As a Professor of English at a traditional, Baptist university, I could not disagree with this essay more. As one example, you say “As the literary world began to disengage with notions of authorial intention,” but this disengagement was first voiced in 1946 by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy.” Literary critics stopped limiting the interpretations of texts to “moral principles” in the very early 1900s. Moreover, Derrida does not say that words “can mean anything.” To deconstruct a text requires the 1950s traditional style of close reading that your essay claims has been abandoned. You also make wide, sweeping generalizations about English departments everywhere. I’m sorry your experience in college was unfair and biased. There is no excuse for that. But the tired cliche that English departments are nothing but Leftist ideological camps is incorrect, relies on a willful misreading of literary theory, and worst of all, smacks of a the kind of “fake news” that Donald Trump invented to cover his own crimes. If you truly want to be intellectually, honest, begin your essay with the fact that you’re part of the radical right so that your readers know where this misinformation is coming from.
My favorite was the first sentence - you just knew that after "As a Professor of English," you were going to get "I could not disagree with this essay more." LOL! Reminds me of Miss Jane on the Beverly Hillbillies. And who capitalizes Professor?
Academic titles are always capitalized, but let me say thank you for the Beverly Hillbillies reference. Next semester I’m teaching a course called “Shakespeare and the Beverly Hillbillies: The Bubblin’ Crude of Literature.”
Isn’t the right radicalized under Trump? Surely you wouldn’t consider him a moderate Republican. So no, “the radical right” is not a cliche. It is a political reality.
No, it isn’t. And anyhow, what has Trump got to do with the point at issue? Nothing that I can discern. Now, I’d be happy debunk the stupid claim that Trump/MAGA is fascism; perhaps you recall what Mr. Orwell had to say about the definition of that word. But that’s another discussion, isn’t it?
The issue is that you called the author of the piece ‘part of the radical right’. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this is true and she was simply speaking from experience about the politicization of classic literature in academia. Or do you think anyone who talks about this issue automatically makes them ‘radical right’?
It’s obviously something you disagree with which is fine and I personally appreciated your perspective, but to throw around unwarranted labels like that is a huge part of the problem. And to bring in Trump was odd.
Listen to Trump’s interview with “The View” years ago. He was proposing much the same ideas and the ladies that hate him now all were in favor of him running for president. No, he is not radical at all.
Starting a war in Ukraine was radical; ending it is the definition of moderate. Yes, I consider Trump very moderate, and very center. By the way your argument is circular, Professor.
The GOP under Trump is not “right” it’s part of the “tear it down” party. And as a “left of center” person, I have mixed feelings about it. There is, “something rotten in institutions” and perhaps it needs to be torn down 🤷🏽♂️
When a prominent public university’s English department now includes a course called ‘Cancel Shakespeare?’ and the course description makes it clear the answer to the question is definitely yes, as my alma mater does, one can reasonably conclude that the radical ‘woke’ left has wholly overtaken the academy. One does not need to be on the ‘radical right’ to recognize this.
I've given up on literature so I don't hang around much anymore, but I will say I've read the radical right, having read the old Alternative Right blog and Sailer for a while, and Ms. Libes is definitely a normie conservative.
I feel somewhat the same way as you do and my English degree came about in the 80’s, beginning of peak postmodernism. Close textual reading to be meaningful requires mastery of a vast web of literature, the world of tropes like synecdoche and allegory, history, the physical sounds of words like prosidy and euphony, and the ability to comprehend cross-language change, and world history as it changed, for a start…
I’m very bored with the strange attribution to postmodernism every possible ill in the land. Of course streams of letters don’t have fixed meaning, the study of what meanings we attach and how and why is fascinating, it’s called the study of literature. Postmodernism is no more frightening than any other tool used to structure meaning. A single-lens view on any literary work is always incomplete; my curiosity is what would be called literary statistical linguistics, yet another view.
All art, including literature, aspires to the condition of music, which has cannot have political aim, being pure abstraction. Rhetoric, that’s something else. I don’t confuse art and rhetoric, that seems to be the operating “paradigm” today.
What Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote in 1946 does not disprove the patently obvious truth that university English departments are drastically politicised only in the new millennium. What Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 was only (and disastrously) applied across whole countries over half a century later. The avant-garde always precedes the mass movement by decades. This article implies a clear understanding of that reality: Barthes (1915-1980) was an exact contemporary of Beardsley (1915-1985). I first studied Wimsatt and Beardsley in the mid-1960s in the aesthetics component of a philosophy degree. I was horrified, as anyone who had read George Orwell should have been. Without intention, without passion, any text might as well be ground out by a soulless machine (or, in our time, by the great oxymoron, “artificial intelligence”).
Well, this is what I have to say about that…Intellectual freedom and inquiry are paramount. Traditional roles can be not only good, but fantabulous. Religion can have very positive aspects. Most importantly, I don’t believe for one second that a scientific middle aged cis dude “missed the boat” in humanities in general and poetry in particular. It’s not about “doing better.” It’s just about doing. As the ancient Taoists used to say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice IS perfect.” And any anon dude who can bust out lines from The Iliad at the drop of a hat is already on team humanities….and team science, of course.
