Discrimination and reverse discrimination in college literature courses · 4:07am Jan 31st, 2016
There was an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago about the Open Syllabus Project. It gathers syllabi from college course websites worldwide, and counts how often different books and publications are assigned reading.
The #1 most-often assigned book is, unfortunately, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, which is a mix of good, bad, and contradictory advice, plus sometimes incorrect grammatical prescriptions. It's mostly remembered for the sentence "Omit needless words," and for being thin enough not to frighten business majors. [1]
More important is that now we can count what is assigned how often, in what parts of the world. I don't know any way to answer the question "What books were assigned reading in the US in the 1950s?" In the future, we'll hopefully be able to track this over time.
So now we can answer the question: What modern works are entering the literary canon? What recent novels are assigned most often in college courses? The Times article says,
What about fiction from the past 50 years? Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson’s “Neuromancer,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” Ms. Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” Sandra Cisneros’s “The House on Mango Street,” Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” and Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple.”
All of them are about oppressed underclasses. 7 out of 8 of them are about the oppression of racial minorities. 6 of 8 are by women. 5 out of 8 are about the oppression of women. 4 of 8 involve rape. All of them are violent. The least-violent among them is probably The House on Mango Street, although the main character still gets raped. The most-violent might be The Bluest Eye, which sounds from plot summaries more like Scootabuse porn than "the black experience". The token possibly-white (or not) male is in a dystopian science fiction story which takes place in Japan.
So, you pretty much can't get into the literary canon anymore unless you write about the oppression of racial minorities, preferably women who are racial minorities and get raped and beaten. Toni Morrison, as a black woman who writes about slavery, racism, and the oppression, rape, and beating of black women, is just what educators are looking for in contemporary authors. Checking the first 400 entries on the list, she now has the third-highest number of major works in the literary canon, just after Shakespeare and Sophocles. (Herman Melville ties with her if you count his short stories.)
These are things that need to be written about, but not to the exclusion of everything else.
Why did this happen? The answer seems obvious to me if you check the list at Syllabus Explorer and select country = 'United States'. The highest-ranked fiction and poetry readings [2] are:
Rank Count Score Text
8 1,787 99.0 Oedipus Sophocles
9 1,785 99.5 Frankenstein Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851
12 1,508 98.7 The Odyssey Homer
14 1,433 98.0 Antigone Sophocles
15 1,412 98.3 The Iliad Homer
22 1,345 98.2 Heart of Darkness Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
23 1,326 98.1 Canterbury Tales Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400
28 1,267 98.9 Hamlet Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
29 1,247 97.1 Things Fall Apart Achebe, Chinua
30 1,201 97.5 Paradise Lost Milton, John, 1608-1674
38 1,041 93.9 The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935
49 930 94.8 Beloved Morrison, Toni
54 889 92.5 Oedipus the King Sophocles
58 868 93.1 Candide Voltaire, 1694-1778
59 862 93.6 The Aeneid Virgil
60 860 93.4 The Awakening Chopin, Kate, 1850-1904
61 858 93.8 Utopia More, Thomas, Sir, Saint, 1478-1535
62 851 94.5 The Tempest Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
63 838 89.9 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
64 829 91.2 Medea Euripides
66 817 95.7 The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896-1940
68 807 91.3 Their Eyes Were Watching God Hurston, Zora Neale
69 790 91.8 Invisible Man Ellison, Ralph
78 756 94.3 Huckleberry Finn Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
81 735 87.0 Lysistrata Aristophanes
84 713 92.1 Metamorphoses Ovid, 43 B.C.-17 A.D. Or 18 A.D
91 691 80.8 Coming of Age in Mississippi Moody, Anne, 1940-2015
94 687 84.8 The Oresteia Aeschylus
96 664 89.0 The Metamorphosis Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924
97 662 85.9 A Modest Proposal Swift, Jonathan, 1667-1745
104 642 81.3 A Rose for Emily Faulkner, William, 1897-1962
105 629 89.3 Mrs. Dalloway Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941
106 629 84.1 Maus Spiegelman, Art
107 628 92.6 Henry V Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
108 626 83.6 My Last Duchess Browning, Robert, 1812-1889
109 619 83.1 The House on Mango Street Cisneros, Sandra
113 613 82.2 The Bacchae Euripides
114 606 87.4 The Waste Land Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
118 600 84.5 Oedipus Rex Sophocles
119 598 90.6 Othello Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
121 596 86.5 The Jungle Sinclair, Upton, 1878-1968
124 589 79.5 Ceremony Silko, Leslie, 1948 [Native American]
125 586 83.2 The Bluest Eye Morrison, Toni
129 575 87.8 Moby Dick Melville, Herman, 1819-1891
