If Reading Classic Literature Is Such A Problem For You, You Need Years Of Intense Psychological Help
This piece in the Columbia Spectator was a group effort -- by Kai Johnson, Tanika Lynch, Elizabeth Monroe, and Tracey Wang:
During a forum hosted by the Multicultural Affairs Advisory Board on Literature Humanities last semester, a student shared an experience with an audience of instructors and fellow students. This experience, she said, came to define her relationship to her Lit Hum class and to Core material in general.During the week spent on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.
Ovid's "Metamorphoses" is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background.
The MAAB, an extension of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, is an advocacy group dedicated to ensuring that Columbia's campus is welcoming and safe for students of all backgrounds.
Again, as Greg Lukianoff points out in Unlearning Liberty, we have gotten to the point where we conflate emotional and physical safety.
Students need to feel safe in the classroom, and that requires a learning environment that recognizes the multiplicity of their identities.
College as nursery school.
I can't help but feel this sort of plea for coddling is really just a disguised plea for attention from those who are unable to earn it.
A commenter on the post writes:
Gullah posted on May 1, 4:15pm
Oh Precious! Precious? My precious little snowflake, speaking as a black man who has been around the block more than a few times, all of you need to grow up and get over it. You re not the center of the universe, none of us has a right to not be offended in a democracy and if you can't handle it repair to your padded room with your lollipops, Valium and whatever other pacifier makes you happy or better still make an appointment with a shrink. We are all always going to be offended by something. Using 'feeling safe', 'respect', and 'trigger-warnings' are just treads in a rope to lynch free speech.
UPDATE: Let's pretend somebody actually is debilitated by reading Ovid; that it isn't just a way to gain attention and unearned power over others.
Rather than avoidance, a practical way to deal with trauma is "exposure therapy" -- under a professional's care, slowly and repeatedly being exposed to the thing that terribly upsets or terrifies you so you can function again.
Fourth-year U of Washington Med Center psychiatric resident Sara Roff suggests this at Chronicle:
As a psychiatrist, I nonetheless have to question whether trigger warnings are in such students' best interests. One of the cardinal symptoms of PTSD is avoidance, which can become the most impairing symptom of all. If someone has been so affected by an event in her life that reading a description of a rape in Ovid's Metamorphoses can trigger nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks, she is likely to be functionally impaired in areas of her life well beyond the classroom. The solution is not to help these students dig themselves further into a life of fear and avoidance by allowing them to keep away from upsetting material.I am also skeptical that labeling sensitive material with trigger warnings will prevent distress. The scientific literature about trauma teaches us that it seeps into people's lives by networks of association. Someone who has been raped by a man in a yellow shirt at a bus stop may start avoiding not only men, but bus stops and perhaps even anyone wearing yellow. A soldier who has seen a comrade killed by a roadside explosive device may come to avoid not just parked vehicles, but also civilians who look like the people he or she saw right before the device exploded. Since triggers are a contagious phenomenon, there will never be enough trigger warnings to keep up with them. It should not be the job of college educators to foster this process.
It would be much more useful for faculty members and students to be trained how to respond if they are concerned that a student or peer has suffered trauma. Giving members of the college community the tools to guide them to the help they need would be more valuable than trying to insulate them from triggers. Students with unusually intense responses to academic cues should be referred to student-health services, where they can be evaluated and receive evidence-based treatments so that they can participate fully in the life of the university.
One of the most important treatments for PTSD is exposure therapy, which helps patients unlearn the associations between traumatic events and triggers so that they can start functioning again. Narrative therapies also provide exposure by encouraging patients to tell their stories over and over again, allowing them to find a less central place for the event in their personal history so that they can start to rebuild their lives.
One of my biggest concerns about trigger warnings is that they will apply not just to those who have experienced trauma, but to all students, creating an atmosphere in which they are encouraged to believe that there is something dangerous or damaging about discussing difficult aspects of our history.
Nursery school is NOT safe... ever read a Brothers Grimm fairy tale? Even the toned-down Perrault contains plenty of triggers!!!
NicoleK at May 5, 2015 12:32 AM
Maybe these kids are on impression overload. They just can't sort through the agendas, sales pitches and noise that are being targeted at them. Maybe the whinging about safe spaces could be cured with getting off line and spending a month in the country. It's a lot more peaceful out there.
And of course that doesn't mean a 4 week drinking binge at some second-cousin's trailer house. They need to hike, and ride, and get rained on. Maybe do some actual work.
