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 AOL.com.