
Sorry for the lengthy screed, I couldn't make it stop.
As someone with a literature degree (I also studied health sciences) back when they actually taught with integrity, I have observed these trends. I worked as a tutor and caregiver to a young man at a very liberal school later on. He needed me to read his literature reading assignment. However, I was appalled at what they were having him read, and resigned from this little side job when I could not in good conscience read the garbage they were calling literature out loud.
That sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s part of the weaponizing and propagandizing of literature. It’s not education. It’s more akin to communist re-education sadly.
100% agree with all of the above. My company has a tutoring branch, and I see this every day. It's even worse at the university level than the high school level, and the communist propagandizing is very real.
I don't think calling the various approaches subsumed under "Critical Theory" or "PostModernism" "communist propagandizing" is at all an improvement over the reductive approaches you quite correctly object to.
This marks you as yet another blathering Alt-Right philistine who wouldn't know "communist propaganda" if it came up and bit you on the knee.
You mean that imposing Marx on literature is not communist propaganda? I guess it must just be a deeply thoughtful literary approach from people with deeply thoughtful ideals. As someone who comes from a post-Soviet background, I think I would know what communist propaganda is better than you, buddy.
Calling everything "alt-right" that you don't agree with is exactly the sort of dangerous rhetoric I am calling out here. Words have meaning.
What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though? Marxists would argue that’s there’s nothing in these theories that have anything to do with class - except as an after thought in “intersectionality”. Marx wasn’t a suffragette, he wasn’t a fan of homosexuality, he didn’t even begin to think of trans or cis, and he would put all these people in the oppressor class if they owned capital.
These ideologies are firmly liberal.
He wasn’t a fan of making a living, personal hygiene (at one point, his filthy skin was so infected by erupting boils that he couldn’t sit), parenting (his two daughters committed suicide), and he was a hardcore racist. In fact, the only positive thing he did for civilization was when he died on 14 April, 1883, although at least 50 years too late.
Liberalism is more about freedom and less about imposing views onto others. Only the bravest rebel would be a neo-liberal in the humanities. Being a Marxist is the cool thing, or post-modern garbage. I would say that the Marxists have the benefit that if you agree with their loony assumptions, they actually have logical conclusions. The post-modernist, critical mindlessness seems to be nothing more than posturing.
I think the best example of where creative work is happening is to check out which classes people crash to enjoy the lectures. No one does this in English classes anymore, and they used to. I have seen them in history, foreign policy/government, and a few other fields. There is no Niall Ferguson or Paul Krugman in the humanities right now. They are frumpy old ladies who are easily offended and cannot bear to have anyone question their assumptions.
I actually think that the strangest aspect of humanities professors is that they are so similar to Victorian women. They are have the same thoughts, and none can bear to hear anything outside of their narrow views.
Indeed. Find me a literature student arguing Hume and Adam Smith were right about everything and I will be impressed. Tepid Marxism, not much.
What people often miss is that Marxism dropped the concern with social class as a source of oppression and exploitation and moved to other social differences while retaining the oppressor/oppressed framework. It stopped being about workers vs owners of capital when it was convenient.
> What’s it got to do with Marx and his theories though?
Marx and his theories didn't stand still when Marx died. There's a lineage to today's. What if "Marx wasn’t a suffragette"? By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
> The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
As for the leftists, after the late 70s they ultimately they found class to be an inconvenient subject, and that they really despised the working class for not being sophisticated enough for their likeling (plus modern academy leftists want to hang out with the elites and get publishing deals, and grants, and such, that the elites control, which makes the whole class critique thing a no-go).
> By 1920s all then marxists were, and so on. Plus, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, approvingly:
Not at all. Suffragettism was often looked at as just a side show for privileged women. Marxism did move on, but if it was merely following liberal trends then those trends were primarily liberal, not Marxist.
Labels flyin', now. All those static, static labels, shocking everyone to irritation. Well. How have definitions changed, and--here's the tricky part--what have been the defining forces within the world that changed them? What's dominated the world over the last 30 years? One of those -isms.
You are correct. Marxism reduces people to categories. Which is stupid. Less stupid in his time than it is now. Stupid then. But unimaginably stupid now. Modern ‘studies’ also does that. You are black, a woman, one eyed - whatever. Your surface characteristics, which is all they are override you as a human. You are put into a box and told that is your experience. Although gender/queer/race/feminist studies is not technically Marxist they emerged from Marxist professors and Marxists everywhere when it became obvious Marxism as an economic theory has terrible effects and can’t rationally be argued. So, they changed the categories and re-divided.