My real issue with the “far left of center” (and “the far right of center” folks I interact with is a absolute lack of knowledge about the classics even of western civilization, let along more ancient classical civilizations.
Even amongst those with a “humanities” education. In fact the “far right” seems to be rediscovering western history. Shockingly the best TV documentary of pre Christian bear Middle East and Judaism is on The Daily Wire with Jordan Peterson. You might disagree with various aspects of the “tour” but it’s better than most I have seen elsewhere
You start out on the right note. Moving away from authorial intentions proceeds Derrida by a number of years.On top of that, I agree with that move.An author can say, I intended, this or that.I may have intended to have lunch but did I.However, your claim that the author is part of the radical right is uncalled for. Look , where does that take the discussion? Essentially it implies that if I don’t agree with the authors views on literature it’s because shes trying to support some political outlook I disagree with.
This website best explains why I made the assumption. Please look at it because it tells a frightening tale. The author with whom I disagree posits the argument that lit theory, or focusing on issues like race and gender, is what is destroying academia. Her essay echoes the right’s agenda to silence these discussions.
Your point and the analysis you linked to illustrate a classic fallacy which I think gets to the core of the so-called 'culture wars'.
As someone who has been observing the absolute s**tstorm that is modern day online politics over the last 10 years, the pattern seems to go as follows:
1. Some well-intended but deeply flawed bad/illiberal ideas emerge on the far-left.
2. A small number of people attempt to force these ideas upon everyone, shout down anyone who disagrees and the ideas start to spread.
3. Legitimate and intelligent criticism starts to emerge from the Liberal left/centre/right which is ignored, mocked, misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented. Some of these people are fired from their jobs, 'cancelled' from public speaking or ostracized from their communities by people who mostly don't understand their arguments.
4. The populist and illiberal right (always late to the game) jump on the bandwagon (because of course they will) and enter the argument like a bull in a china shop.
5. The left (along with much of the general public who are suddenly made aware of the issues at hand - albeit through a very distorted lens) can now point to these people as proof that *any* criticism of the original bad ideas no matter where it comes from, no matter what the nuances are, is no different to those made by the illiberal/populist right.
6. An unwinnable fight now gets underway between the illiberal left and right and any intelligent person who wades into the argument is immediately labelled 'far-right' or 'woke' by idiots on either side.
It really shouldn't be that hard to sort through the nuances and distinguish between legitimate criticism of bad ideas (even if you think they're good ideas) and dumb knee-jerk responses to the same ideas. We don't all need to retreat to extreme positions in order to fight the opposing side, there are lots of possible positions which are balanced and nuanced and are not coming from reductionist concepts like left/good vs right/bad.
No. As Anon pointed out, Bloom made similar arguments about identity politics and repressive tolerance in The Closing of the American Mind.
I largely agree regarding your comment below about Donald Trump and populist anti-intellectualism, although I will point out that both sides are reacting to perceived condescension from the other side (deplorables, etc.). A broken clock is right twice a day. Sometimes, Trump or those in his movement make an argument (usually a dumbed-down form), which others have been making for years and which happens to be true. That doesn’t mean anyone who makes that argument supports Trump.
I hear ya, Anon Dude. I referenced the far right only because in these dark days, attacks from that direction often involve a strong anti-academic, anti-intellectual ethos. Down with the educated elite! (This coming from a president whose gold toilet is the very definition of elitism.) Up with covfefe! We have no idea what that word means but we certainly prefer it to anything English departments teach!
Frankly, one of my interests in this blog was particularly because I thought academia had become a left-wing monoculture and it was bad for intellectual freedom and inquiry. (Could traditional roles be *good* in some cases? Could religion have positive aspects? I don't know, you'll lose your job for even asking.) So, you know, any movement against anti-intellectualism on the right is to be applauded.
I've pretty much accepted that it's way too much of an uphill battle to engage with the humanities for me personally at this point. I'm well into middle age, my training's in the sciences, and I'm a cishet(ish) white (passing?) man. If I wrote a book nobody would publish it, and I'd be up against people who have been writing poetry since grammar school. I'm not arrogant enough to believe I can do better than people who completed degrees in English and have been writing for decades. *Viciste, sinistri*.
I see. One university has one professor who teaches one course called “Cancel Shakespeare,” and this means the woke left has “wholly taken over the academy?” Might this be a slight overstatement? Hundreds and hundreds of university English departments require that their students study Shakespeare, not cancel him. The last time I taught Shakespeare, we read several plays and studied the universal themes of love, justice, and forgiveness. Is that too woke?
Slight, but just slight. ‘one’ professor, yes, in a department that approves the course in a public, not private, university, another level of approval. That’s the point. Glad to hear your report of a ‘non-woke’, as it seems, approach.