131 567 84.2 Leaves of Grass Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892
133 565 91.5 Pride & Prejudice Austen, Jane, 1775-1817
134 565 78.2 Agamemnon Aeschylus
135 562 81.8 Lyrical Ballads 1805 Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850
142 546 75.5 Everyday Use Walker, Alice, 1944
145 542 85.1 Death of a Salesman Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005
150 529 85.0 Neuromancer Gibson, William, 1948
151 529 80.4 Songs of Innocence Blake, William, 1757-1827
152 527 88.0 King Lear Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
153 527 90.7 Brave New World Huxley, Aldous, 1894-1963
155 525 88.3 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
160 514 88.3 The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864
162 511 82.5 The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900
163 510 85.6 Dracula Stoker, Bram, 1847-1912
165 506 83.4 Midsummer N. Dream Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
168 499 74.6 Oroonoko Behn, Aphra, 1640-1689 [female]
172 490 75.4 The Lottery Jackson, Shirley, 1916-1965
173 489 72.0 Bartleby, the Scrivener Melville, Herman, 1819-1891
181 469 80.6 Faust Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von, 1749-1832
182 469 75.4 A Raisin in the Sun Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930-1965
185 464 74.3 To His Coy Mistress Marvell, Andrew, 1621-1678
186 464 69.9 Lais Marie de France, 12th Century
187 463 78.6 The Decameron Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1313-1375
188 461 69.9 Trifles Glaspell, Susan, 1876-1948
190 457 87.3 To the Lighthouse Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941
192 456 79.6 Hard Times Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
193 454 70.8 The Clouds Aristophanes
197 448 90.8 Macbeth Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
198 447 76.2 All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque, Erich Maria, 1898-1970
201 443 74.9 The Rape of the Lock Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744
202 443 86.0 Ulysses Joyce, James, 1882-1941
204 442 82.8 Jane Eyre Bronte, Charlotte, 1816-1855
206 438 78.2 Dubliners Joyce, James, 1882-1941
211 433 75.0 A Streetcar Named Desire Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983
212 431 75.0 The Turn of the Screw James, Henry, 1843-1916
214 430 66.5 Passing [for white] Larsen, Nella
220 423 80.1 Robinson Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731
222 422 67.9 Dover Beach Arnold, Matthew
227 415 79.5 Robinson Crusoe Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731
228 411 67.3 Fall of the House of Usher Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849
231 407 61.0 Benito Cereno Melville, Herman, 1819-1891
232 407 63.9 Sula Morrison, Toni
233 406 79.9 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce, James, 1882-1941
234 404 71.2 White Noise DeLillo, Don
244 395 86.6 Great Expectations Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870
245 394 76.6 The Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900
249 389 68.5 Songs of Experience Blake, William, 1757-1827
250 387 68.3 The Faerie Queene, 1596 Spenser, Edmund, 1552?-1599
255 383 63.4 Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats, John, 1795-1821
256 382 65.1 Daisy Miller James, Henry, 1843-1916
259 380 58.3 The Open Boat Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900
262 377 58.5 The Theban Plays Sophocles
265 375 65.6 Billy Budd Melville, Herman, 1819-1891
267 372 81.0 The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968
270 370 65.6 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834
271 369 66.1 Song of Solomon Morrison, Toni
273 368 68.8 The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon, Thomas
276 367 59.9 The Canterbury Tales: Prologue Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400
280 365 68.9 Native Son Wright, Richard, 1908-1960
288 361 75.3 Twelfth Night Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
292 359 72.2 Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys, Jean [female]
293 358 79.2 Waiting for Godot Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989
295 357 71.6 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850-1894
303 354 65.0 Songs of Innocence and Experience Blake, William, 1757-1827
304 354 65.4 Iliad Odyssey Homer
307 349 65.1 The Ancient Mariner Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1772-1834
310 346 73.1 The Color Purple Walker, Alice
316 344 77.2 Madame Bovary Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880
317 344 69.4 The Stranger Camus, Albert, 1913-1960
319 343 62.2 Looking Backward, 2000-1887 Bellamy, Edward, 1850-1898
321 342 59.6 Rip Van Winkle Irving, Washington, 1783-1859
323 341 56.6 Paradise Lost : Book I Milton, John, 1608-1674
328 337 82.7 The Complete Works Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
The list of classics is full of stuff by white males, and it's hard to change them [3]. There aren't many alternatives anyway; there weren't many women writing in Europe before the 20th century. Plenty in China, but not in Europe. Other than Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, it's hard for me to think of women or racial minorities from before the 20th century whom you could add to the list.
So to get some balance, you need nearly all the contemporary writers to be women or racial minorities, preferably both.
