Right?? That’s what irritates me all the time. And as a now-retired working class person, I have almost zero chance of getting a big publisher if I wanted to write a book as a spokesperson for the working class.
Yeah ppl who contribute nothing to society sure as hell love seeing themselves anointed to directing it. I’m sure that’s never had consequences like starvation and genocide by the tens of millions
A lot of times they are from working class backgrounds, but are upwardly mobile and know they have to say the things the rich kids around them are saying. The actual working class is usually too busy, well, working to write novels.
Although Liza only touches on it, as a Jane Austen fan I'd like to unpack the Jane Austen reference a little.
The treatment of slavery in Mansfield Park and elsewhere in the Austen-verse is a topic worthy of discussion. Edward Said's attacks on Austen are essentially that she's an apologist for slavery because Mansfield Park demonstrates the casual acceptance of wealth built on slavery. I'd contend that Austen showing things as they are doesn't mean she's in favour of them. Usually the opposite, in fact.
The slave-owning Sir Thomas Bertram is not a sympathetic character, but it is true that Mansfield Park doesn't read like The Underground Railroad. Still, I think it's more enlightening to study what Jane Austen actually wrote (eg link below) than shout about what she should have written (Said).
I am continually baffled by this supposition that just because an author depicts something in their work, that means they are for it. That seems to be one of literature’s primary flaws. Nabokov, for instance, in no way supported or justified pedophilia. We’ve created a narcissistic world, it seems, where authors are expected only to write about their own viewpoints and experiences, which, to me, defeats the whole point of literature.
I wrote an essay pushing back against Said’s take on Mansfield Park my freshman year of college. Professor was horrified that anyone would do such a thing. Thanks for your analysis. Has been a while since I’ve read the Said piece. It’s ridiculous, of course.
I was never able to get past page one of Lolita. It was pedophilia gussied up as “literature.” I finally HAD to read it in grad school, and still felt creeped out. One night one of my classmates, a big bruising guy built like a prize fighter, started mumbling and then broke down crying. It wasn’t hard to do the math. He reaffirmed my initial reaction to the book. I’ve never stopped hating that novel.
Part of this is 'standpoint theory'--your unique place in the world, especially if 'marginalized', gives you knowledge others don't have about that marginalization. Which is true in some regards, but also makes anything except autofiction impossible if taken to its extreme.
(Of course that also theoretically means conservatives and even classical liberals such as yourself would have unique literary perspectives...but they don't want to think about that.)
There's also (as I am sure you were aware at the end) the whole political thing where Said is left-coded and you're, ah, white-by-their-standards (if not by Nick Fuentes'), so therefore pushing back against him is right-coded, which is bad in a university. I hate to allude to Carl Schmitt but the friend-enemy distinction seems to be working overtime these days.
There's also the old didacticist idea that art should be instructive, now making a comeback. If you're primarily politically motivated, then the most important thing about any work is going to be what it does politically. Authorial intent becomes much more important then.
Whenever I’m confronted by someone spouting their knee-jerk Marxist sloganeering, I fire back at these humorless polemicists with a different style of Marxism. It pisses them off every time as I deflate their protective bubbles. Pretentious self-important ramrod stiff ideologists never fair well when your ' Marxism is filtered through Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo.
As someone who studied literature with a passion for the humanistic tradition, and having been raised in a former communists Eastern European country, I deeply resonate with the concerns raised here. The shift away from engaging with texts as timeless explorations of the human condition toward interpreting them solely through rigid ideological frameworks is disheartening. Literature has always been a space for grappling with universal truths — what it means to love, to suffer, to persevere — not a battleground for contemporary political agendas. If we reduce literary study to a narrow lens of theory, we lose its transformative power, its ability to connect us across time, culture, and experience. We should not allow these rich, humanistic traditions to be overshadowed by divisive ideologies.
How can they be "against" a work of literature if it's taken off the curriculum and they never read it? We are supposed to read works that may make us uncomfortable, but that's the only way one can properly critique them. As someone whose highest education is technically community college, this was an eye opening read.
I think that's the point though. The idea of reading works that make you uncomfortable and understanding the other person's point of view is an older, GenX-and-earlier version of liberalism. Millennials and later think they have a right to be safe in college.