Another factor is that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s demoralized much of the campus left, which had seriously been rooting for the Soviet vision of a communist human future (this isn’t an ad hominem point, it’s literally true). Many turned from there deeper into intersectionality and identitarianism as one of the only places to go when the hope of a communism died. Others saw English departments (and other academic fields unrelated to politics and economics) as one of the last places where they could hold out against an unfortunate rightward shift in collective reality. Here, it didn’t matter what had happened or what that said about the possibility of communism. Here, in English departments, it was still possible to influence the next generation to support left-wing idealism.
In the 1950s, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida warped our society’s understanding of literature forever with the adoption of the idea of “repressive tolerance” and the idea that words had no inherent meaning (idiotic) and “binary opposition theory” which was carried on and expanded upon by postmodern critics like Roland Barthes who insisted that context and authorship were irrelevant. Michel Foucault only added to this by adding a focus on gender to the mix. What you get today is a literary establishment that has lost touch with the true meaning of literature. It’s not about universal themes and exploring the human condition anymore. Now it’s about dissecting the socioeconomic themes of literature and finding some sort of identity angle one can work into a work of literature the author never intended. This would include nonsensical disciplines that need to be abolished like feminist, postcolonial and queer theory and African-American studies. This has led to a rigid hierarchy within which class and identity based interpretations of literature are king and dissenting viewpoints are marginalized and looked down upon. This is why when Liza wrote an essay arguing (and rightly so) that feminist literature is bunk, she was summarily dismissed from Columbia’s PhD program. You can only get a good grade if you find a way to insert completely irrelevant contemporary themes into a classic work of literature. By reducing classic literature to an exercise in ideological purity, you make it dumber and strip from it the thinking it requires you to do about its inherent message. No need to think anymore! Now you know what it’s message is about! I’d like to propose a bill for Congress, the Save Literature Act. The bill would abolish identity studies as academic disciplines, shut down departments based on identity studies, remove silly theories from literature courses, and remove postmodernist thought altogether from literary departments. Private universities should pass a resolution based on these ideas as well. Speaking here as a liberal, I don’t want ideology in my literature nor do I wish to dissect themes that have nothing to do with what the author wrote. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, James Joyce, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Chaim Potok, and Flannery O’Connor gave us works that are like a mirror by which we can look back at ourselves as human beings and reflect on the lessons they teach us and learn valuable nuggets of wisdom about life and ourselves from. They enrich ourselves, our culture, our society, and ultimately the whole of humanity! I couldn’t care less what shallow, divisive nonsense Sally Rooney, Roxanne Gay, Edward Said, Dr. Cornel West, Mychal Denzel Smith, Angie Thomas, or Michelle Alexander (her book the New Jim Crow is complete bunk by the way) have to offer. No thanks, I’ll stick to Romeo and Juliet, A Christmas Carol, The Souls of Black Folk, Up from Slavery, Intruder in the Dust, To Kill A Mockingbird, Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Green Eggs and Ham, The Raven, Notes of a Native Son, For Whom the Bell Tolls, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Tale of Two Cities, The Prince and the Pauper, The War of the Worlds, and the original Winnie the Pooh stories.
Boom. Flannery O'Connor is my favorite author and she would absolutely hate this stuff (interestingly, she's one of the authors who has been "cancelled" by many universities of late). Promoting ideology has become more important than getting students to think critically about ideas that they may not agree with.
Your inclusion of James Baldwin in your personal canon, given the context of your claim, is brilliant. I highly recommend reading Baldwin’s “A Letter To My Nephew,” and evaluating your argument in conversation with the wisdom he left there. If you’re bored, maybe go as far as to triangulate your thinking with Edward Pollard’s “The Lost Cause.” Good luck with your bill, and maybe one day I will be able to credit you with re-establishing the pure, classical canon to its rightful glory.
Homer, Virgil and Dante as well as Milton are also a must read. If you have the wherewithal I would add The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, Gilgamesh and the remaining works of Aeschylus
I love literature but I have to say I disagree with you. Words have no inherent meaning other than statistics of the network they are embedded in, and in relation to each other. That’s the foundation of LLM based auto-regressive AI’s which are a magnificent object example of a context-free “texte” system. The Derridas and Barthes of the world have been proven mathematically partially correct, but never fully grasped how fundamental the Author and concurrent historical records is as coded symbol that connects multiple levels of language abstraction. The “texte” is the Author, and vice-versa. That’s why one can summon Jabberwocky rewritten by Shakespeare, about Das Kapital. The only few authors I’m aware of who predicted our present condition of “texte” are Heinlein (“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Time Enough For Love”), Herman Hesse (“Das Glasperlenspel”) and to a degree Walter Miller Jr. (“A Canticle for Leibowitz”). Your mileage may vary.
If anyone is proven right by language being "statistics of the network they are embedded in" it would be Ludwig Wittgenstein, not Barthes et al. He was a true seeker of how the meaning of language is created by the human mind. The others were just political activists with tenure.
At a certain depth of thought, ideology shows itself to be a feeble crutch for those who need to feel, much like religious zealots, insulated from uncertainty —and any need for further inquiry and thought —by a suit of mental armor: impervious certainty. They may see others, but fail to see their own always-vulnerable, underlying assumptions.
