How Social "Justice" Ruins Literature
At Arc Dig, Amna Khalid writes about "Disrupt Texts," which is "representative of a broader, growing movement in K-12 education to teach literature through a social justice lens, with an emphasis on centering the voices and experiences of BIPOC (black, Indigenous, and people of color) authors and students."
Social Justice Lit asks students to focus on how texts "support or challenge issues of representation, fairness, or justice" and whether they "perpetuate or subvert dominant power dynamics and ideologies."There are two big problems with Social Justice Lit that greatly diminish how students study and understand literature.
First, in its current form, Social Justice Lit is promoting a cult of relevance that advances an extremely narrow vision of what kinds of texts will engage and inspire students.
Second, it is encouraging a tyranny of presentism in which literary analysis revolves around interpreting -- and judging -- texts based on 21st-century, socially progressive values and concerns.
...By predetermining which texts will speak to whom based on crude racial and cultural categories, we potentially deprive people of some of the most transformative reading experiences they may have.
...Laura Bates, a professor who started a Shakespeare program at a maximum security prison in Indiana, was in awe of some of the prisoners' interpretive chops, noting that they "were able to make sense of some passages that professional Shakespeare scholars have struggled with for 400 years."
It is Ruth Simmons, though, the first African-American president of an Ivy League institution, who has the most devastating rejoinder to those who believe that some literary traditions will not or cannot appeal to particular readers. Asked in a 60 Minutes interview why she -- "a tenant farmer's kid from the wrong side of the tracks of this country" -- decided to study French literature, she replied: "because everything belongs to me. There is nothing that is withheld from me simply because I'm poor. That's what children have to understand."
...Social Justice Lit insists that the classics have "no more and no less" "literary merit" than any other works. So the value of teaching classic literature is reduced to present-day concerns -- either by transforming reading into an exercise in calling out a text's "problematic and outdated ideas," or by using the text as a springboard to discuss socially relevant topics through a social justice prism.
...In the event that you must teach Shakespeare's plays or other classic texts because of prescriptive school policies (or of your own free will), social justice educators insist "the only responsible way to do so is by disrupting" them. When teaching Shakespeare, 8th grade English teacher Christina Torres urges teachers to "call out the misogyny in The Taming of the Shrew, the racism in Othello, and the antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice."
"When I read Romeo and Juliet with my students," Torres reports, "I pause, give a thumbs-down and say 'Boo' when the play says something misogynistic."
"Boo"? Are you five?
This turns reading literature into a whack-a-mole game of spot the "problematic" -ism. It encourages students to take a self-righteous, judgmental stance toward fictional characters, scanning texts for any sign that they fail to live up to today's socially progressive standards....Social Justice Lit embraces a do-not-read-between-the-lines approach to literary analysis and interpretation. It fails to see that an author's portrayal of a "racist" or "sexist" character is not necessarily an endorsement of the character's worldview, but can instead be a way of highlighting social ills and presenting sharp, social commentary. Vexing, endlessly fascinating, and hugely important questions about an author's intent remain unaddressed.
So The Merchant of Venice is wholly and definitively antisemitic; there's no room to consider that Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock's treatment in the court of law might be a critique of discriminatory attitudes toward Jews. And the Great Gatsby simply "toes the line of perpetuating the myth of meritocracy." That Fitzgerald threw into sharp relief the ostentatious lifestyles of the rich and famous to critique materialism, social climbing, and the American dream is not even entertained. The word "satire," alas, is foreign to the Social Justice Lit lexicon.
In a lovely, short book called Breaking Bread with the Dead, English professor Alan Jacobs notes that "the reader who instantly translates the subject or story of a book into present-day terms often is not having a genuine encounter with the book at all."
I have a theory about the misogyny in Taming of the Shrew. I think Katerina is a Dame role. He didn't cast his slender little pretty boys, he cast the biggest, ugliest brute as Katerina and some skinny little dude as Pertruchio.
Because it's a comedy. And some guy beating up a lady isn't really funny. But a skinny guy chasing around a hulking brute in drag while yelling things like, "Fair Kate! Slender as a hazel wand!" or spanking him or whatever, and the dude in drag mincing about talking about submissiveness? That'd be pretty funny.