College was originally a finishing school for wealthy young men; it may be returning to that, though more for wealthy women now.
This leftward drift has only gotten worse since I was in school. We need to treat it as it is: a secular religious replacement for the major old world religions. Unfortunately it’s hard to stem it when institutions across the board are filled with voices that support it loudly, and those who disagree either leave or continue to be silent about it.
I mean, I think a lot of people need some kind of religion and when they got rid of the old ones they came up with social justice instead.
I've seen quite a few Christian writers argue it's a heretical form of Christianity without God or Jesus, with whiteness, maleness, etc. as original sin, self-criticism as confession, calling out as excommunication, and so on. I wouldn't mind seeing a few Jewish writers analyze the ways it draws on Jewish tropes as well, though sadly lacking any hint of Mel Brooks/Jackie Mason irreverence.
You are a rarity inoculated by your parents' history and thinking early in life. Most parents have zero idea the crap their kids are studying in the humanities and when they find out, they don't do anything about it because 1) they think this is all just talk, not realizing/forgetting that ideas have real world consequences or 2) they give in to stupid unearned guilt surrounding their "privilege", which their kids begin to shove back on them. Thankfully my daughter was inoculated too and avoided the woke virus but if I had a kid who came home spewing this nonsense I'd sit them down and fix it right away by offering to cut off the "privilege". Most parents don't bother and the sh** festers.
And no problem with such valuable guidance—it’s a gift. My mother was a great guide for me too. In America, esp here in CA, I have many friends with lost children who didn’t pay attention to the ideas their kids were absorbing. I feel sad for them. One can ignore the notion that ideas have consequences but there’s no getting away from the consequences. Then you’re relying on pure luck…
The problem with Marxism in the humanities is even greater than people realize. What is being taught is not the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson or Darko Suvin who at least tried to grapple with the dismal failure of their paradigm and opted for a revision of Marxism by linking it with psychoanalysis (Jameson) or genre theory (Suvin). What you have today is a pseudo-religious mean-spirited political ideology that is even more dogmatic than the Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism but has no pretense to intellectual integrity or rationalism. Instead it is a finger-wagging moralizing discourse that embraces the political cause du jour, be it Palestinians or trans rights, without even trying to articulate how it is connected to history or ideas or literary theory of any kind. And I am a bona fide professor of literature.
Marxism, Africana studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and post-colonial studies have no place in the teaching of literature! None. Period. Full stop. A Marxist Union sending out a message to organize the literature department at Columbia? That is disgusting and totally inappropriate! I am a Rockefeller Republican who is liberal on social issues and a big supporter of labor unions and I think that’s despicable. The vast majority of English professors are liberals, progressives or leftists. This is a big, big problem! For someone like Liza who was born and actually lived under the great evil that is Communism or her family, it is a HUGE insult and a slap in the face, to teach Marxist theory in college and be walking around with a bunch of leftist radicals and Antifa members. You do know Communist regimes all over the globe have murdered hundreds of millions of people right? You know that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were horrible people who’s ideas were very flawed and would only work in a perfect world right? Literature should NOT be treated as so subjective you can read anything into it. I don’t think when William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, G.K. Chesterton, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens were writing their famous works they had implicit messages about the class struggle, queerness or what it means to identify as a pansexual woman of color role playing as a crab in mind. Forcing a Jewish girl to understand Mansfield Park through the lens of notorious anti-Semite Edward Said’s 20th century post-colonial lens? Dang, really classy bro! Not to mention insulting and offensive! By the way, Edward Said’s theories are bunk and his book Orientalism has been critiqued and torn to shreds numerous times. The two also have nothing to do with each other. This is why literature needs to be de-politicized at once, higher education in this country needs massive reform and the current generation of literary scholars need to be replaced by a new generation of apolitical academics who will stick to the intended meaning of the literature and only that! I remember in my English and American literature courses in college, ridiculous stuff being read into literature all the time. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for the western literary canon including POC, women, LGBT people, and disabled people and for hearing the perspectives and reading the literature of non-western peoples. But let’s take Marxism and identity studies out of it shall we? Instead let’s stick to REAL literature like Metamorphosis, Mansfield Park, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Raven, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, A Streetcar Called Desire, This Side of Paradise, A Christmas Carol, Notes of a Native Son, Oliver Twist, and Red Badge of Courage. Also, removing works of literature from the curriculum because of uncomfortable content is most definitely the wrong approach as is claiming an important work of literature is NOT important because it’s not Marxist enough for you and you can’t use it to indoctrinate your students. The takeover of the academy by Marxist ideology in the 1980s is probably one of the most important historical events of our times no one knows about. I would also like to point out that post-colonial studies are complete garbage and that it was those same Orientalists who documented non-western cultures and brought knowledge of them to the Western world for the first time. Furthermore, while European colonialism gets a bad rap, it was warts and all, a very positive thing for the people of the developing world. Did colonialism come with racial discrimination, atrocities, injustices, and exploitation? To be sure. But the arrival of European rule also did so much good for the peoples of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Here are some of the many benefits of European colonialism: expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, the enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identity formation.