There's a more subtle form of discrimination going on, though, and it's more obvious if you see the full list, including non-fiction, or if you also look at famous novels on other lists: Ethnic minorities, and to a lesser extent women writing in the past 50 years, can enter the canon only if they write about gender, oppression, or at least something distinctively ethnic. The same people who think, "We've gotta get books by ethnic minorities onto the list!" assume that, in order to represent ethnic minorities, the books have to be about being an ethnic minority.
Because, really, what else could minorities have to say?
Even when non-whites write something that isn't primarily about racial oppression, it will be consistently read as if it were; see the Wikipedia entry for Their Eyes Were Watching God for an example. Also read Zora Neale Hurston's essay "What White Publishers Won’t Print". If we were to believe the people who compile reading lists in an attempt to present diversity, we would end up concluding that the great vast spread of human experience has been explored only by white men--surely the opposite of what they intended.
[1] "The Magician and the Detective" is not listed, because the program to identify names of books and articles only looked for those listed in two library catalogs, and because the syllabus is on a page not accessible from Princeton's main web page. If it were on the list, it would tie for rank #512,226.
[2] "Highest-ranked" is dramatically different from "highest-scoring", and it isn't at all clear from their FAQ what the difference is between what they mean.
[3] Personally, I don't think undergraduates need to study the classics at all in introductory courses. They don't need to read one Greek play or one play by Shakespeare. I think the point of studying literature should be to understand something about literature, and maybe learn to enjoy reading it, not to be able to catch the references in 19th-century poems. Learning the history of literature would be important if we used it to understand how literature changes as a function of social beliefs, but we don't.
And, seriously, Twelfth Night? The Crying of Lot 49? The Faerie Queene? 
Better one of Heinlein's juveniles.
Here are the entries from the list that I have read and would keep on it for all readers:
Heart of Darkness Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924
Things Fall Apart Achebe, Chinua
The Yellow Wallpaper Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935
Huckleberry Finn Twain, Mark, 1835-1910
Maus Spiegelman, Art
Henry V Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616
The Waste Land Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
Death of a Salesman Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005
Neuromancer Gibson, William, 1948
Brave New World Huxley, Aldous, 1894-1963
The Lottery Jackson, Shirley, 1916-1965
Bartleby, the Scrivener Melville, Herman, 1819-1891
A Raisin in the Sun Hansberry, Lorraine, 1930-1965
All Quiet on the Western Front Remarque, Erich Maria, 1898-1970
A Streetcar Named Desire Williams, Tennessee, 1911-1983
The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck, John, 1902-1968
Native Son Wright, Richard, 1908-1960
Waiting for Godot Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 (didn't like it, but it's relevant to understanding modern fiction)
The Stranger Camus, Albert, 1913-1960
Incidentally, regarding that "6 out of 8 are women" thing, that may actually just be representative of the modern publishing industry:
flavorwire.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/survey_feature.png?w=728&h=489&crop=1
That said, regarding the contents of the work by women and minorities, I'm not terribly surprised; the liberal arts have been infected with this sort of faux-progressivism for quite some time, and they need to appear to be as pretentious as possible for social points.
Of course, the best way to score points is to claim that they're being racist or sexist by pretending like that's the only thing that women/minorities can write about.
Also that they're all perverts.
Telling them that studying literature is not very worthwhile compared to other things they're doing is going to upset all the people whose nearly-worthless degrees in studying literature become totally worthless degrees in studying literature. :V
3724239 That's a good point, but if you break it down further, it looks roughly like this:
50% of novels published are "trashy" romance novels
- about 100% of those are written by women
50% of novels are not trashy romance novels
- about 50% of those are written by women
- 100% of new candidates for the canon are in this category
Things I've read (or know sufficiently well):
The Odyssey — Homer
The Iliad — Homer
Hamlet — Shakespeare, William
Candide — Voltaire
The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald, F. Scott
A Modest Proposal — Swift, Jonathan
Maus — Spiegelman, Art
Henry V — Shakespeare, William
The Waste Land — Eliot, T. S.
Othello — Shakespeare, William
Pride & Prejudice — Austen, Jane
Neuromancer — Gibson, William
Brave New World — Huxley, Aldous
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Twain, Mark
The Scarlet Letter — Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Dracula — Stoker, Bram
Midsummer N. Dream — Shakespeare, William
The Lottery — Jackson, Shirley
Macbeth — Shakespeare, William
Jane Eyre — Bronte, Charlotte
Fall of the House of Usher — Poe, Edgar Allan
Great Expectations — Dickens, Charles
Billy Budd — Melville, Herman
The Grapes of Wrath — Steinbeck, John
Native Son — Wright, Richard
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Stevenson, Robert Louis
Rip Van Winkle — Irving, Washington
...that I think should be in the canon:
The Odyssey — Homer
Candide — Voltaire
Maus — Spiegelman, Art
Henry V — Shakespeare, William
The Waste Land — Eliot, T. S.
