[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: Thomas Hart <tehart@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:09:54 -0500
My objection to the Realism course is the inclusion of Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin
Far, and Zitkala Sa. I suspect that these are non-entities who are included not
because they are good, but because of their race or gender.
"One god I can understand, but one wife? It is not generous.... It is not
civilized." Sheik Ilderim, Ben-Hur, 1959
Thomas Hart
tehart@xxxxxxx
On Feb 28, 2012, at 11:27 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
> Tom,
>
> In several histories I’ve read the author uses letters sent home from
> soldiers at the front. These letters are interesting and in the historian’s
> context perhaps even important, but no one has suggested that they be
> presented as literature in an English class – at least not thus far.
>
> Also, Edmund Wilson wrote an article on “Marxism and Literature.” It seems
> that Marx, Engels and Lenin all thought that writers should be left alone.
> They should not be recruited for political purposes. But “Lenin died;
> Trotsky was exiled; Lunarchasky died. The administration of Stalin,
> unliterary and uncultivated himself, slipped into depending more and more on
> literature as a means of manipulating a people of whom, before the
> Revolution, 70 or 80 percent had been illiterate and who could hardly be
> expected to be critical of what they read.” This essay of Wilson’s first
> appeared in the collection entitled The Triple Thinkers,published in 1948.
> Now in 2012 some of us might wonder if “70 or 80 percent” of the students
> attending college, while not technically illiterate, can be “expected to be
> critical of what they read.” What do you think?
>
> Look up “French Realism” and you will find Stendhal and Flaubert. Are any of
> the writers in the class on American Realism writing “realism” in according
> with the definition created by the French writers? Mark Twain was a yarn
> spinner not a realistic writer. Henry James has never been considered
> realistic by any standard, etc. etc.
>
> The Freud Shakespeare Dostoevsky class sounds interesting. I probably would
> have signed up for that one – also the class on the 19th century British
> Novel & Empire – although the instructor obviously has an agenda, the student
> would at least be exposed to at one excellent writer, Joseph Conrad.
>
> The last three courses are all politically correct, but I don’t see any good
> writers mentioned – aside from St. Augustine and Rousseau, but they probably
> weren’t meant to be read.
>
> Lawrence
>
>
>
> From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> On Behalf Of Thomas Hart
> Sent: Monday, February 27, 2012 6:06 PM
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: education
>
> From my undergrad and M.A. alma mater
> <http://departments.columbian.gwu.edu/english/undergraduate/courses/upperlevel>
>
> 93061 ENGL 3560W.10 American Realism
> Romines MW 03:45PM - 05:00PM
> This course looks at texts produced by the Realist movement that dominated U.
> S. writing in the decades between 1865 and 1912. We will read books that
> reflect the rapid social changes that occurred in the U. S. in the decades
> after the Civil War: urbanization, immigration, changes in gender
> construction, distribution of wealth, attitudes toward ethnicity and race.
> The energies of American Realist writing reflect both the accelerating pace
> of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginnings of “modern”
> twentieth century literature. Readings will include texts by Mark Twain,
> Henry James, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala Sa, Edith Wharton, C. W.
> Chesnutt, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others. Requirements: midterm and final
> examinations, two essays and class participation. This is a WID course.
>
>
>
> 95645 ENGL 3720W.10 Contemporary American Lit
> Moreland TR 03:45PM - 05:00PM
>
> In this course, we will explore the ‘howling’ literature of 1950s and 1960s
> America. Post-World War II America was intent on a return to “normalcy,”
> which was inevitably defined narrowly. Those that deviated from the
> norm—whether in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
> socioeconomic class, psychological state, or behavior—were ejected from the
> “normal” center into the margins of society. Rendered invisible by society,
> those who were marginalized gave themselves voice in the literature of the
> time, saying “No! in thunder” (in Melville’s prescient words) to the
> strictures of 1950s and 1960s American society.
>
> Sample Texts: Ginsberg’s Howl; Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind;
> Kerouak’s On the Road; Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Ellison’s
> Invisible Man; Plath’s The Bell Jar; Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
>
> Requirements: An annotated bibliography, a long paper, a final exam, and
> participation in class discussion.
>
> 92481 ENGL 3810.10 Freud,Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky
> Carter TR 09:35AM - 10:50AM
>
> 94605 ENGL 3810.11 19th C. British Novel & Empire
> Goswami TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
>
> This course will examine the pivotal role Britain’s vast empire played in
> shaping the British novel from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth
> century. We will explore how actual wars, debates, laws and insurgencies in
> the colonies erupt into British novels in interesting and unexpected ways.