I agree, let’s make the study of literature more about the appreciation of art and the insight into human experience more generally. Thanks for your work.
The Marxist takeover of literature... Been going on a long time. In the latter half of the 20th century, I would argue, the Marxists began using sex and racial identity to push their ideology on young people. But, as bad as it is in the universities, it's now in elementary schools, with teachers normalizing deviant sexual lifestyles. It's all part of, "if you want to create a new world, you have to destroy the old." Another big front in the Marxist war on democratic and free societies is in publishing. Normative fiction is marginalized and anarchist/sexphreak stories sought out, sanctified, published, pushed, and normalized.
I’ve never seen a spokesman for the working class be a part of the working class. It’s all social status to them, pseudo-religious moralizing.
Right?? That’s what irritates me all the time. And as a now-retired working class person, I have almost zero chance of getting a big publisher if I wanted to write a book as a spokesperson for the working class.
Yeah ppl who contribute nothing to society sure as hell love seeing themselves anointed to directing it. I’m sure that’s never had consequences like starvation and genocide by the tens of millions
A lot of times they are from working class backgrounds, but are upwardly mobile and know they have to say the things the rich kids around them are saying. The actual working class is usually too busy, well, working to write novels.
Although Liza only touches on it, as a Jane Austen fan I'd like to unpack the Jane Austen reference a little.
The treatment of slavery in Mansfield Park and elsewhere in the Austen-verse is a topic worthy of discussion. Edward Said's attacks on Austen are essentially that she's an apologist for slavery because Mansfield Park demonstrates the casual acceptance of wealth built on slavery. I'd contend that Austen showing things as they are doesn't mean she's in favour of them. Usually the opposite, in fact.
The slave-owning Sir Thomas Bertram is not a sympathetic character, but it is true that Mansfield Park doesn't read like The Underground Railroad. Still, I think it's more enlightening to study what Jane Austen actually wrote (eg link below) than shout about what she should have written (Said).
https://janeausteninvermont.blog/2014/08/28/quoting-jane-austens-mansfield-park-the-issue-of-slavery-and-the-slave-trade/
I am continually baffled by this supposition that just because an author depicts something in their work, that means they are for it. That seems to be one of literature’s primary flaws. Nabokov, for instance, in no way supported or justified pedophilia. We’ve created a narcissistic world, it seems, where authors are expected only to write about their own viewpoints and experiences, which, to me, defeats the whole point of literature.
I wrote an essay pushing back against Said’s take on Mansfield Park my freshman year of college. Professor was horrified that anyone would do such a thing. Thanks for your analysis. Has been a while since I’ve read the Said piece. It’s ridiculous, of course.
I was never able to get past page one of Lolita. It was pedophilia gussied up as “literature.” I finally HAD to read it in grad school, and still felt creeped out. One night one of my classmates, a big bruising guy built like a prize fighter, started mumbling and then broke down crying. It wasn’t hard to do the math. He reaffirmed my initial reaction to the book. I’ve never stopped hating that novel.
Part of this is 'standpoint theory'--your unique place in the world, especially if 'marginalized', gives you knowledge others don't have about that marginalization. Which is true in some regards, but also makes anything except autofiction impossible if taken to its extreme.