To add to your thoughts on the canon: when we choose to politicize canonical works (which frequently requires a some amount of mental gymnastics) we ignore the fact the there *are* texts written in this century that *are* about race, class, gender, etc.
When I took Shakespeare at Columbia with Tayler in 1980-81, the course focused on who Shakespeare was, what he had studied and knew, and through that lens explicating the texts. The final exam required you to identify quotes from the plays and comment on them. Maybe the best course I took there and one of the most challenging.
I agree with this mainly since I feel like my identity is political. And I’m tired. I want to lie in the beauty of words and not think about racism or really any social political context. I just want to be.
I just would like to date myself here and give some perspective on my own education. I did the University of Michigan Honors English Program 1978-1982. I mention it because this is when the tide really started to turn, the older professors, like my thesis mentor, Herbert Barrows, were retiring, and a group of young professors were taking over the department. Many of them were 60's radicals who couldn't make it on Wall Street so they returned to the universities with renewed anger and resentment. Their classes were horrible. They no longer shared the idea of universal human nature and the human condition discovered through literature. 'Books' were simply there to provide ammunition. It has gone downhill since then. But perhaps the greatest motivation for the transformation was that the generations before them had done a remarkable job of raising up literature to millions of new readers, both in and out of the universities, and the young lions needed some way to distance themselves from the 'fathers' of the American universities. They found their direction with the groups documented in this article.
Just one other thought - when was the last time we had any good ideas from France? They gave us Rousseau, a real gem, and then the equally worthless Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, etc. Do yourself a favor and avoid French thinkers. By all means, enjoy the occasional croissant with good coffee, but avoid the thinkers.
Voltaire? Descartes? Montesquieu? I don't mind a little Anglophilia but it's hardly true every Frenchman is a postmodernist wackjob. Heck, one of the few real conservative literary writers these days is Michel Houellebecq.
Voltaire, Descartes and Montesquieu are closer to being contemporaries of Rousseau and of a different era. The heyday of “enlightenment” thought that was the basis of the French Revolution that overthrew the ancien regime but likely not in a way these men would have approved or supported. They were the inspiration behind the liberal nobles led constitution of 1789
All I know is this was a problem when I was an undergrad 25 years ago. I still remember how angry one of my creative writing professors was about a piece I wrote, because it didn't fit her worldview. "A writer's job is to promote a progressive world," she told me. Progressive to her meant, of course, Marxist/Feminist/Queer. And all my fellow students nodded along with her as I got chewed out in the middle of class.
I still remember preparing my applications to grad school, knowing EXACTLY what kind of writing would get me accepted anywhere--and then I decided I wasn't going to do it. I never expected this would lead me to get rejected from everywhere I applied, but that's how it turned out.
Even then, in my experience at non Ivy-League schools, I could see the game: Either play along with the Critical Theory/Postmodern worldview or get lost.
I saw a "traditional" production of Twelfth Night at the Globe in London a few years ago. All actors, as per the original productions, where played by men. In an after-show talk, the actors talked about their roles and interactions. To a person, they said it wasn't a drag show nor a "insert your own favorite political/social interpretation here" production. The intent and delivery was authentic Shakespeare for modern audiences. An excellent production unmarred by pseudo-intellectual academic-nonsense pontifications.
The humanities have been irrelevant for a very long time. Meanwhile, real life is increasingly fascinating, between Trump II and unexplained flying objects over New Jersey. The great Camille Paglia once put it best: “The reform of an English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.” Wake up, Ivy League, the entire country is laughing at you. The text of a recent speech at the Democratic National Committee says it all: “The rules specify that when we have a gender non binary candidate, the non binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.” HUH??? From an article by Jonathan Chait, the title of which says it all: The Democrats Show Why They Lost. Word salad like this is the kind of absurd tripe that elite education is producing. But I think it is very easy to demonize these basically well meaning people for their increasingly absurd behavior. It’s not their fault- the real problem is baked into the cake, a symptom of decadent end stage democracy. Allan Bloom first pointed this out in his great book, The Closing of the American Mind. Why, an article in First Things, of all places, once made the argument that LGBTQ rights were only a natural progression from a process that first began with The Enlightenment- the extending of rights, rights, and more rights to every single marginalized group, no matter how obscure or insignificant, and on and on and on: Manifest Destiny, or self cannibalism?
As a Professor of English at a traditional, Baptist university, I could not disagree with this essay more. As one example, you say “As the literary world began to disengage with notions of authorial intention,” but this disengagement was first voiced in 1946 by Wimsatt and Beardsley in their essay “The Intentional Fallacy.” Literary critics stopped limiting the interpretations of texts to “moral principles” in the very early 1900s. Moreover, Derrida does not say that words “can mean anything.” To deconstruct a text requires the 1950s traditional style of close reading that your essay claims has been abandoned. You also make wide, sweeping generalizations about English departments everywhere. I’m sorry your experience in college was unfair and biased. There is no excuse for that. But the tired cliche that English departments are nothing but Leftist ideological camps is incorrect, relies on a willful misreading of literary theory, and worst of all, smacks of a the kind of “fake news” that Donald Trump invented to cover his own crimes. If you truly want to be intellectually, honest, begin your essay with the fact that you’re part of the radical right so that your readers know where this misinformation is coming from.
