MY READING

POLITICALLY INCORRECT GUIDE TO ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE

Just finished another excellent book from the "Politically Incorrect Guide" series. This one was especially dear to my heart, since I am an avid reader, and overwhelming percentage of what I enjoy reading is British. The woman who wrote it sounds like a very enjoyable college professor of English literature with a great sense of humor and totally in love with her subject.

Actually, I had a professor like this. I loved her and took all my English prereqs with her. There was only one problem with good dear Dr. E.: she always assigned the most depressing reading imaginable; either a piece that was written by an author who was slightly deranged, or, if we were studying a particular author, she would invariably pick up his or hers most depressing work. Aside from that regrettable tendency, Dr. E. was a great prof.

She had a saying: "The best way to kill a book is to give it for an assignment in school". I tend to agree with her there for a number of reasons: first of all, you have to be in a mood to read something. The book may be the greatest in the world, but your mind has to be tuned to appreciate it, otherwise, it is just a waste of time. Plus, I never enjoyed all the dissecting done in classes. "The country was going thorough a war, and you can clearly see it in this piece." "The author was going through financial problems, and the hero of the story reflects this." "This work is imbued with revolutionary pathos!" I always had one question for all this nonsense: "How do you know that?" Unless you have a telepathic connection with the author (usually deceased), you have no idea what he or she was thinking or feeling at the time, and how exactly it is reflected in the writing, no matter how great an expert you are on the biography. Unless a letter or a journal survived that clearly indicates the connection between the writer's life and his or her writing, all the rest is just a guesswork and a matter of personal perception. So, yes, giving out a literary piece for an assignment in school is a very sure way to kill the true appreciation for it.

Or so I thought till I read Elizabeth Kantor's PI Guide. As much as I heard and read about the loony left's taking over of the colleges, nothing paints the exact horror as specific pictures. Apparently, students now a days either are not required at all to take English Lit as a prereq., or they are required and offered courses in English Lit., but only to teach them the horrors of Western Civilization, and the racism, misogyny, and the hatred of the homosexuals inherent in the above mentioned Civilization. Kantor makes a very good observation: professors who used to teach garbage like Marxism are not needed that much anymore. So, where could they transfer to? They can't teach science or math, so they somehow end up the literature department and continue to teach their miasma under the guise of English Lit.

Kantor gives a whole bunch of examples of loony teachings, saying that "English professors are so politically correct they're beyond parody." Here are some courses offered as "English": Comparative Cross Dressing; Gender Relations in the 19th Century Romantic Ballet: Sex, Drugs and Crime; Latino/a Popular Culture; Sex Outside the City; The Bourgeois; Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean. She also gives some specific examples of PC language imposed in classes: subject instead of human being or person, the literary production instead of the work of literature, binaries instead of truth and falsehood, Marxist instead on Communist, priveleges instead of benefits, and so on. Suffice it to say that the blood boils from such garbage.

Most of the book is dedicated to basically going over the greatest English writers and their major work, touching on the main biographical points and explaining why all these works are classics and what we can learn from them (aside from supposed "priveleging" of white males to the detriment of everyone else). Despite the fact that I do not necessarily see all of these literary works in the same light (like nothing will convince me that I will enjoy The Taming of the Shrew), her sheer enthusiasm and obvious love for her subject was very contagious.

She concludes the book by offering the ways of teaching English Lit to yourself. I found that especially delightful: finally somebody tells me that it's OK to think of the literary characters as somebody real and argue with them. Plus, she suggest starting an amateur production of Shakespeare with your friends and relatives. What a grand idea! (Moish, how about you as MacDuff)?

As much as I enjoyed Kantor's witticism, the sad conclusion is inevitable. Long gone are the days when the worst what could have happened to you while studying English Lit. was somebody with Dr. E.' propensity for assigning depressing works. Now the wide-eyed college freshmen are subjected to English professors like Grover Furr, credited with saying: "This article outlines Joseph Stalin's attempts, from the 1930s until his death, to democratize the government of the Soviet Union", and instructors teaching "theory", "meaning Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, bashing of dead white males" and general "resistance to literature". Let us also not forget that a lot of it is done using our tax dollars. Great!