(Of course that also theoretically means conservatives and even classical liberals such as yourself would have unique literary perspectives...but they don't want to think about that.)
There's also (as I am sure you were aware at the end) the whole political thing where Said is left-coded and you're, ah, white-by-their-standards (if not by Nick Fuentes'), so therefore pushing back against him is right-coded, which is bad in a university. I hate to allude to Carl Schmitt but the friend-enemy distinction seems to be working overtime these days.
There's also the old didacticist idea that art should be instructive, now making a comeback. If you're primarily politically motivated, then the most important thing about any work is going to be what it does politically. Authorial intent becomes much more important then.
Whenever I’m confronted by someone spouting their knee-jerk Marxist sloganeering, I fire back at these humorless polemicists with a different style of Marxism. It pisses them off every time as I deflate their protective bubbles. Pretentious self-important ramrod stiff ideologists never fair well when your ' Marxism is filtered through Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo.
As someone who studied literature with a passion for the humanistic tradition, and having been raised in a former communists Eastern European country, I deeply resonate with the concerns raised here. The shift away from engaging with texts as timeless explorations of the human condition toward interpreting them solely through rigid ideological frameworks is disheartening. Literature has always been a space for grappling with universal truths — what it means to love, to suffer, to persevere — not a battleground for contemporary political agendas. If we reduce literary study to a narrow lens of theory, we lose its transformative power, its ability to connect us across time, culture, and experience. We should not allow these rich, humanistic traditions to be overshadowed by divisive ideologies.
Eastern Europeans get it. Spot on!
In my experience quite a few Chinese do too, for reasons you can guess.
How can they be "against" a work of literature if it's taken off the curriculum and they never read it? We are supposed to read works that may make us uncomfortable, but that's the only way one can properly critique them. As someone whose highest education is technically community college, this was an eye opening read.
I think that's the point though. The idea of reading works that make you uncomfortable and understanding the other person's point of view is an older, GenX-and-earlier version of liberalism. Millennials and later think they have a right to be safe in college.
College was originally a finishing school for wealthy young men; it may be returning to that, though more for wealthy women now.
This leftward drift has only gotten worse since I was in school. We need to treat it as it is: a secular religious replacement for the major old world religions. Unfortunately it’s hard to stem it when institutions across the board are filled with voices that support it loudly, and those who disagree either leave or continue to be silent about it.
I mean, I think a lot of people need some kind of religion and when they got rid of the old ones they came up with social justice instead.
I've seen quite a few Christian writers argue it's a heretical form of Christianity without God or Jesus, with whiteness, maleness, etc. as original sin, self-criticism as confession, calling out as excommunication, and so on. I wouldn't mind seeing a few Jewish writers analyze the ways it draws on Jewish tropes as well, though sadly lacking any hint of Mel Brooks/Jackie Mason irreverence.
You are a rarity inoculated by your parents' history and thinking early in life. Most parents have zero idea the crap their kids are studying in the humanities and when they find out, they don't do anything about it because 1) they think this is all just talk, not realizing/forgetting that ideas have real world consequences or 2) they give in to stupid unearned guilt surrounding their "privilege", which their kids begin to shove back on them. Thankfully my daughter was inoculated too and avoided the woke virus but if I had a kid who came home spewing this nonsense I'd sit them down and fix it right away by offering to cut off the "privilege". Most parents don't bother and the sh** festers.
Spot on! So much of this happens because of circumstances of upbringing as well. Appreciate your support, Reena!
And no problem with such valuable guidance—it’s a gift. My mother was a great guide for me too. In America, esp here in CA, I have many friends with lost children who didn’t pay attention to the ideas their kids were absorbing. I feel sad for them. One can ignore the notion that ideas have consequences but there’s no getting away from the consequences. Then you’re relying on pure luck…
My freshman year was nearly 30 years ago, and even then my English Degree required Marx and Foucault while Shakespeare was optional.
Tells you where their interests are.
What college/university?
University of Utah -- way back in the late 90's
Literature with a political moral or the intent of convincing someone to follow a certain doctrine is nothing more than propaganda.