I wonder if you realize that your last two sentences undermine everything that precedes them. “The radical right”— speaking of tired cliches.
My favorite was the first sentence - you just knew that after "As a Professor of English," you were going to get "I could not disagree with this essay more." LOL! Reminds me of Miss Jane on the Beverly Hillbillies. And who capitalizes Professor?
Academic titles are always capitalized, but let me say thank you for the Beverly Hillbillies reference. Next semester I’m teaching a course called “Shakespeare and the Beverly Hillbillies: The Bubblin’ Crude of Literature.”
Isn’t the right radicalized under Trump? Surely you wouldn’t consider him a moderate Republican. So no, “the radical right” is not a cliche. It is a political reality.
No, it isn’t. And anyhow, what has Trump got to do with the point at issue? Nothing that I can discern. Now, I’d be happy debunk the stupid claim that Trump/MAGA is fascism; perhaps you recall what Mr. Orwell had to say about the definition of that word. But that’s another discussion, isn’t it?
I never said anything about fascism. The point at issue was whether “the radical right” is a cliche. It isn’t.
The issue is that you called the author of the piece ‘part of the radical right’. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this is true and she was simply speaking from experience about the politicization of classic literature in academia. Or do you think anyone who talks about this issue automatically makes them ‘radical right’?
It’s obviously something you disagree with which is fine and I personally appreciated your perspective, but to throw around unwarranted labels like that is a huge part of the problem. And to bring in Trump was odd.
Sanity returns to the thread….
What does it mean?
Listen to Trump’s interview with “The View” years ago. He was proposing much the same ideas and the ladies that hate him now all were in favor of him running for president. No, he is not radical at all.
Starting a war in Ukraine was radical; ending it is the definition of moderate. Yes, I consider Trump very moderate, and very center. By the way your argument is circular, Professor.
“The quickest way to end a war is to lose it”
-George Orwell
And Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine is better described “criminal” than “radical”.
The GOP under Trump is not “right” it’s part of the “tear it down” party. And as a “left of center” person, I have mixed feelings about it. There is, “something rotten in institutions” and perhaps it needs to be torn down 🤷🏽♂️
When a prominent public university’s English department now includes a course called ‘Cancel Shakespeare?’ and the course description makes it clear the answer to the question is definitely yes, as my alma mater does, one can reasonably conclude that the radical ‘woke’ left has wholly overtaken the academy. One does not need to be on the ‘radical right’ to recognize this.
I've given up on literature so I don't hang around much anymore, but I will say I've read the radical right, having read the old Alternative Right blog and Sailer for a while, and Ms. Libes is definitely a normie conservative.
I feel somewhat the same way as you do and my English degree came about in the 80’s, beginning of peak postmodernism. Close textual reading to be meaningful requires mastery of a vast web of literature, the world of tropes like synecdoche and allegory, history, the physical sounds of words like prosidy and euphony, and the ability to comprehend cross-language change, and world history as it changed, for a start…
I’m very bored with the strange attribution to postmodernism every possible ill in the land. Of course streams of letters don’t have fixed meaning, the study of what meanings we attach and how and why is fascinating, it’s called the study of literature. Postmodernism is no more frightening than any other tool used to structure meaning. A single-lens view on any literary work is always incomplete; my curiosity is what would be called literary statistical linguistics, yet another view.
All art, including literature, aspires to the condition of music, which has cannot have political aim, being pure abstraction. Rhetoric, that’s something else. I don’t confuse art and rhetoric, that seems to be the operating “paradigm” today.
I’m also bored, and impatient, with the attribution to pomo for all ills!!
What Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote in 1946 does not disprove the patently obvious truth that university English departments are drastically politicised only in the new millennium. What Marx and Engels wrote in 1848 was only (and disastrously) applied across whole countries over half a century later. The avant-garde always precedes the mass movement by decades. This article implies a clear understanding of that reality: Barthes (1915-1980) was an exact contemporary of Beardsley (1915-1985). I first studied Wimsatt and Beardsley in the mid-1960s in the aesthetics component of a philosophy degree. I was horrified, as anyone who had read George Orwell should have been. Without intention, without passion, any text might as well be ground out by a soulless machine (or, in our time, by the great oxymoron, “artificial intelligence”).
Well, this is what I have to say about that…Intellectual freedom and inquiry are paramount. Traditional roles can be not only good, but fantabulous. Religion can have very positive aspects. Most importantly, I don’t believe for one second that a scientific middle aged cis dude “missed the boat” in humanities in general and poetry in particular. It’s not about “doing better.” It’s just about doing. As the ancient Taoists used to say, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice IS perfect.” And any anon dude who can bust out lines from The Iliad at the drop of a hat is already on team humanities….and team science, of course.
My real issue with the “far left of center” (and “the far right of center” folks I interact with is a absolute lack of knowledge about the classics even of western civilization, let along more ancient classical civilizations.
