>Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:53:38 -0400 (EDT)
>From: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: We have seen the enemy, and it is us.
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>«Y entre los santos de piedra
>y los álamos de magia
>pasas llevando en tus ondas
>palabras de amor, palabras».
>
>Que estrofa mas evocativa! No la conocia. Gracias por citarla, Emilia.
>
>Spanish literature is not alone in the situation
>that many at this forum lament. Many literature
>departments around the country have eliminated
>Medieval Studies or made them ancillary to other
>studies of greater relevance.... Look at the
>department of English at your university or
>college and see who publishes on Chaucer; or who
>publishes on Chaucer in order to show something
>other than the chauvinism, patriarchalism,
>obscurantism, and brutality of Medieval times,
>against which some select Medieval writers
>miraculously rebelled, as indubitably
>demonstrated by the professor's
>research. Taking a class dedicated to
>Shakespeare is no longer part of the program,
>but something voluntary. The same goes for
>French. A course on Cervantes has ceased to be
>a requirement of the undergraduate curriculum,
>and in some cases this requirement has been
>eliminated with the enthusiastic acquiescence of
>Golden Age scholars, who have been against
>"privileging" or "hierarchizing." The
>humanities are studied basically in order to
>show how chauvinistic, racist, and generally bad
>the context in which they have appeared and
>thrived has been; and how they have been placed
>largely at the service of exploitation, etc.,
>that is, the humanities are studied in order to
>show how ideological they have actually
>been. Some years ago I thought the situation
>was bad; but the situation has worsened since I
>published my American Academia and the Survival
>of Marxist Ideas. So the question is, if those
>who study the humanities do not consider them
>worth defending, why should administrators? If
>we consider the sixteenth and seventeenth
>centuries not a "Golden Age," but an age of
>exploitation, religious obscurantism, and
>general badness, which a few clever writers
>secretly managed to denigrate, until we of
>course thanks to our superior abilities have
>managed to detect and prove their Straussian
>deceptiveness, why should administrators be
>concerned with subsidizing the study of this
>historical cesspool, or students be concerned
>with studying it at all? At best, let us better
>conflate it with something of greater interest,
>such as Liberation Studies, for example. If we
>study Medieval and sixteenth and seventeenth
>century writers basically to show how bad their
>times were, how can we communicate any love of
>the culture that, somehow, strangely, fostered
>the existence of such great writers (notice the
>paradox here) to our students so that they get
>interested in studying the period
>themselves? Of course in many cases the concept
>of greater or lesser writer has disappeared as
>well, along with the concept of greater or
>lesser, period, so there are no great writers to
>study anymore. Now, who would want to study
>something under these conditions
>consistently? I suppose we professors would,
>along with pathologists, but that is not enough
>to keep a field alive indefinitely...(I am
>tempted to create a field: The Pathology of
>Literature; two famous French professors once
>did publish a book on "The Parasite" once, and I
>am sure many other professors read it). If the
>humanities have been basically an ideological
>instrument of exploitation, etc. etc. should we
>wonder that neither administrators nor students
>put the humanities very high on their list of
>priorities? I just attended a lecture on Persae
>by a famous English professor. Her
>prize-winning line of argument was how racist,
>chauvinistic and eurocentric Persae and its
>interpretations have been, at least until
>recently, when, as she points out, satirical or
>subversive adaptations have been made in order
>to put Persae at the service of human
>liberation, as understood by the English
>professor of course. She expressed her
>annoyance at other interpretations by
>characterizing them as "bourgeois liberal
>crap." Those where her exact words. She kept
>mocking the notion that Salamis and Thermopilae
>had anything to do with Western liberty--Western
>liberty being in any case a notion that she
>laughs at too. A month ago I attended another
>lecture on Persae by yet another famous
>professor, this time a classicist from
>Stanford. His line of argument was that
>egalitarianism is highly desirable, as is the
>redistribution of wealth. Since he has the gift
>of gab, as we all more or less do (after all, we
>are professors), he did manage to make this
>argument while talking around Persae. So my
>friends, we have seen the enemy of the
>humanities, and it is not administrators or students: it is us.
>
>
>
>----------
>See what's free at <http://www.aol.com?ncid=AOLAOF00020000000503>AOL.com.
Prof. A. Robert Lauer
The University of Oklahoma
Dept. of Modern Langs., Lits., & Ling.
780 Van Vleet Oval, Kaufman Hall, Room 206
Norman, Oklahoma 73019-2032, USA
Tel.: 405-325-5845 (office); 405/325-6181 (OU
dept.); Fax: 1-866-602-2679 (private)
Vision: Harmonious collaboration in an international world.
Mission: "Visualize clearly and communicate promptly"
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