Pride & Prejudice — Austen, Jane
Neuromancer — Gibson, William
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Twain, Mark
The Grapes of Wrath — Steinbeck, John
Native Son — Wright, Richard
...that I think people need to shut up about:
The Great Gatsby — Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Scarlet Letter — Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Great Expectations — Dickens, Charles
Billy Budd — Melville, Herman
3724239
Part of me wants to take exception with your stridency (or tell you to check your privilege, with tongue firmly in cheek).
But then I remember that a guy I went to high school with is now a tenured faculty member in English Literature, and while the plural of anecdote isn't data, I have to say he fits your description to a 'T' (and bugs the hell out of me any time I see him open his mouth).
3724245 Eh? Tons of Romance authors are men, they just use female pen names.
This is fascinating stuff! Thanks for writing about this!
And not a single writer of horse words among them.
3724245
I was thinking that had to be a gross exaggeration. It is only somewhat of an exaggeration by the looks of things:
rtbookreviews.com/public/images/sepsalespm.jpg
authorearnings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/author-earnings-by-genre-and-publisher-type-5.png
This now makes me wonder how closely FIMFiction views match the general industry trends.
3724278
Yet.
Don't worry. In 30 years, everyone will remember the bloody revolution.
Provided, of course, that it was written by a horse of a different color.
Alright, a more serious, less snarky question:
The Far East also has a literary tradition.
Why aren't there any books from the Far East on there?
According to that list, I've read more books from the Far East than someone who has studied literature in college.
I don't think I see a single book on that list written by someone who lived between Asia Minor and the Bering Strait.
3724256 Here's the first picture I was able to find using Google of a lot of people at a romance writers' convention. This is from Oracon 2015:
ozarks-romance-authors.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ORACON-2015-group.jpg
Here's the second photo I found, from the Romance Writers of America:
i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1374053242413121382.jpg
3724296 I'm just going off all the articles I found online talking about men who hid the fact that they had dangly bits from their fans.
3724298
Well, judging by those photos, like 90-95% of the industry is women, so it isn't surprising. If women don't buy steamy romance books bought by men, and men wanted to write said books, they'd have to pretend to be women.
3724302 I'd imagine a significant portion of the men in question never go to conventions, too :D
3724292
I would venture because one usually has to take a course in Far Eastern literature to even run across them. And yes, that is a shame, because there is tons of really amazing stuff that came out of there, and if the Iliad and Odyssey and Aeneid merit the list (I assume they are all on it for I am too lazy to look) then Mishima, Murakami, and heaps of others would fit well there as well.
3724292
... maybe because Indians and Asians aren't preferred minorities?
There are sometimes Chinese books on the English Lit GRE. It has a world literature section. The number of Chinese female authors from 900 years ago is surprising. Maybe women were much higher status back then than in the intervening centuries?
3724308
It would also increase the "non-white" quota. Plus, you know, they're kind of important civilizations.
It seems like you should at least get a broad base of literature across civilizations that actually have extensive literary traditions. Obviously you aren't going to get much from Sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, but it seems kind of important to note the Middle Eastern/Indian/Far Eastern traditions at least to, you know, remember that they're there and such, and maybe expose people to some variety.
Are there non-fiction books in the "literary canon" at all?
3724315
That is interesting. No clue; unfortunately, my knowledge of gender roles in medieval China are, I'm afraid, sorely lacking.
What about the fact that very few of the commonly assigned books are less than 50 years old; and the vast majority of books on the list older than 50 years are written by European men? There's a pretty straightforward argument that we're not expanding the canon ENOUGH if there are only five women, and only one person of color, in the top 50.
3724292 Agreed. Journey to the West, anyone? The Water Margin? Bandits of the Marsh? Hell's bells, I'm more whitebread thany anyone I know, and I read these as a child!
...the abridged versions, of couse. Didn't read the official versions until high school.
3724352 First, there are 13 women and 7 people of color in the top 50. But anyway, that's what I was talking about. That's why only minorities are getting into the canon now--to make it "balanced" without kicking out any of the classics.
I don't think it makes any sense to say both that (A) we need to study literature from across the past 2500 years of Western history, and (B) that that sample of authors should be balanced according to the current distribution of writers. Balance the writers from each time period according to who was writing in that time period.