The problem with Marxism in the humanities is even greater than people realize. What is being taught is not the neo-Marxism of Fredric Jameson or Darko Suvin who at least tried to grapple with the dismal failure of their paradigm and opted for a revision of Marxism by linking it with psychoanalysis (Jameson) or genre theory (Suvin). What you have today is a pseudo-religious mean-spirited political ideology that is even more dogmatic than the Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism but has no pretense to intellectual integrity or rationalism. Instead it is a finger-wagging moralizing discourse that embraces the political cause du jour, be it Palestinians or trans rights, without even trying to articulate how it is connected to history or ideas or literary theory of any kind. And I am a bona fide professor of literature.
You are the best sort of literature professor! 👏🏻
This. All of this.
“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”
So glad to have found your Substack
Marxism, Africana studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and post-colonial studies have no place in the teaching of literature! None. Period. Full stop. A Marxist Union sending out a message to organize the literature department at Columbia? That is disgusting and totally inappropriate! I am a Rockefeller Republican who is liberal on social issues and a big supporter of labor unions and I think that’s despicable. The vast majority of English professors are liberals, progressives or leftists. This is a big, big problem! For someone like Liza who was born and actually lived under the great evil that is Communism or her family, it is a HUGE insult and a slap in the face, to teach Marxist theory in college and be walking around with a bunch of leftist radicals and Antifa members. You do know Communist regimes all over the globe have murdered hundreds of millions of people right? You know that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were horrible people who’s ideas were very flawed and would only work in a perfect world right? Literature should NOT be treated as so subjective you can read anything into it. I don’t think when William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, G.K. Chesterton, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens were writing their famous works they had implicit messages about the class struggle, queerness or what it means to identify as a pansexual woman of color role playing as a crab in mind. Forcing a Jewish girl to understand Mansfield Park through the lens of notorious anti-Semite Edward Said’s 20th century post-colonial lens? Dang, really classy bro! Not to mention insulting and offensive! By the way, Edward Said’s theories are bunk and his book Orientalism has been critiqued and torn to shreds numerous times. The two also have nothing to do with each other. This is why literature needs to be de-politicized at once, higher education in this country needs massive reform and the current generation of literary scholars need to be replaced by a new generation of apolitical academics who will stick to the intended meaning of the literature and only that! I remember in my English and American literature courses in college, ridiculous stuff being read into literature all the time. Don’t misunderstand me, I’m all for the western literary canon including POC, women, LGBT people, and disabled people and for hearing the perspectives and reading the literature of non-western peoples. But let’s take Marxism and identity studies out of it shall we? Instead let’s stick to REAL literature like Metamorphosis, Mansfield Park, East of Eden, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Raven, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, A Streetcar Called Desire, This Side of Paradise, A Christmas Carol, Notes of a Native Son, Oliver Twist, and Red Badge of Courage. Also, removing works of literature from the curriculum because of uncomfortable content is most definitely the wrong approach as is claiming an important work of literature is NOT important because it’s not Marxist enough for you and you can’t use it to indoctrinate your students. The takeover of the academy by Marxist ideology in the 1980s is probably one of the most important historical events of our times no one knows about. I would also like to point out that post-colonial studies are complete garbage and that it was those same Orientalists who documented non-western cultures and brought knowledge of them to the Western world for the first time. Furthermore, while European colonialism gets a bad rap, it was warts and all, a very positive thing for the people of the developing world. Did colonialism come with racial discrimination, atrocities, injustices, and exploitation? To be sure. But the arrival of European rule also did so much good for the peoples of Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Here are some of the many benefits of European colonialism: expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, the enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identity formation.
I agree, let’s make the study of literature more about the appreciation of art and the insight into human experience more generally. Thanks for your work.
The Marxist takeover of literature... Been going on a long time. In the latter half of the 20th century, I would argue, the Marxists began using sex and racial identity to push their ideology on young people. But, as bad as it is in the universities, it's now in elementary schools, with teachers normalizing deviant sexual lifestyles. It's all part of, "if you want to create a new world, you have to destroy the old." Another big front in the Marxist war on democratic and free societies is in publishing. Normative fiction is marginalized and anarchist/sexphreak stories sought out, sanctified, published, pushed, and normalized.