NicoleK at January 14, 2021 10:55 PM
... this is not to say big guys are ugly brutes by definition. Just that this actor wouldbe.
NicoleK at January 14, 2021 10:56 PM
So, maybe ... do not buy into it! Give it no credence! In fact, laugh at it as the bullshit it is! Mock it! Satirize it!
Maybe don't pay a fortune to send your children to places where this is taken seriously! Or ... horrors ... don't send your kids to college at all, if you find it so objectionable.
I know these are heretical thoughts among the Academically Persecuted, who have a money stake in being Academically Persecuted, but for the rest of us it would be a refreshing change from whinging about American college life. But that would require the same sort of self-reliance that the authors of these endless essays require of their readers.
If a church's doctrine repels you -- and, make no mistake, today's college campus is closer to a church than a place of freethought -- then leave the goddamn church instead of whining about it endlessly. You'll be healthier and happier, and you'll starve the church of its ultimate sustenance: money.
Kevin at January 14, 2021 11:45 PM
I can’t believe “A Modest Proposal” is still being taught. Swift is totally arguing for cannibalism. Especially the BIPOC babies in Ireland!
Mike S the Woke at January 15, 2021 2:31 AM
Perhaps the teachers are so dumb that they are incapable of anything but the most surface-level, facile reading?
When you axiomatically reject the author having any intention in writing something, there's no point to any sort of systematic approach to understand the way the text is made, and now, several generations into this, the practitioners and teachers no longer know how to do that. They can only jeer like extras in Idiocracy.
It's funny because that means that if you have an author who has become skilled at their craft and also checks the current year's boxes, that author will only be valued for "speaking in an authentic voice" for the boxes they check - not for the intellectual heft required to assemble a compelling narrative.
I can accept that Foucault and Derrida may have had some mental horsepower - warped as it was - but you can't say the same about these school teachers.
I wonder how they would treat the text of Barack Obama's speeches if they were told they were George Bush's or even Joe Biden's. There would be much booing from the peanut gallery.
El Verde Loco at January 15, 2021 5:20 AM
"I wonder how they would treat the text of Barack Obama's speeches if they were told they were George Bush's or even Joe Biden's. There would be much booing from the peanut gallery."
look for Campus Reform videos, they pretty much do this, with quotes and policies.
Joe J at January 15, 2021 8:24 AM
> Perhaps the teachers are so
> dumb that they are incapable
> of anything but the most
> surface-level, facile reading?
It ain't just candlepower: An enormous number of people, like maybe forty percent, maybe forty-seven percent, are completely, genetically incapable of ironic thinking.*
Asking them to reflect on matters which are subtly incongruous makes them angry. They don't want to have to deal with nuances or complex forces bringing remarkable results. ('The airliner is built from weighty metals… And yet it flies through the air!')
They want everything in the natural world to supportive and pleasant, especially to them personally (See EVL, above.)
And they certainly expect the personalities in their lives to be straightforward and sincere. They want the world to be simple comprehensible. They want the challenge of the information given them to be dried of complication first. When someone says something ironic, they presume they're being mocked.
(They're often correct, because getting under their skin is a galactic pleasure for us normies.)
Whether for stupidity or abject temperament, to go through life distrusting irony and its consolations is to be that kid in fifth grade who was constantly whining: This isn't going to be on the test, is it?
You bet it is, Bumpkin.
> I wonder how they would treat
> the text of Barack Obama's
> speeches if....
There's a vague memory of someone reading a few lines of Sarah Palin's memoir to an auditorium full of college students, who snorted and cackled at the trite nonsense of her bogus humility.
When told several minutes later that the passage was actually the opener to (one of) Barack Obama's autobiographies, they were displeased.
Crid at January 15, 2021 8:35 AM
Ah, yes. The closing of the American mind.
Jay R at January 15, 2021 8:49 AM
> Ah, yes. The closing of
> the American mind.
…A book which itself could only be read ironically.
Crid at January 15, 2021 9:26 AM
Rewrites, remakes, and reviews:
"Lord Of The Flies" - "They were privileged white boys just like Trump, violent racist misogynist elitists who turned on each other when there were no womyn or minorities left to subvert or destroy".