3724326 I'm going by Wikipedia's list of female poets by time period, for 500-999 C.E. Actually more Japanese.
An alternative interpretation of the data is that there are so many more white male authors from which to choose that no individual author will have his book featured in many classes. In contrast, if there are fewer novels dealing with women's or minorities's perspectives, then the same novels will be more likely to be chosen in many different syllibi. So, it is definitely possible to see the results that you see without having modern lit classes teach only minority and women writers. I know I didn't see evidence of "reverse discrimination" in the syllibi of the literature courses I took. For example, consider this modern lit syllabus from Yale: http://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291#syllabus There is no extreme bias toward women or minorities.
3724316
Well, important varies by criterion. I mean, much as I love much of the lore of Japan, the nation made a rather conscious choice to remain heavily insular and didn't have much influence on the world stage until the 1900s; China has more, but it's still a case of regional power rather than global hegemony.
The Western stance therefore is so heavily dominant because there is a direct narrative drawn from Homer to the Romans to the British Empire to the Modern world - and while China certainly has a rich history, and I do not mean to begrudge it, the fact remains that within the minds of most, Chinese history is 'That stuff happened over there, then the West fucked them up, then Mao came along' - so there isn't an 'heir' of Chinese literature outside of China in the same way the West romanticizes Greece & Rome as the progenitors of modern civilization.
3724435 If there are 70 white writers and 30 minority writers, and you pick 7 whites and 3 minorities without replacement 1000 times, who has a better chance of being picked the most number of times? Seems to me they each are expected to be picked 100 times, but the extremes of the distributions will be different. I'd consult the binomial theorem, but it's too late at night. I suspect we'll find the minorities have an advantage as you state.
EDIT: Nope; the answer is that in the above scenario, both whites and minorities have an equal chance of being picked the most # of times. There is no advantage to current minorities unless they're over-represented WRT current "majorities".
3724448 I think an extreme example is how Frankenstein gets so high on the list. Shelly is one of the few women writers of her time, so if a course wants a female voice, they basically have to turn to her (in this case sampling is disproportionate as proportional representation would exclude women writers from the literature of many time periods). There are some trade offs between fairness and equality, and I don't think the problem is as large as you make it out to be.
As for the canon, since when did literature go moneyball? Is the number of times a story gets listed on college syllibi the best measure of what constitutes the literary canon? Is the goal of writing to get your book read in a college course? College courses have many different goals in mind when choosing stories to feature--including exposing students to different points of view--so any ranking based on them will obviously be flawed.
I hate English course in general. We never seem to really do any learning in them, we never talk about (for example) plot structure or characterization or what have you--no, we just read a bunch of short stories and novels that no one in their right mind would bother reading unless they were being asked to read it as part of an English course. Like, who would read Jamaica Kincaid's 'Girl' unless it was part of such a course?
Maybe it gets better in higher academic courses, but I have my doubts.
These are all excellent points.
I wish I could favorite journals for future reference
3724474
If your goal is to educate people about literature, then you should be choosing literature representative of literature, not representative of what you want to be true. The latter is indoctrination, not education.
TBH, the real question is whether or not they're actually even educating people with these courses, as 3724494 points out. If you don't explain why this stuff matters, what's the point?
There's no point to reading The Illiad unless you actually do something with it. "I've read the Illiad" means nothing if you don't understand why it is important.
In high school, we covered books like As I Lay Dying not just because of the contents but because of how it was written, and it gave the teacher an excuse to talk about use of perspective, and what it means, and thinking about the same story and events from multiple perspectives, ect.
Something like L'Etranger is useful for the same reason - we discussed it in French class and used it in part to analyze absurdism, as well as the method of writing and the mindset of the character.
Stuff like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are used to look at both dystopian societies and how people present political ideas via fiction, and examine how the books worked to get across their ideas.
That's why you should be reading something in literature - it isn't enough that something is "important", it needs to be explained to the class why it is important, and used to expand their understanding of literature and how to analyze and understand its context and importance.
I always thought Maus was such an odd popular inclusion. it must be the "token comic book" that gets bonus points for covering the Holocaust quota.
3724316
I think I had one of the lucky exceptions, as my first literature course included both the Ramayana and Arabian Nights (the original, not the French remix). I still remember how much I enjoyed reading those! and the professor picked some of the more "fun" western books to go with those too. she was a fun teacher.
after that, I got the courses with the usual literature canon where I barely understood anything and lost all my interest
3724597
Pretty much, though I'm not sure how much competition there is in the realm of graphic novels as high literature - Maus, V for Vendetta, and Watchmen seem like the three most plausible inclusions, and Maus has the advantage of being about the Holocaust, while Watchmen has the disadvantage of commenting about superheroes (though, frankly, I think that's actually an important advantage in some ways, as it serves as commentary on them as well, and it isn't like superheroes aren't culturally significant to us).