> The topics we will consider include: the idea of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’;
> notions of civility and barbarity; the metropolis versus the colony; cultural
> hybridity and colonial identity; children and empire-building; and the
> rhetoric of imperial fiction. We will also make a brief foray into
> postcolonial fiction as an example of how the ‘empire writes back’. We will
> read works by Charlotte Bronte, Rudyard Kipling, Frances H. Burnett, Joseph
> Conrad, E.M. Forster, and others.
>
> 97063 ENGL 3830.11 Popular Music & Identity
> Wald TR 11:10AM - 12:25PM
>
> Why on social networks like Facebook are musical likes such an important part
> of user profiles? What does "our" music have to tell us about who we imagine
> ourselves to be and, conversely, how does music shape identity and
> identification? How are different identities "sounded"? This course explores
> how identities are formed and de-formed, reflected and made, in popular music
> culture, focusing on the 20th and 21st-century United States (although we
> will also talk about the history of 19th-century blackface minstrelsy). We
> will read theoretical texts about music and identity, as well as delve into
> fiction and creative non-fiction. Topics include: race/ethnicity and musical
> identity; popular music and aesthetics; pop music genres; music and
> sexualities; music, consumption/production and the Internet.
>
> 95262 ENGL 3840.10 Gender and Literature
> Chu MW 02:20PM - 03:35PM
>
> Inward Journeys: Gender and Autography. The course will examine how
> (primarily) American women writers transform and re-create the genres of
> autobiography and memoir. Given autobiographical traditions that emphasize
> individual confession and internal spiritual transformation (St. Augustine,
> Rousseau) or public service or development as a citizen (Franklin, Douglass),
> how do women negotiate the process of writing their stories? How do women
> justify the act of writing publicly about their lives? How do women
> negotiate the public/private divide, in life and in writing? How do women
> write about bodies, sexuality, spirituality, citizenship, and other aspects
> of self? Who gets to write a memoir, under what conditions, and for whom?
>
> The genres of autobiography, memoir, and “life writing” have been
> re-theorized in narrative and epistemological terms; the idea of objective,
> transparent reportage has been supplanted by questions about truth, memory,
> language, history, ethnography. How do women’s texts negotiate these
> questions? Representative authors include: ; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in
> the Life of a Slave Girl; Mary Antin, The Promised Land; Gertrude Stein, The
> Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic
> Girlhood; Sara Suleri, Meatless Days; and Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La
> Frontera. This course fulfills the theory and/or cultural studies
> requirement for the English major.
>
>
>
> 96564 ENGL 3980.10 Queer Studies
> McRuer MW 12:45PM - 02:00PM
>
> Note: this course will likely feature a short-term study abroad component,
> with a week's attendance at the Prague International LGBT Film Festival.
> Contact Professor McRuer directly (rmcruer@xxxxxxx) with questions about this
> course.
>
> The interdisciplinary field that has come to be called "queer" studies over
> the past two decades has always concerned itself with questions of
> representation: how are, for instance, lesbians and gay men, or transgendered
> people, represented in film, in novels, in other forms of media? As the
> field has developed, these questions of representation have increasingly been
> linked to other, complex questions, involving political economy,
> globalization, and transnationalism: in what ways have lgbt people been
> incorporated into contemporary nation-states? What identities and desires
> threaten "the nation" as it is currently (and variously) materialized in our
> world? How have identities such as "gay" and "lesbian" circulated globally?
> How have those recognizable minority identities come into contact and
> conflict with other ways of identifying around non-normative desires? Have
> those identities at times unctioned imperialistically, especially as "gay
> tourism" has become a recognizable part of global capitalism? Conversely,
> what kinds of unexpected alliances have been shaped across borders as queer
> movements have globalized? How have these movements theorized race, gender,
> class, and ability; what connections have been made with other movements
> organized around identity? This film studies course will consider how
> questions of queer representation intersect with questions of queer
> globalization(s).
>
>
> Seems like indoctrination to me.
>
> "One god I can understand, but one wife? It is not generous.... It is not
> civilized." Sheik Ilderim, Ben-Hur, 1959
>
> Thomas Hart
> tehart@xxxxxxx
>
>
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