"The Preacher's Daughter" - "Imprisoned in a white female body, and forced to return to the strict, religious home of xher white sperm donor and white uterus-haver. Xhe defeats the local white patriarchy and receives free transitioning hormones, surgery, and a new wardrobe, and goes on to fight against Trump".
"A Tale Of Two Cities" - "Both were run by the white patriarchy and, as such, hell, much like life under Trump".
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 15, 2021 10:44 AM
It sounds like the children are in charge. They didn't like reading Shakespeare in high school ("We hate iambic pentameter!" ~ the cast of Moonlighting) - so they decided as adults they should no longer have to read it or make anyone else read it.
Well, Buttercup, some things are harder to read than Harry Potter, but convey much better lessons for life than Harry ever will.
And, no, I don't hate Harry Potter. I've read all the books and was impressed with the way Rowling made each book more relevant to the age and reading level of the audience as it grew with the books. The first one was very simple and suitable for 10-11-year-olds while the last was much more complex and suitable for 17-18-year-olds.
Teaching literature in schools has always been corrupted by education fads. When I was in school, deconstruction was the big thing.
Deconstruction is defined as "a way of analyzing literature that assumes that text cannot have a fixed meaning." An example is reading a book again after 20 years and seeing how it has different meaning to you over time. But that's not the way it was taught.
We had to evaluate the meaning of the symbolism in a passage relevant to today as opposed to when Shakespeare wrote it - and literally every other word was symbolic of something. You couldn't get through one stanza of Shakespeare in class readings without the teacher stopping the class to discuss more symbolism. It wasn't until I got out of high school that I actually read Shakespeare end-to-end without interruption. It's much better that way.
I actually got an "A" in a literature class in college by using Aphra Behn's 1688 book, Oroonoco, as an analogy for the Vietnam War. Professors loved that kind of stuff.
Social Justice literature sounds very much like it evolved from deconstruction. No wonder kids don't like reading. We've ruined it for them.
Conan the Grammarian at January 15, 2021 10:51 AM
80's romcom action shows ought not lead our thinking about such things… But you've got to admit: Iambic pentameter is ALL fucked up.
Crid at January 15, 2021 11:33 AM
I do think it's worth looking at why we chose to remember some authors and not others, and if social issues back in the day may have contributed to uplifting some voices and not others. I'm sure there are lots of undiscovered gems out there that are just as good as some of the more mainstream stuff.
I sometimes like to play the "What art will be remembered" game. I think the music of John Williams will survive. Yes it's pop culture, but so are a lot of the overtures from operas and stuff that are considered highbrow classics today
NicoleK at January 15, 2021 11:52 AM
Conan: "Social Justice literature sounds very much like it evolved from deconstruction."
I was thinking the same thing!
What I thought about deconstructionism and what I think about this Social Justice Lit is that it comes across very much like some professors really don't have the historical background to fully understand where the author was coming from so they have to make stuff up.
charles at January 15, 2021 11:57 AM
Huckleberry Finn is a good example of that. The use of a word that is recognized as offensive today is what most people know the book for. At heart, however, it was a condemnation of slavery and prejudice.
Conan the Grammarian at January 15, 2021 12:12 PM
Another thing to consider is profit margin.
The timeless classics are public domain so publishers don't earn much from them.
But if they can convince -ie. bribe- the teachers' unions that their novels are like Shakespeare but with brown, overweight, and autistic lesbians? Boom. 100 years of mandatory overpriced textbooks for the kids.
Sixclaws at January 15, 2021 1:18 PM
Most older literature doesn't make any sense unless you read it with the period in mind when it was written. Through a "modern" lense, a recent critique completely misconstrued "The Scarlet Letter". The complexity of human nature (both good and bad in the same person) is present in To Kill a Mockingbird but critics complain that the lawyer is not unambiguously good. They miss that the stand he took, against his inclinations, was heroic. To understand Dickens, you need know about life in his times and that his books were meant to be crusades against injustice.
One of the interesting things about literature is both the timelessness of it (consider the ancient greek plays) and the evolution of it.