But giving Maus the nod is hardly something I find unreasonable.
Thank you for a thought-provoking and typically well-written post.
Ah, Strunk and White. We even had to get that on our music course! Wonder if anyone actually read it? I must have given it a cursory eye at some point... I certainly remember being confused by the vagueness of their distinction between colons and semicolons.
I think you're quite right in seeing the thematic trends in most prescribed modern literature as being, perhaps necessarily, a reaction to the "colonialist" trappings of the traditional Western literary canon. A balance would be nice.... otherwise things tend to swing back the other way in an overzealous counterbalance.
Perhaps it just indicates part of a wider healing or, more fundamentally, understanding process. After all, it is amazing just how defensively prejudicial some people can be. However, sad to say, many of the people whose self-worth hinges most acutely on separating themselves from the "other" (and those who disagree with them in any form) are unlikely to engage in a course which involves a concerted attempt at open-minded appreciation of others thoughts and the self-admission of the need for greater knowledge. Perhaps the fundamental issue is that that these somewhat noble attempts at balance are largely preaching to the converted. The old class-based stigmas of the "literary" and "cultured" being somewhat out of reach for some aspects of society do not help.
3724609
oh sure, I certainly don't think it's unworthy. I'm just curious as to how it's taught, since it would most likely be compared to written works rather than other comics. perhaps they simply believe it's the most effective Holocaust story compared to the alternatives? could be.
my guess for 2nd most common comic is Persepolis, which is about an Iranian woman so it reinforces Bad Horse's point here, heh.
I'd personally pick Jimmy Corrigan if I were in charge of a literature course. it's bleak & depressing and full of symbolism.... perfect for essay assignments. professors would love it.
It's not just literature. Reverse discrimination happens constantly.
Australia just axed all its entry-level film startup budgets for non-Aboriginals, because that's who they want representing Australian culture. That's how they're countering discrimination.
Aboriginals also need to meet a certain quota of university graduations, or the university doesn't get government funding for discrimination. Unfortunately, this doesn't cause those citizens to want to go or complete university more. So what happens is they get ludicrous free-ride scholarships and can't be failed by their professors, or the university looks racist.
I'm saying this as the child of a an administrator who is in charge of enforcing this, not as some weird outsider.
So the problem is, if I'm a white cis-Male, I'm fucked because I'm deemed too overrepresented.
Thank God I'm disabled or I'd have no artistic credibility!
3724286 Or a donkey.
3724617
Ever notice how Trump mentions his Muslim friends or his Mexican friends all the time after spouting white nationalist crap?
Notice any similarities between that, and the folks in academia PRAISING those POOR REPRESSED MINORITIES for their AWESOME CONTRIBUTIONS?
It isn't about healing. It is about people trying to convince themselves/others that they aren't racist.
The people who are obsessed with race are the people who are most likely to be racist themselves. If you put people into a box where they are an oppressed minority struggling against cismale white society, you're not really thinking of them as people, which explains why they are obsessed with books by members of minorities about repression - they don't think of them as being people with normal human experiences like everybody else, and they don't seek out such things because they don't even think about them existing, because everything in their mind is flavored by the oppression of society. And by cloaking themselves in that, they think that they can understand their pain.
If you think of all women as being victims of the patriarchy, and all black people as being victims of white supremacy, you're still a bigot, because you're still not really seeing them as people with individual experiences and life stories and unique views of society. You may be a sympathetic bigot, but you're still a bigot.
3724648
That's a fair point. There's a real terror about being considered racist that I think stops people acknowledging their own prejudice. However, I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with trying not to be racist - as strange as that may sound.
I agree that there can be a tendency to cloak oneself in a "group identity" rather than focus on the strengthening of the individual, which can end up unhelpfully reaffirming stereotypes and counter-productively maintaining barriers. I think we all do it - or seek to find an identity by reacting against it - to some extent. There's a lot of societal conditioning out there and finding an identity which doesn't involve a label to some degree is hard for anyone, let alone people who had their identities directly dictated to them in the past and, in essence, have had to find a voice without any real precedent. I feel that when trying to broadcast a concern that has not been previously been heard or taken seriously, one is already anticipating self-defence - it kinda makes sense that people would naturally fall into the "accepted" language and expectations of the society at large in order to make themselves heard. The problem there is that it becomes self-defence of an assigned role against self-defence of an assigned role, rather than a single society seeking to rectify and understand its own problems.