Ask yourself this - how many ‘_________ studies’ profs are also economically Marxist? All of them. Show me a gender studies prof who is a capitalist and I would eat my hat.
Seriously? Did you actually read what she wrote? When did such mindless labeling become acceptable to Liberal thought?
These people don't care about liberal thought—it was never about that. It's about creating a myopic narrative and shutting out all viewpoints that deviate from the tiny window they've created. Hence anything that is not grotesquely far to the left is labeled "alt-right." But we all know horseshoe theory, so clearly he is projecting.
I dunno man. I've been a Liberal since the 70s, a combination of McGovern and Truman. It's sad to see a proud tradition reduce itself into a reactionary collective. Which applies to both sides. I loved your insight, and reality doesn't have a political bias.
I agree with all of the above and with classical liberalism—we need to do all we can to keep liberal thought alive.
You're half right. It's not communist propaganda per se, it's the propaganda of the uniparty of "progress", adopted not just by leftists and self-identifying as "establishment critics" (lol), but by every corporation, career bureaucrat, fashionable public intellectual, journalist, and aspiration elite wanabees.
But you're also full wrong: it's origin is leftist thought, from the 60s and 70s, which peaked and pioneered most of the cliches served today. The rest is just incremental updates. And that thought identified as communist more often than not back then. It's just that today's leftists shed the pretense of caring about the working class and class struggle (at best they ask for more taxes for the rich, but cozy up to every elite narrative, and suck to mega-corps and moguls pandering to their slogans).
Yes, Communism, or at least Marxist-Leninism, had consistent analytical thought if you could hold your nose when agreeing to their assumptions. Most post-modernist BS is little more than mental masturbation. I still have no idea how Foucault became so respected. It is a struggle to find anything of his that was not an academic equivalent of trying to be cool in the high school lunch room.
Oh Michael…..You must be so proud of your command of the key phrases of the progressive leftist childish spoiled party…..
critical theory and post modernism are ignorant inventions of dull minds. Minds that have never, ever done anything useful.
Have you yourself ever tried to be useful or productive in society?
Does communist propaganda do that?
More often than your average commie wants to admit, I'm afraid.
Very sad
I just quit a graduate education program after completing all the coursework for this reason. When we treat every child as if they are intellectually disabled and likely in need of gender affirming social emotional lessons on the daily, we are no longer teachers, we are propagandists.
How sad. I respect your decision. That would be very difficult. The time and resources spent, but I would not choose to be a tool of the propaganda machine either. It’s heartbreaking. We somehow need to see this madness stop.
New universities appear to be the only answer.
How do you feel about the accusation that many of the individuals who have promoted this system are exercising misplaced maternal instincts? Many have noticed that spaces that have succumbed to this form of lunacy tend to be female dominated, especially rich, childless females. I am thinking of Cory Clark in psychology (not humanities, but I can remember her name), or others who have examined this subject. This feels wrong to me, but the evidence has seemed strong. I wonder how we as a society can remedy certain unproductive female biases in a manner than is not prejudicial, assuming that such biases exist.
I do see this pattern and have had similar thoughts myself. But I am childless and find telling others how to live their lives and manage their affairs abhorrent. I have never desired to become a moral scold.
So, I’m not sure I understand what drives this behavior. Perhaps you need to add self-righteousness into the equation. Or, at least a sense of arrogance.
Or narcissism.
Amen. 🙏
Thank goodness my M.A. in literature dates back to 1976. I dabbled in mother-child psychobabble in my paper on Frankenstein, but for the rest it was the literature itself with its motifs and metaphors and historical and social milieus that interested me.
As an upper school teacher in the 1980s and 1990s, I began to hear deconstructionist stuff from my colleagues with Ph.Ds. Well, I thought, amused, to each his own.
When I changed schools and taught only middle schoolers, I didn't have to listen to pretentious talk any more. A mixed blessing: Not only did the younger teachers in my department not spout Derrida, but in fact they knew nothing at all. They hadn't read Vanity Fair in college, they didn't know who Trollope was, they hadn't studied English or American history. They didn't even know Civil Rights history: They hadn't heard of Emmett Till.