The woke lens will render you unable to read poetry or see beauty in fiction. It is all below the ideal perfection that you think you deserve to get but which does not exist.
cc at January 15, 2021 1:30 PM
All you guys are right.
Nic's probably right about Shakespeare, but I don't know enough about him, or most any other classics, to say.
The world of musical tastes has been so fragmented by wide choices, the idea of a classic may be obsolete: As with the books, no one wants to consider anything they don't already know and find flatteringly comprehensible.
Anyway, for movies I might credit John Barry, Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer as contenders against John Williams. Also Quincy Jones, for body-of-work if not film scores precisely. And I'm impressed by Nolan's new brat… (No one's as annoying as a talented punk.)
Shitty novels dropping into syllabi via teacher's unions seems unlikely, but who knows. You wouldn't believe the horrors that have been done to kids in the lunchroom.
Crid at January 15, 2021 2:55 PM
I liked “Lord of the Files”, about a domineering and ruthless secretary who would kneecap anyone who even came within twenty feet of the cabinets.
JD at January 15, 2021 3:16 PM
Should have anticipated that the piece works this way as well.
Crid at January 15, 2021 3:19 PM
"I liked “Lord of the Files”, "
"Heart Of Wokeness", in which a Latinx studies professor travels upriver into the mysterious land of the woke, where all the clocks are set to different times and the rules of reality change at random. Set decoration by Salvador Dali.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 15, 2021 3:38 PM
@Gog,
Woke fiction doesn't work that way. It circles around three themes:
The environment. Either the world is in ruins and as you progress further in the plot, you find out that it was capitalism to blame; or the planet rebels against humans, either by turning the plants into churning human-killing poisons, or by turning the animals into a human-killing hive mind.
Dystopian tyranny saved by using Socialism and emotionally stunted young adults living in sh*thole towns. Pretty much all Y.A. fiction revolves around this theme. And for some reason their new utopia never runs out of cash and/or resources.
But with lesbians. Think about every work of fiction that you have ever read, and then turn the major characters into lesbians.
Sixclaws at January 15, 2021 8:22 PM
“Mobile Dick”: after her husband dumps her for a much younger woman, New York socialite Trish Mayle purchases a giant white dildo and embarks on a year-long journey to use it in every country in the world.
JD at January 15, 2021 8:30 PM
"But with lesbians."
Spoken out loud, it sounds like the title of a painting.
"Butt With Lesbians"; ca. 1968; oil painting on Masonite. Alberto Vargas (1896-1982). Private collection.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at January 16, 2021 11:32 AM
Another novel I liked was “To Kilt a Mockingbird,” the compelling story of a plucky wee finch from the Scottish Highlands that flies across the Atlantic in a quest to wrap a tiny tartan cloth around the upper legs of the titular bird.
JD at January 16, 2021 12:31 PM
Ah, Vargas Girls...every young man’s fantasy.
Well, OK, not the fantasy of young gay men (or Catholic priests.)
JD at January 16, 2021 12:44 PM
Conan, I can't remember which professor wrote this, but it was something like "a Shakespeare play should always be watched BEFORE being read." Maybe it was Harold Bloom.
It makes sense. After all, even plenty of 20th-century plays will have words or references that not even every adult will understand - but that is NOT necessary to understand and appreciate the play as a whole. All the detailed analysis, in class, can come later - it's so much easier that way.
Though I WOULD suggest having the preteens and teens watch the comedies first. (I read A Midsummer Night's Dream at age 12, since it was on the reading list, so I didn't get to watch it - but that one was easy enough to understand and enjoy anyway. Of course, it helped that I'd already been given Edith Hamilton's Mythology a year earlier, for my birthday.)
Lenona at January 17, 2021 9:14 PM
Watching is definitely preferable to reading it. Although, I find that reading it beforehand lets me keep up with the dialogue where the actor my mumble or ambient sounds distract from the action on the stage.
I remember attending a presentation of King Lear at a local university's "Shakespeare in the Park" with friends. I had not read Lear before this and couldn't not always keep up with the dialogue. Of course that my have been because I was often distracted by Goneril's fantastic legs.
Conan the Grammarian at January 18, 2021 8:20 AM
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