Yes - I agree that a focus on individuality should be the situation. I think, however, that there is still a position of mutual defensiveness of the old prescribed roles - a lot of folk recognize this as being the case - and there is still a long way to go before people at large, in any setting, feel comfortable enough to be true to themselves. I know I still regularly fall into mental traps of trying to "appease" people and gain acceptance based on the expectations of others because unless one has a surplus of self-confidence, I think it can feel very lonely outside. For anybody, possessing the self-confidence to forge one's own path if it doesn't really fall within the accepted base of language and understanding for a society is a struggle, and I think it's easy to fall in under the pressure. Again, I'm not saying people should do this - I just feel that it's understandable because of the difficulty posed by the alternative.
Cheers for your responses - cool to have an intelligent discussion about these issues! This feels so pleasantly different from youtube.
Well, I wouldn't know from literature classes: I was an Engineering major so I took math. A lot of math.
I even took Differential Equations. Made an "A" in it, too. You know the last time I solved a differential equation? The final exam. Thirty years of professional accomplishment and technical change, and I haven't had to solve a differential equation once. Now I couldn't even tell you what one was without Googling it.
Anyway, sorry, I'm just talking to no purpose. I'm sure my experience has nothing to do with literary theory as taught in college.
AM
I
BEING
TOO
SUBTLE?
The effect of warping the syllabus to include sub-standard works of fiction, provided that they are by "persons of color" (risible phrase) and support the progressive orthodoxy regarding race, is to induce students to conclude that only white folks are good writers. To the extent that this includes work by female authors provided that they support the progressive orthodoxy on sex, it is to cause them to conclude that only white men are good writers. This is of course a false belief -- but it is the one to which the curriculum logically impels those who only know literature through that curriculum.
It's a bad idea in general for literary criticism to become obsessed by the race, sex or other personal characteristics of the writers, because while this is sometimes useful in understanding their books (for instance, Jane Austen tended to write protagonists similar to herself and her sisters, because that was what she knew best) it does not explain everything or even most things about their books (Jane Austen's Classical-Liberal ideology, especially as applied to her theory of courtship and marriage, did not derive from her race, sex or even social class, though it did derive in part from her social circles).
I wrote an essay on this in 2011 regarding speculative fiction anthologies, "Why I Am NOT Into Group Identity Based Anthologies," of which the gist was that the more irrelevant criteria one imposes upon story selection, inevitably the lower is the quality of the storis included, for simple mathematical reasons.
As I put it:
further explained as
of course, assuming that the criteria does not also incorporate something that strongly affects quality.
Your point that in fact such race- and sex-based criteria also usually include the hidden criterion
is highly-relevant to my argument, since it reveals the existence of a major criterion which is independent of quality and disqualifies a very large number of books written by women or by members of ethnic minorities. For instance, none of Agatha Christie's immense output would be qualified because she did not write about women from the standpoint of their supposed oppression (I'd argue that in Interwar Great Britain, they weren't all that oppressed any more) nor would Mike Williamson's nor Sarah Hoyt's science fiction because they don't write about being black or Hispanic (though Hoyt's "Good Men" series is indeed about oppression of the members of one race by the members of another race -- thing is, the oppressing race in question are genetically-engineered superhumans and the other race is "humanity at large," and that doesn't count because it's not "real," though it is of course fully-real in the secondary universe).
(I urge everyone to read Hoyt's work in general -- she's a really good writer).
If you add to this that the approach to the racial or sexual oppression has to conform to the current progressive orthodoxy on the topic, this makes it almost impossible for any of the books by non-whites and more difficult for the books by women to pass muster (women are lucky in that there are a lot more women writers, and hence the feminist criteria aren't imposed on them as strictly as are the racialist criteria on, say, Black writers). This produces the result you mention -- that those familiar with literature only through the approved curriculum will conclude that White men are the best writers, and others naturally inferior.
3724678
Logically, if one is automatically racist, then there is no sane reason to try not to be racist, since one would be trying to accomplish the impossible.
One of the hilariously beautiful things about intersectional theory is that it is just one memetic mutation away from being white supremacy (because, of course, it does claim that white male hetrosexuals are special -- just specially evil).
There was an incident in a restaurant a few months back where a couple of black women started harassing my wife for some incomprensible reason, and then declared that this was going to be a "teachable moment" for her regarding "white privilege."
I turned and told them they were full of crap and they should leave her the heck alone.
They told me that I needed to learn about "white male privilege."
I told them that I knew all about it, that I had it, and I was exercising it over them right then and there -- that it made me automatically right and them wrong by virtue of my superior white-ness and male-ness.
They looked horrified, sputtered, and after some more invective left the scene.
Guess they didn't expect their claim to be taken seriously, now DID they?
Heh-heh-heh.
Of course, I don't believe for a moment in this nonsense. But I was amused to see how, in real life, it can be so easily turned around to shock the progressives.
