>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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