They were products of Teachers College, and before "writing units" they studied How to Write a Paragraph booklets. I lived in a state of professional astonishment: You're telling me you have to read up on how to write a paragraph?
What did they get their degrees in? Education? For which, I guess, the writing of paragraphs was optional.
I'm sorry for today's students, taught initially by undereducated elementary and middle school teachers and later by pretentious I don't know whats. We are seeing the results in far too many young people, empty vessels wearing pretty scarves and marching to the beat of a murderous unseen ayatollah.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and reflections. It truly is tragic and wrong. Young people deserve a good education not propaganda and fluff. I taught college age before working in the counseling field. I hear you loud and clear. I still try to invest in young people and mentor some when possible. It’s sad.
I don't blame you for ditching the gig!
Thanks. It was just a side job. I was glad to help this disabled student until it violated my principles so much I felt it better to resign. I had a full time job days, so I just did it to help.
What are some examples of the appalling books you refer to, please?
For mass market silly literature, I highly recommend "How to be an Anti-Racist" or "White Fragility." The latter is not as terribly written, but it is difficult to imagine that the author could have gotten this published in any other era.
For general silliness, check out any book that sounds like a 1990's Lifetime Network made for TV movie. If you look at books with the words "deconstruct" and "queer" or "gender" in them, just open to a middle section and see how long the sentences are. If the are really long, it is probably a good candidate for a shit book.
In general, the quality of the writing has gotten so bad. History books are like a fun Brad Pitt movie compared to the dreadful prose in so many literary works, or worse, anything with the word "critical" in it. In general, certain fields are simply dead. If anything important were happening, people would have fought to preserve the mission, or at least the relevance of their fields and departments. Clearly no one cared.
The fact of the matter is that if every one of these departments were to disappear tomorrow, not one would notice. Presidential helicopters do come on to campus to pick up literary critics for emergency white house visits (my history honors program professor at university was buddies with Bill Clinton at Yale, and they picked him up like this sometimes). These fields were allowed to rot because no responsible adults were watching.
It’s been enough years ago, I don’t recall any specific titles or authors.
What were some of the books? So curious
It's been too many years ago...but I remember thinking to myself that reading these crass words out loud to a young man was not something I was willing to do. He and his family were sad to see me resign, but I couldn't in good conscience read those. The university was a well known liberal arts college in my area. The only reason I took the job was to help out someone with a disability so they could do the basic things necessary to attend college. I was glad to help until those raunchy books made it too much of a conflict internally. I honestly can't remember the titles. But I thought to myself that if this is what he's paying thousands of dollars tuition to study, our country is going downhill fast.
A couple of years ago I wouldn’t have believed these kind of stories. I was lucky to have throughout high school and most of college good professors who would judge your writings not based on the content itself but rather in it’s structure, the strength of the arguments and cohesive writing. But for some reason in the last few years this new breed of “professionals” invaded all educational spaces with the sole purpose of making sure everyone had the same viewpoints as them. I haven’t encountered them ever since I graduated but I am worried about the future of education.
Lucky indeed Aetius. Because, like you, I wouldn’t have believed thee kinds of stories myself, I try to document some of those reasons as I’ve found them in my discipline’s academic journals and my recent grad school experiences. You might find it relevant: https://open.substack.com/pub/projectluminas/p/ncte-and-the-doublespeak-award-professionalized?r=1pzpde&utm_medium=ios
Yep. It's been slithering into academia over the past decade.
I do think there's room for understanding literature through the lens of politics. But it's an ugly affair when there's room for nothing else.
'There is something grotesquely wrong with people who devote their lives to English literature—and I have since figured out that it is because they somehow never realize that they’re not doing literature.' yep - they're philistines.
Do you have a sense of why and how literature departments took this direction? My background is in philosophy, and when I’ve read things by US literary scholars it often strikes me as a super idiosyncratic school of political philosophy. I’ve wondered a lot why this is the case. Is there a good way to learn their idiom?
(When I read critical theory, my inner monologue tends to go “what does ‘totalizing’ mean and why does it axiomatically lead to totalitarianism, what does ‘closure’ really mean, why is it assumed without argument that ‘closure’ sucks, et cetera.”)
I wrote a piece a few months back on the history of literary theory! I tried to stay fairly objective there, but it chronicles the development of literary theory and explains how we got to where we are today. Check it out if you have a moment, might be a great place to start to answer your question :)
https://www.pensandpoison.org/p/a-history-of-literary-criticism
Thanks for that link. It brought back a few memories from university literature courses. At the time it all seemed terribly profound but now it seems like losing the essence of literature which I believe is story telling. Thanks for the summation.