Even amongst those with a “humanities” education. In fact the “far right” seems to be rediscovering western history. Shockingly the best TV documentary of pre Christian bear Middle East and Judaism is on The Daily Wire with Jordan Peterson. You might disagree with various aspects of the “tour” but it’s better than most I have seen elsewhere
It’s sad!
I could not disagree with you more: give me Samuel Johnson any day … time is the best critic.
You start out on the right note. Moving away from authorial intentions proceeds Derrida by a number of years.On top of that, I agree with that move.An author can say, I intended, this or that.I may have intended to have lunch but did I.However, your claim that the author is part of the radical right is uncalled for. Look , where does that take the discussion? Essentially it implies that if I don’t agree with the authors views on literature it’s because shes trying to support some political outlook I disagree with.
This website best explains why I made the assumption. Please look at it because it tells a frightening tale. The author with whom I disagree posits the argument that lit theory, or focusing on issues like race and gender, is what is destroying academia. Her essay echoes the right’s agenda to silence these discussions.
https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Higher-Ed-Legislative-Landscape.pdf
Your point and the analysis you linked to illustrate a classic fallacy which I think gets to the core of the so-called 'culture wars'.
As someone who has been observing the absolute s**tstorm that is modern day online politics over the last 10 years, the pattern seems to go as follows:
1. Some well-intended but deeply flawed bad/illiberal ideas emerge on the far-left.
2. A small number of people attempt to force these ideas upon everyone, shout down anyone who disagrees and the ideas start to spread.
3. Legitimate and intelligent criticism starts to emerge from the Liberal left/centre/right which is ignored, mocked, misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented. Some of these people are fired from their jobs, 'cancelled' from public speaking or ostracized from their communities by people who mostly don't understand their arguments.
4. The populist and illiberal right (always late to the game) jump on the bandwagon (because of course they will) and enter the argument like a bull in a china shop.
5. The left (along with much of the general public who are suddenly made aware of the issues at hand - albeit through a very distorted lens) can now point to these people as proof that *any* criticism of the original bad ideas no matter where it comes from, no matter what the nuances are, is no different to those made by the illiberal/populist right.
6. An unwinnable fight now gets underway between the illiberal left and right and any intelligent person who wades into the argument is immediately labelled 'far-right' or 'woke' by idiots on either side.
It really shouldn't be that hard to sort through the nuances and distinguish between legitimate criticism of bad ideas (even if you think they're good ideas) and dumb knee-jerk responses to the same ideas. We don't all need to retreat to extreme positions in order to fight the opposing side, there are lots of possible positions which are balanced and nuanced and are not coming from reductionist concepts like left/good vs right/bad.
Is Allan Bloom a member of the radical right?
Not in my opinion. Do you think he is?
No. As Anon pointed out, Bloom made similar arguments about identity politics and repressive tolerance in The Closing of the American Mind.
I largely agree regarding your comment below about Donald Trump and populist anti-intellectualism, although I will point out that both sides are reacting to perceived condescension from the other side (deplorables, etc.). A broken clock is right twice a day. Sometimes, Trump or those in his movement make an argument (usually a dumbed-down form), which others have been making for years and which happens to be true. That doesn’t mean anyone who makes that argument supports Trump.
It's a good point though. Ms. Libes is much closer to a Bloomian (Allan or Harold) fan of the old-school Western Canon than any kind of far-rightist.
I hear ya, Anon Dude. I referenced the far right only because in these dark days, attacks from that direction often involve a strong anti-academic, anti-intellectual ethos. Down with the educated elite! (This coming from a president whose gold toilet is the very definition of elitism.) Up with covfefe! We have no idea what that word means but we certainly prefer it to anything English departments teach!
I am going to agree with you.
Frankly, one of my interests in this blog was particularly because I thought academia had become a left-wing monoculture and it was bad for intellectual freedom and inquiry. (Could traditional roles be *good* in some cases? Could religion have positive aspects? I don't know, you'll lose your job for even asking.) So, you know, any movement against anti-intellectualism on the right is to be applauded.
I've pretty much accepted that it's way too much of an uphill battle to engage with the humanities for me personally at this point. I'm well into middle age, my training's in the sciences, and I'm a cishet(ish) white (passing?) man. If I wrote a book nobody would publish it, and I'd be up against people who have been writing poetry since grammar school. I'm not arrogant enough to believe I can do better than people who completed degrees in English and have been writing for decades. *Viciste, sinistri*.
I see. One university has one professor who teaches one course called “Cancel Shakespeare,” and this means the woke left has “wholly taken over the academy?” Might this be a slight overstatement? Hundreds and hundreds of university English departments require that their students study Shakespeare, not cancel him. The last time I taught Shakespeare, we read several plays and studied the universal themes of love, justice, and forgiveness. Is that too woke?
Slight, but just slight. ‘one’ professor, yes, in a department that approves the course in a public, not private, university, another level of approval. That’s the point. Glad to hear your report of a ‘non-woke’, as it seems, approach.