3724286
Celestia needs to acknowledge her white female Alicorn privilege!
3724274
That was also pretty much the end of Ellen's promising career as a comedienne -- mostly because she trotted happily down the primrose path of Social Justice Relevance and abandoned comedy. This is a shame -- she was a hilariously deadpan actress.
3724292
Because you didn't have hordes of Chinese and Japanese and Korean people storming the administrative offices of weak-willed faculty in the 1960's and 1970's and said cowardly college administrators setting up Ethnic Studies Programs for them. In literary science fiction, there is a tendency to ... ahem ... kowtow to East Asian writers (but only ones who write the approved ethnic opinions). And of course those literary science fiction writers sniff superciliously at the greatest contribution of East Asia to speculative fiction -- the giant monster, giant robot and space opera epics of anime and manga.
3724866
Remember: if only white males are moral actors, and only white males' choices have any moral weight, this must necessarily relegate everyone else, morally speaking, to the category of "non-sentient animals" at best. I'm the sort of warped evil person who can laugh at that, but I know not everyone is.
3724898
Exactly my point. The sort of intersectional race-sex-orientation theory currently enshrined in political correctness on campus implicitly regards whites, men and heterosexuals as superior to non-whites, women and homosexuals. Right now it's being taken to mean, politically, that white male heterosexuals should be extra nice to everyone else, but it could as easily imply that nonwhites, females and homosexuals should just shut up and do what the white male heterosexuals tell them.
It's already taken this way with regards to nonwhites, females and heterosexuals who fail to toe the Progressive line. Sarah Hoyt -- the female Hispanic science fiction author to whom I referred -- writes science fiction often with heroic nonwhite, female or gay protagonists, but is presumed to be racist, sexist and homophobic simply because she is a right-leaning semi-libertarian. Conadleeza Rice -- a black Hispanic woman high in the administration of George W. Bush (she was National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, not exactly sinecure positions) was and is despised because she is a conservative. And more so than if she had been a white man.
3724621 3724609
It's probably ignored because of the length, but personally I think you could teach an entire literature course using nothing but The Sandman.
As a broader point, I'd like to push back against a specific passage Bad Horse wrote (I'm probably unfairly singling him out, as this applies to a much broader swath of society):
Racial oppression has been a fact of life for nearly all of American history (and certainly in the lives of the writers under discussion), so it's not surprising that it plays into much of the writing by minorities. Just as you can't easily de-ponify a good MLP fanfic, you cannot separate racial themes from the works of minorities. Still, books by minorities are not just books about race. For example, novels like Invisible Man and Black Boy can be taught as classic examples of coming-of-age stories. However, while race does inform the works of minority writers, it also informs the works of white writers. For example, The Great Gatsby is just as much a novel about being white as Invisible Man is a novel about being black. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald discusses themes about social mobility and the American dream that basically have only applied to white males throughout most of American history. So perhaps it's not as surprising that books by minorities and women often discuss topics that do not seem to apply to white males. All too often, "the vast spread of human experience" is looked at only as the experiences of white males.
If the purpose of literature is to explore the human condition, then oppression should be a major theme to discuss. After all, until very recently, about half of the population (women) has lived under varying degrees of oppression. Perhaps these themes and ideas do not resonate with you, but they are certainly important to understanding the American history and the human condition more broadly. Yes, we'd like to get to a point where we a discussion of these ideas seems outdated, but there is value in using these works to understand the history of Western civilization and Western thought. Unlike what others have suggested, these works are not substandard works of literature that have been shoehorned into lit classes to fulfill some quota.
3725032
I'm sorry, and I don't mean to sound hostile or uncivil. I'm choosing my words carefully here and I don't want to be That Guy. But I am compelled to ask, is this always necessarily so?
Steven Barnes writes science fiction. It happens that he is of African descent. You may look over his bibliography at Wikipedia, which is fairly extensive. Do all of his works--ALL of them--contain racial themes? I haven't read all his books, or even most of them, but I couldn't find anything like that in the ones I've read.
See also, Samuel R. Delany, whose Wikipedia biography says that his grandfather was the first black bishop of an Episcopal church. While Dhalgren was not to my tastes, I've read and reread a lot of his short work. I can't find any racial themes in, for example, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," which won him a Hugo in 1970. It is possible, I suppose, that I am not looking hard enough.
If we say these themes can't be separated from their works, are we saying they're incapable of writing anything else? Do these "racial themes" exist in the stories, or in the lens through which certain people view the world--a lens through which everything is political and politicized? That must be a tiresome way to look at the world.
3724866 This brought me quite a chuckle. Thank you.