Thanks, that sounds perfect!
Ethan, highly recommend Lisa’s linked article (if you haven’t read it!). Which lit scholar comes to mind? I can offer my distinct sense of how a particular political school of thought and institutional partisanship took root in the 80s and 90s in English scholarship. Given your 1st question, you might find it interesting: https://open.substack.com/pub/projectluminas/p/ncte-and-the-doublespeak-award-professionalized?r=1pzpde&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for the link!
Thank you for writing this wonderful essay. I’m a painter and a published Poet. Who are your favorite painters? Who are your favorite Poets? I managed to successfully navigate the M.F.A. experience in painting after fighting with my original 3 faculty advisors. Grad school was all about producing an exhibition with an easily recognizable theme. Stupid me had deviated from that and was almost expelled. As for being published - fortunately there are hundreds of publishers, it’s a matter of finding the sweet spot: where your work fits their sensibilities. For the newbies - avoid all contests - waste of time and the money sent to Submittable. Once again thank you for your insights and scholarship.Shona Tovah.
Kudos to you for navigating your MFA! Glad you enjoyed the piece!
Here are my favorite painters: Chagall, Klimt, Raphael, Paul Delvaux
Favorite poets: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Plath, Coleridge, Keats
Had you been expelled for not conforming you would have been the Howard Roark of painters/poets, for that you should be proud. I am also an artist, more of a hobby, and have zero clue as to how people who love to create can conform to someone else's standards. I can only create that which resonates within my soul, tell me to draw/paint something you want and it's almost impossible for me to do so as I need to be inspired in order to create. More and more each day I view Ayn Rand as a prophet, she lived through the Bolshevik revolution and tried to warn America about what was coming.
So true about the contests being a huge waste of $$$
Absolutely wonderful essay, yet heartbreaking, too. I love world literature and was tempted to study it in university, but some instinct warned me to stay away, and so I studied economics instead (where Keynes was worshipped). The Long March through the intuitions has borne poisonous fruit.
LOL @ Keynes worshippers. Relatable. Glad you were able to stay in touch with literature regardless and sounds like you made a smart choice! Thank you for your kind words!
There is an issue of this all over academia. In college I found myself on the outside looking in a lot of the time. I was a theatre major and my advisor was highly political in the sphere, but it was always the same political issues of women and race. When the director who would become a mentor to me put on the show Assassins, he got a lot of flack from that side of things because he was putting on a show that on paper had majority white men in it. But the cast ended up all female or non-binary and so was the crew, he pushed what we thought we knew about being an American in a way that I had never experienced in another college theatre class because so much of the discussion was on race and gender. Not that those things aren't important, but they aren't the only thing important about art.
Kind of heartbreaking. I know what you mean, though. Literature as a field of study is perhaps the one that most suffers from the current narrowing of minds in the Humanities… that said, I suspect the *where* you were studying it also matters. (Maybe? Not sure.)
Ironically, all the papers and topics for exploration you’ve mentioned sound rather worthwhile to me. As a prof, I’d have been curious to read them. When I myself taught undergrads (not literature, but religious studies, which is close enough, especially in the politicization department), I always tried to walk that line that respected a wide variety of opinions, but also to provide pushback, so students can hone their arguments and lean the difference between making a case for something and merely reciting dogma or opinion. Unfortunately there’s a worrying trend in universities that seems to favour dogma over inquiry and debate (not all debate is in good faith, but I don’t mean people who are just being trolls).
I do hope it’s not all fatal to the study of literature as such—or to any other field. It’s probably going to take the pendulum swinging in the other direction, or conversations to move outside academia for a while, though. Intellectual incest, as it appears, is not good for anyone.
Dogma over inquiry — exactly. When I was young, this same ethos in my very religious family and community pushed me into the arms of the left. But, I only understood the left superficially and could not see what was burgeoning.
Now, I see that the will to power and authority can warp any belief system — no matter how good the original intentions. The end game is always dominance and coercion. There appears to be something intrinsic to human nature that some of us don’t feel safe unless we are dominating others and controlling the narrative. I’ve never held this desire and don’t understand it.
Intellectual incest: Nice phrase!!