Another factor is that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s demoralized much of the campus left, which had seriously been rooting for the Soviet vision of a communist human future (this isn’t an ad hominem point, it’s literally true). Many turned from there deeper into intersectionality and identitarianism as one of the only places to go when the hope of a communism died. Others saw English departments (and other academic fields unrelated to politics and economics) as one of the last places where they could hold out against an unfortunate rightward shift in collective reality. Here, it didn’t matter what had happened or what that said about the possibility of communism. Here, in English departments, it was still possible to influence the next generation to support left-wing idealism.
In the 1950s, Herbert Marcuse and Jacques Derrida warped our society’s understanding of literature forever with the adoption of the idea of “repressive tolerance” and the idea that words had no inherent meaning (idiotic) and “binary opposition theory” which was carried on and expanded upon by postmodern critics like Roland Barthes who insisted that context and authorship were irrelevant. Michel Foucault only added to this by adding a focus on gender to the mix. What you get today is a literary establishment that has lost touch with the true meaning of literature. It’s not about universal themes and exploring the human condition anymore. Now it’s about dissecting the socioeconomic themes of literature and finding some sort of identity angle one can work into a work of literature the author never intended. This would include nonsensical disciplines that need to be abolished like feminist, postcolonial and queer theory and African-American studies. This has led to a rigid hierarchy within which class and identity based interpretations of literature are king and dissenting viewpoints are marginalized and looked down upon. This is why when Liza wrote an essay arguing (and rightly so) that feminist literature is bunk, she was summarily dismissed from Columbia’s PhD program. You can only get a good grade if you find a way to insert completely irrelevant contemporary themes into a classic work of literature. By reducing classic literature to an exercise in ideological purity, you make it dumber and strip from it the thinking it requires you to do about its inherent message. No need to think anymore! Now you know what it’s message is about! I’d like to propose a bill for Congress, the Save Literature Act. The bill would abolish identity studies as academic disciplines, shut down departments based on identity studies, remove silly theories from literature courses, and remove postmodernist thought altogether from literary departments. Private universities should pass a resolution based on these ideas as well. Speaking here as a liberal, I don’t want ideology in my literature nor do I wish to dissect themes that have nothing to do with what the author wrote. William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, James Joyce, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Chaim Potok, and Flannery O’Connor gave us works that are like a mirror by which we can look back at ourselves as human beings and reflect on the lessons they teach us and learn valuable nuggets of wisdom about life and ourselves from. They enrich ourselves, our culture, our society, and ultimately the whole of humanity! I couldn’t care less what shallow, divisive nonsense Sally Rooney, Roxanne Gay, Edward Said, Dr. Cornel West, Mychal Denzel Smith, Angie Thomas, or Michelle Alexander (her book the New Jim Crow is complete bunk by the way) have to offer. No thanks, I’ll stick to Romeo and Juliet, A Christmas Carol, The Souls of Black Folk, Up from Slavery, Intruder in the Dust, To Kill A Mockingbird, Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Green Eggs and Ham, The Raven, Notes of a Native Son, For Whom the Bell Tolls, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, A Tale of Two Cities, The Prince and the Pauper, The War of the Worlds, and the original Winnie the Pooh stories.
Boom. Flannery O'Connor is my favorite author and she would absolutely hate this stuff (interestingly, she's one of the authors who has been "cancelled" by many universities of late). Promoting ideology has become more important than getting students to think critically about ideas that they may not agree with.
Your inclusion of James Baldwin in your personal canon, given the context of your claim, is brilliant. I highly recommend reading Baldwin’s “A Letter To My Nephew,” and evaluating your argument in conversation with the wisdom he left there. If you’re bored, maybe go as far as to triangulate your thinking with Edward Pollard’s “The Lost Cause.” Good luck with your bill, and maybe one day I will be able to credit you with re-establishing the pure, classical canon to its rightful glory.
Homer, Virgil and Dante as well as Milton are also a must read. If you have the wherewithal I would add The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, Gilgamesh and the remaining works of Aeschylus
I love literature but I have to say I disagree with you. Words have no inherent meaning other than statistics of the network they are embedded in, and in relation to each other. That’s the foundation of LLM based auto-regressive AI’s which are a magnificent object example of a context-free “texte” system. The Derridas and Barthes of the world have been proven mathematically partially correct, but never fully grasped how fundamental the Author and concurrent historical records is as coded symbol that connects multiple levels of language abstraction. The “texte” is the Author, and vice-versa. That’s why one can summon Jabberwocky rewritten by Shakespeare, about Das Kapital. The only few authors I’m aware of who predicted our present condition of “texte” are Heinlein (“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, “Time Enough For Love”), Herman Hesse (“Das Glasperlenspel”) and to a degree Walter Miller Jr. (“A Canticle for Leibowitz”). Your mileage may vary.
If anyone is proven right by language being "statistics of the network they are embedded in" it would be Ludwig Wittgenstein, not Barthes et al. He was a true seeker of how the meaning of language is created by the human mind. The others were just political activists with tenure.