Canvasback at May 5, 2015 2:26 AM
I guess they don't read Huck Finn or B'rer Rabbit anymore do they.
mer at May 5, 2015 3:18 AM
They need a Trigger Warning at birth - It's called Life.
FYI - That's why, first thing, the Doctor slapped your ass. Get used to it. It happens a lot.
Wfjag at May 5, 2015 3:40 AM
These are not students. They have no intention of learning anything, only forcing the world to conform to their wishes.
Good luck, kids. Some of you may survive.
MarkD at May 5, 2015 6:56 AM
It's funny, isn't it, that "universe"-ity has come to mean NOT exploring challenges in your intellectual, artistic, athletic, and spiritual life, but clinging to your pre-existing ideas of how life should be - if only those poopy h8rs would go along with you.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at May 5, 2015 7:31 AM
During the week spent on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work.
_______________________________
I don't follow. I've read MANY different editions of that book, and not one goes into the explicit details of what happens in a rape (as opposed to the abduction of Persephone or the pursuit of Daphne, who "escapes").
But, re Apollo and Daphne, I can imagine that the blurring of the lines between LOVE and rape would be pretty disturbing to a rape victim.
(Edith Hamilton - who did not write a translation of that book, to my knowledge - has been described as a hack by more than one critic, and I knew two women who felt the same way; one was a professor born in the 1940s and the other was a Harvard student born in the 1980s. I liked Hamilton's "Mythology" as a kid, but I do see problems with her now. Namely, on the one hand, she goes to a LOT of effort to point out, in Daphne's story, that contrary to Ovid's account, she didn't need any supernatural incentive to run from Apollo, because it would be very strange for ANY girl not to run like mad from a male stranger who wouldn't take no for an answer, especially in a millennium where "honor killings" were very much the rule and not the exception. Also, as Ovid also didn't mention in that story, but Hamilton did, the only way rape victims could avoid that killing was to somehow hide the pregnancy and then kill the baby at birth or leave it to starve. HOWEVER, at the end of the story, Hamilton somehow saw fit to include the same disgusting cheerful sign-off that Ovid wrote. WHY? It would have worked just as well had she left out the last sentence.)
Here's what I mean (this is taken directly from Hamilton's book):
http://prinsesasheila.tumblr.com/post/3657935182/literary-criticism-modernism
Oh, and in the same book, Hamilton uses the word "lover" in the myth of Apollo and Creusa, of all myths! (She could just as easily have said "man," after all! Or, given what she said in the introduction, "brute.") I have mixed feelings about the drastic changes she made to the second half or so of Euripides' play - after all, in the play, IIRC, Creusa is set up to lose a lot of the audience's sympathy, and who would want to see that?
You can find that one, if you like, in Google Books under Hamilton's name and "The Royal House of Athens." (The story comes long after the introduction.)
lenona at May 5, 2015 7:38 AM
and not one goes into the explicit details of what happens in a rape
__________________________
I should have said "in those particular stories."
lenona at May 5, 2015 8:08 AM
I guess they don't read Huck Finn or B'rer Rabbit anymore do they.
Nope, 'cause raaaaaaaaacism.
I R A Darth Aggie at May 5, 2015 9:18 AM
Since we're discussing Greek plays, it seems appropriate to recall that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
✓
The Greek gods and goddess were, for the most part, a nasty lot. On a good day, they were just sociopathic, on a bad day they were sociopathic and psychopathic...
I R A Darth Aggie at May 5, 2015 9:27 AM
Let's note one little detail, shall we?
ALL OF THESE POOR, TRIGGERED, SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES ARE ADULT WOMEN! No one gives a flying F if some dude feels triggered by "Of Mice and Men" because he was bullied by the jock back in high school.
Are these the very same female "best and brightest" who are going to defend us in direct military combat and occupy the highest business and political positions in the country?
Sorry, you can't be sniveling little girls and strong, independent women at the same time. So choose, and then SHUT THE HELL UP!
Jay R at May 5, 2015 11:35 AM
It's not about trauma or triggers. It's about gutting the Western canon of literature. Too many dead white men.
We don't want the masses literate enough to read. That leads to thinking for themselves.
Conan the Grammarian at May 5, 2015 5:21 PM
"As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope." ~ Alberto Manguel
Conan the Grammarian at May 5, 2015 5:29 PM
Have them read Faulkner's Sanctuary - they'll have triggered nightmares when they get to the corncob scene!
charles at May 5, 2015 6:34 PM
When I was in college, I took a War Lit class with a guy who had done 2tours in ' Nam. He wasn't freaked out by All Quiet on the Western Front, so why are these babies whining?
kateC at May 5, 2015 9:09 PM
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