In one post you have not only make me proud of my (largely “themeless”) approach during my HS teaching days but you also validate the 18+ years of near-weekly classic literature podcast episodes I’ve hosted and released. (We’re about to finish “Emma”. I think most of the former Emma-haters have gotten over it by now 😛)
NOW when I hear listeners describe the show as hosted by, “the English teacher you always wished you had” it’ll make more sense why so many of them are young.
I’m horrified to hear that an uncompromising love of Humanities appears to be dead (another thing Boomers shoved out of the way then knifed in the back?) in schools I would have expected to know better—like Columbia—but maybe opportunities to learn and Find Your People is finding a more egalitarian path to people’s brains. The humanities are firmly entrenched on YouTube. Between Philosophy Tube, Contrapoints, HBomberguy, and Alexander Avila I feel like I’ve covered a good chunk of philosophy and sociology that I missed in school—and they’re pretty clear, they’re “giving away their University Education” for us to access and enjoy for free.
Honestly, they’re so enjoyable to watch I rarely notice how much I’ve learned, but it’s quite a bit.
I’ll be sharing your Substack with my CraftLit listeners. I hope they visit and let you know you aren’t quite so alone in the way you love literature.
Still, I’m sorry you had to watch the lifeblood drain out of the Humanities during your time at Uni. No one should have to witness a crime like that. (Not even a Thackeray lover 😏)
(Btw, one of the most interesting students I taught in lower Manhattan was a white boy, homeschooled his whole life, who finally had to start coming to a public high school—because math —and had just finished reading Vanity Fear for the second time (“For fun”) before he began as a freshman.
This kid scared the bejujus out of most teachers. I loved him in all his snarky glory. And I loved that he became a hero of the school because he was such an excellent freestyle rapper! Wonderful what classic lit can do for a brain!)
Would you mind sharing links to the resources you mentioned as well as your podcast? I never had the money for a university degree and would love to partake. Thank you!
👍👍👍💥
Sadly, too often a love for Art is what stops one from persuing its study in academia
So true. Especially with writing. I declined my MFA last second. Best choice I ever made.
Wow. Intense. Had a very similar freshman experience — finger wagging and a C on my first paper for a wrong opinion. I did go on to do a PhD in literature, but it was a battle every step. Eventually fired after a decade as a university prof — more wrong opinions. ✌🏻
Ugh. That is so absurd and discouraging. What crap. Good for you for hanging in but damn!
Re: “There is something grotesquely wrong with people who teach English literature…”
There’s something grotesquely wrong with your argument’s logic: it rests on a hasty generalization. I suspected this when I read your Note announcing your publication in my feed. Reading this post rather confirms it.
You attended Columbia, probably the most “lefty” university in the country. But even so, I find very suspect your story that you got a C on your first college paper because the professor just didn’t like your ideas and not because it was, you know, your first college paper, it likely sucked — I know mine did — and your prof was showing you the bar you had to meet. You didn’t graduate (to go by what you wrote here), but you walked away with the notions that literature is being taught like this everywhere, English teachers are universally obsessed with politics, and English departments across the country are crawling with leftists demanding their students adopt their politics (like the straw man prof demanding students become atheists in “God’s Not Dead” — something that never, ever happens and is only real in the imaginations of evangelicals with a persecution complex).
You are suffering under a terrible and enormous misapprehension. In fact, literature is almost never taught like this. Maybe in your hoity-toity high school it was. (Private school kid?) But in ordinary schools and colleges across this country, teachers and professors consider it a big lift to get students to analyze “the text in itself” per the New Criticism of the 1940s. When I was an English major at first a community college and then a state university that focused on liberal arts, I took only two classes in four years in which any mention of feminism was even made — one was a single-author course on an explicitly feminist writer, and the other was my critical theory course where I was obliged to learn different theoretical frameworks, including feminism.
As students should be obliged … because in fact there is good literature out there with feminist dimensions to it which ought to be studied. Just because you saw feminism applied to an absurd degree in cases ill-suited to it doesn’t mean the theory has no meaningful application. The same goes for other critical theories. In grad school at a state flagship university, I saw how critical theory could be misapplied. I saw postmodernist "cultural critics" talk their way up their own asses. Yeah, I'm aware all of that happens now and then. But much more often, I saw theory smartly applied, used to crack open interesting lines of inquiry about works of literature.