Ideology is easy. Thinking is hard.
l would add that ideology is a way for small minds to think 'big' thoughts.
At a certain depth of thought, ideology shows itself to be a feeble crutch for those who need to feel, much like religious zealots, insulated from uncertainty —and any need for further inquiry and thought —by a suit of mental armor: impervious certainty. They may see others, but fail to see their own always-vulnerable, underlying assumptions.
"repressive tolerance"
Jumbo shrimp
That was good--
literature primarily as a vehicle for ideology = propaganda
Exactly!
To add to your thoughts on the canon: when we choose to politicize canonical works (which frequently requires a some amount of mental gymnastics) we ignore the fact the there *are* texts written in this century that *are* about race, class, gender, etc.
“ … what is enduring in human nature …”
When I took Shakespeare at Columbia with Tayler in 1980-81, the course focused on who Shakespeare was, what he had studied and knew, and through that lens explicating the texts. The final exam required you to identify quotes from the plays and comment on them. Maybe the best course I took there and one of the most challenging.
I agree with this mainly since I feel like my identity is political. And I’m tired. I want to lie in the beauty of words and not think about racism or really any social political context. I just want to be.
This is a brilliant analysis. Literature is meant to touch on universal human themes, not be suffocated by the ideologies of the passing age.
I just would like to date myself here and give some perspective on my own education. I did the University of Michigan Honors English Program 1978-1982. I mention it because this is when the tide really started to turn, the older professors, like my thesis mentor, Herbert Barrows, were retiring, and a group of young professors were taking over the department. Many of them were 60's radicals who couldn't make it on Wall Street so they returned to the universities with renewed anger and resentment. Their classes were horrible. They no longer shared the idea of universal human nature and the human condition discovered through literature. 'Books' were simply there to provide ammunition. It has gone downhill since then. But perhaps the greatest motivation for the transformation was that the generations before them had done a remarkable job of raising up literature to millions of new readers, both in and out of the universities, and the young lions needed some way to distance themselves from the 'fathers' of the American universities. They found their direction with the groups documented in this article.
Just one other thought - when was the last time we had any good ideas from France? They gave us Rousseau, a real gem, and then the equally worthless Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, etc. Do yourself a favor and avoid French thinkers. By all means, enjoy the occasional croissant with good coffee, but avoid the thinkers.
Voltaire? Descartes? Montesquieu? I don't mind a little Anglophilia but it's hardly true every Frenchman is a postmodernist wackjob. Heck, one of the few real conservative literary writers these days is Michel Houellebecq.
Voltaire, Descartes and Montesquieu are closer to being contemporaries of Rousseau and of a different era. The heyday of “enlightenment” thought that was the basis of the French Revolution that overthrew the ancien regime but likely not in a way these men would have approved or supported. They were the inspiration behind the liberal nobles led constitution of 1789
All I know is this was a problem when I was an undergrad 25 years ago. I still remember how angry one of my creative writing professors was about a piece I wrote, because it didn't fit her worldview. "A writer's job is to promote a progressive world," she told me. Progressive to her meant, of course, Marxist/Feminist/Queer. And all my fellow students nodded along with her as I got chewed out in the middle of class.
I still remember preparing my applications to grad school, knowing EXACTLY what kind of writing would get me accepted anywhere--and then I decided I wasn't going to do it. I never expected this would lead me to get rejected from everywhere I applied, but that's how it turned out.
Even then, in my experience at non Ivy-League schools, I could see the game: Either play along with the Critical Theory/Postmodern worldview or get lost.
I saw a "traditional" production of Twelfth Night at the Globe in London a few years ago. All actors, as per the original productions, where played by men. In an after-show talk, the actors talked about their roles and interactions. To a person, they said it wasn't a drag show nor a "insert your own favorite political/social interpretation here" production. The intent and delivery was authentic Shakespeare for modern audiences. An excellent production unmarred by pseudo-intellectual academic-nonsense pontifications.
This is an excellent article.
The humanities have been irrelevant for a very long time. Meanwhile, real life is increasingly fascinating, between Trump II and unexplained flying objects over New Jersey. The great Camille Paglia once put it best: “The reform of an English department cuts no ice down at the corner garage.” Wake up, Ivy League, the entire country is laughing at you. The text of a recent speech at the Democratic National Committee says it all: “The rules specify that when we have a gender non binary candidate, the non binary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.” HUH??? From an article by Jonathan Chait, the title of which says it all: The Democrats Show Why They Lost. Word salad like this is the kind of absurd tripe that elite education is producing. But I think it is very easy to demonize these basically well meaning people for their increasingly absurd behavior. It’s not their fault- the real problem is baked into the cake, a symptom of decadent end stage democracy. Allan Bloom first pointed this out in his great book, The Closing of the American Mind. Why, an article in First Things, of all places, once made the argument that LGBTQ rights were only a natural progression from a process that first began with The Enlightenment- the extending of rights, rights, and more rights to every single marginalized group, no matter how obscure or insignificant, and on and on and on: Manifest Destiny, or self cannibalism?
This what having been successfully seduced by inevitably feeble ideology looks like.