Before making such sweeping, slanderous claims about the teachers of literature, who are largely well-meaning people who love books and try to pass their passion along, you really ought to expand your experience so you’re not so prone to fallacy. In your Note, you said you had “left academia” — this implied to me that you were a former professor who had enough of what you saw there, and that’s what intrigued me enough to come here and read this post. (I’m a former composition prof who left because of perennially low pay that kept me poor.) But it turns out you’re just a dropout with an axe to grind over that — which makes me wonder whether your experience of college wasn’t largely brought about by the axes you were grinding there.
She’s not “just a dropout.” She’s a dropout. Irrelevant to the rightness of her argument.
I was in a Comp Lit PhD program in the 80s. Theory was ubiquitous and is still widespread.
Also you need an editor.
Jeff, her having dropped out doesn't invalidate Liza's argument, but it's not irrelevant. It's context for the argument. Even Liza thinks so, or she wouldn't have made it part of the story.
I went to grad school much more recently, graduating a decade ago. I'm aware theory is ubiquitous. (That's not the nub of my objection. See Heather's reply re: "data points" and my response to it; that's the nub.) I'm no big fan of theory, either. Even as an undergrad, I believed it often diverted attention away from better uses of scholars' time and thought. In grad school, as I mentioned, I saw theory misapplied at times. I saw literature subjected to "pretzel logic," leading to bizarre interpretations. And not always for the sake of liberal politics: conservatives play that game, too. But it's one thing to say theory is misapplied in some cases, quite another to say it's useless garbage and literature should be "left alone." The refusal ever to look at literature "through a theoretical lens" is itself a political act: it's a conservative, deliberately myopic act. It's all pretense, too, because really it does hew to a particular theory, namely the school of thought which says "the text in itself" is all that exists and all that scholars or students need to concern themselves with. What's needed is not the either-or thinking which either accepts or rejects theory wholesale, but a nuanced, critical application which recognizes when and where it makes sense to use this or that bit of theory, an application which has a solid, not tenuous, rationale for using theory.
I'll give you an example. Referring to Liza's story, is it true that patriarchy never benefited women in any way? No, of course not, that's absurd. Frankly, I don't think even most feminist critics make this claim. A nuanced, critical application of feminist theory to The Iliad would not insist on this claim. Instead, it would present evidence from The Iliad to probe both the ways patriarchy circumscribed women and the ways it benefited women and how all of that can inform feminist thought. In other words, you don't put a book in a theoretical "box," insisting it conform to theory; rather, you treat it as a contributor to a better understanding of theory, even if that calls certain theoretical tenets into question. This is how I've seen theory smartly applied.
I need an editor? Dude, I am an editor. If you just mean I'm verbose, well, thank you. I do try to pay people the compliment of taking their ideas seriously and responding in detail.
💯
I’m not sure you read the OP very thoroughly, but I’d still like to give you props for an excellent life-choice—
by starting at a community college you saved yourself some misery AND you had quantifiably and qualifiably better teachers.
(In fact, you probably had *trained* teachers as well. That’s sadly not a requirement for 4-year-uni professorships.)
I taught at a very non-elite state university In the Southwest for several years in the late ‘aughts and saw the seeds of what Liza reports here.
I don’t think her take is necessarily untrue or inappropriately applied outside of an elite university setting simply because her starting data-point was observed at an elite venue.
Any hypothesis derived from a single data point has the potential to be plausible, but of course, it will need to be expanded on and expected to morph and refine as new data points are added.
Expecting more from a reading of her personal observation would include engaging in several logical fallacies on your part — and you don’t strike me as someone who likes to dally with fallacies in your own thinking.
I hope you’re right about the state of the larger education landscape, but what Liza wrote tracks with what I’ve heard from other young lit lovers.
I appreciate the intelligence and care in your reply, Heather. My basic nit is that, working from her “single data point,” Liza has made a claim (not just here but in the Note where I first came across her writing) embracing colleges and universities writ large. I agree her experience ought not to be dismissed out of hand. But she doesn’t seem to be treating it as the basis for a hypothesis — rather, for a theory (in the scientific sense of the term). And as you point out, we need a lot more data for that. This wouldn’t bug me so much if criticism from the Right didn’t so regularly paint higher ed with this broad brush — using outliers to typify it — and vilify profs as “indoctrinators.”
Last year, I taught at the community college I attended twenty years ago. So now I’ve gone all the way up the ladder of higher ed — community college, mid-level state uni, flagship — and down again as both a student and a teacher. So I’d say I’ve got a few more data points than Liza to work with. In all those institutions, I met some profs who wore their politics on their sleeves — conservatives lower on the ladder (e.g. my mentor in community college), liberals higher on it (e.g. the director of my MFA program) — but what I’ve never seen is anything that looked like indoctrination, much less a prof conditioning a grade on toeing an ideological line. Having taught many freshmen, though, I can well imagine Liza earned her C on her first college paper some other way — writing that didn’t meet the bar for that program, maybe, or argument littered with fallacy — but she zeroed in on one thing her prof said as the reason. And he may only have been pointing out that she hadn’t proved her claim, not that it was impossible to make. I’ve had students who jumped to conclusions like this.
What’s a bit telling to me about her story is that, having come in for such biased treatment, she didn’t go to anyone higher up in the department, like the chair, and lodge a complaint. She may have found people to be much more reasonable than she was assuming. Instead, in her story, she flipped her position in her next paper and earned an A. I smell a correlation-causation fallacy. What else was different about that second paper? Did she meet the writing bar or make a tighter argument? Did she actually learn something useful about college-level writing from her prof but walk away with the idea she’d been mistreated? I’ve had students do that, too.
I don’t necessarily disbelieve Liza. But, going on experience, I suspect we’ve gotten a cherry-picked version of events for the sake of an argument. And going on hard-won wisdom about how students’ minds work, I suspect she’s been less than generous about people’s motives.
Re: the “indoctrination” accusation, I’ve actually written a post on my substack that addresses it. In case you’re interested: https://singulardream.substack.com/p/life-and-frustrations-of-an-adjunct-professor
Thank you for writing out what I was thinking. "Are you sure that's why you got a C? Are you sure you actually proved that argument just because you spent days on that essay?"
I also found the supposed proof she shared in her note rather suspect.
Crazy how many hoops leftists will go through to deny literal photographic evidence of a widespread problem that 300+ people agree with just to conform to a myopic and dangerous worldview.
“300+ people agree with me, so I must be right!” = Appeal to popularity. You’re not doing your ethos a favor with that one.
Literal photographic evidence? Where? If there’s photo evidence backing your story’s claims, I’ve yet to see it. I saw no such thing in the post when I read it, at least. ???
https://substack.com/@pensandpoison/note/c-72739903 Calm down Sherlock Holmes.
A lot of people have been writing about this, my friend. My English Lit teacher from high school just quit after 40 years because he couldn't handle the hard left political ideology infecting the school. It's all over the place at this point. This isn't anecdotal.
Agree.
Liza, great post! if you need any support or could use any help from a bona fide English professor, who agrees with you about the study of literature, let me know.
Nice. My high school English teacher, who I'm still good friends with after 22 years, finally just quit after 40 years of teaching. He couldn't take the progressive mutilation and politicization of the classics.
The strangest aspect of this is how progressive activism so strongly points its venom towards liberals. I am a proud liberal, and I never find myself being shouted out of the room by conservatives. It has always been nutcase Progressives who appear to have so much money and so little sense. I have come to instinctively expect drama and pointless animosity with any self-described "activist" that I meet. It is sad to see roles that were once such a positive force now becoming caricatures of revolutionaries. These little rich white kids pretend to be radicals and prevent adults from fixing anything. I honestly do not know what to do.
I have met a number of people who introduce themselves with "I'm a social justice warrior." (Well, I'm in Seattle, so what would you expect?). As you might guess, I react in much the same way I would if they had said "I have bubonic plague."
You listed Eliot and Pound first in your list of favorite poets, and my mentor in grad school published a well regarded book on the Cantos.
The Waste Land and Four Quartets were the most influential poems for me personally. And there's a wonderful recording of Four Quartets narrated by Ted Hughes that I listen to once a month.
I'm glad I discovered your substack!
Clarifying p.s.
I'm perfectly aware of Ezra Pound's rampant antisemitism and the fact that he accepted the position of Mussolini's spokesperson that landed him in prison after WWII. And I regret Eliot's Waste Land tribute to Pound as "the superior craftsman."
But my aforementioned grad school mentor, Max Halperen, was both Jewish and atheist as well as a Pound expert. One of the most memorable moments in my educational life was Dr Halperen's prefatory announcement before a class discussion of Four Quartets that "Atheist though I am, I always cry when I read "Little Gidding."
And that memory makes me tear up as w .