Where is the Milton of ableism?
From the “this must be parody” file, Yale students launch a petition telling the English department to stop requiring English majors to read Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.
The prestigious Connecticut university requires its English majors to spend two semesters studying a selection of authors it labels the “major English poets”: “Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Donne in the fall; John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and TS Eliot or another modern poet in the spring”.
Now, if I were in charge of that course I might swap Spenser for someone else – like, maybe push Milton back into the first semester and add Keats to the second. I can see quibbling over which “canonical” poets to include – but I can’t see saying “no ‘canonical’ poets at all!!” English majors read English literature – that’s what the major is.
It would be fabulous if there were comparable women poets from those centuries, but there just aren’t, for the familiar obvious reasons – most girls weren’t even taught to read, let alone encouraged to futz around with writing down words. It’s a huge historical injustice, but that’s not a reason to skip reading Shakespeare.
But students have launched a petition calling on Yale to “decolonise” the course. They want the university to abolish the major English poets requirement, and to refocus the course’s pre-1800/1900 requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity”.
I’m betting Yale already does include courses that do things along those lines, to the extent that one can with regard to literature that was unfamiliar with most of those categories; it’s not clear why students think it should get rid of major poets from the curriculum altogether.
The petition says that “a year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of colour, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity”, and that the course “creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of colour”.
Setting aside the tiresome didacticism of the language for the sake of argument, that’s true in a way. It’s true that it can be depressing (at least at intervals) to immerse yourself in a literature that someone like you could never have had a share in creating. The students aren’t completely wrong to say that. But…they are wrong to say that the thing to do then is throw out Shakespeare and Wordsworth. The cure is far worse than the disease.
One student, Adriana Miele, told the student newspaper that change was needed in the English department “because it openly rejects the very legitimate scholarship, criticism and analysis that many other academic departments at Yale embrace”.
In April, Miele wrote a column in the Yale Daily News in which she criticised the course because while students “are taught how to analyse canonical literature works”, they “are not taught to question why it is canonical, or the implications of canonical works that actively oppress and marginalise non-white, non-male, trans and queer people.”
No. Shut up. Don’t be schewpid. The works don’t “actively oppress” anyone. Maybe if Miele read a little more poetry she would manage to wean herself off language like that, with its combined staleness and dishonesty. It’s true that no one in the 16th century took the trouble to recruit non-white, non-male, trans and queer people to write poetry so that it could be taught to Yale students in the 21st century – but that by itself is not oppression, and it doesn’t makes the poetry that was written “actively oppressive.”
“It is possible to graduate with a degree in English language and literature by exclusively reading the works of (mostly wealthy) white men. Many students do not read a single female author in the two foundational courses for the major. This department actively contributes to the erasure of history,” Miele wrote.
They don’t read a single female author in the two foundational poetry courses because women don’t loom as large in English poetry as they do in the English novel. I hope Emily Dickinson is one of the alternatives to T S Eliot, but other than that – the supply is thin.
Slate writer Katy Waldman, who studied English literature at Yale, advised students that “if you want to become well-versed in English literature, you’re going to have to hold your nose and read a lot of white male poets. Like, a lot. More than eight.”
“The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it,” writes Waldman. “I am not arguing that it is acceptable for an English major to graduate from college having only read white male authors or even 70% white male authors. But you cannot profess to be a student of English literature if you have not lingered in the slipstreams of certain foundational figures, who also happen to be (alas) both white and male.”
It is what it is. Women can be poets now. In the past? Not so much. Affirmative action doesn’t work well on the past.
You should be aware that the Guardian has seriously misportrayed Miele’s column. It was not about this one single course, but rather about the structure of the English curriculum as a whole. She’s got a list of complaints; I cannot verify their accuracy, but not one of them strikes me on the face of it as particularly dismissable:
1: It’s apparently possible to get through an English major without reading anyone BUT the dead white dude brigade. That’s bad.
2: Literature (not just poetry) selections are all skewed to that same era–not just for the foundational stuff, but in general.
3: Nothing other than “close-reading” analysis is done. In particular, it’s apparently unacceptable to point out that Chaucer’s literature contains a lot of misogyny, save to note that his views were typical for the day and to move on.
4: Everything other than the Dead (Rich) White Dude canon is relegated to optional studies, often through other programs.
5: The teaching staff is also heavily skewed both male and white, particularly as you move up to senior levels. There’s a similar bias in guest-lecturers, which really is indefensible.
Consider:
I don’t see why this is any more tolerable a situation than the lack of women in management positions in Silicon Valley. A bias in the leadership becomes a bias in the rank and file.
Now, one can reasonably argue that the petition itself is misguided. As you note, the course itself is pretty much necessary if one is going to comprehend English poetry at all. So putting a target on that single course is folly. But Miele’s column pre-dates the petition, and was much broader in scope than a single course.
I can think of a few works off the top of my head that _are_ kinda ugly by modern standards. Or have bits that are. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still read them. I’d be surprised if the average instructor weren’t perfectly happy to entertain some discussion of that. Mores _do_ change, over centuries, people. I kinda figure the average participant of a university literature course is gonna get that.
I even think you can appreciate the artistry of something whose overall message you find quite appalling. Riefenstahl was a helluva filmmaker, bit of a touchstone, bit foundational to the modern vocabulary. Saying you don’t wanna watch it, too many Nazis, well, look, I can understand how this might make you a liittle twitchy. But if you’re a film student, that’s probably a bad move, actually. Twitch if you must, but watch how she uses those dollies, all the same.
It’s all a bit bigotry of the now, too, seems to me. Let’s not listen to people at all from those earlier centuries… pricks treated women and blacks like dirt, and now we know so much better, so what could they possibly tell us? But then is it okay with you, too, that everything _you_ write today is gonna have to go in the sealed vault in a century or two, too, since whatever new idea comes along and everyone decides, with the benefit of hindsight that we, too, were utter barbarians? Shall we reset every century, pretend all art older than our grandparents is too shameful to have any merit?
Been mulling this notion: there’s this anxiety about purity in all of this. News flash: you’re probably a bit bigoted about _something_, too, and if you could somehow be transported in time forward a few centuries, you might make even the most embarassing drunk racist uncle at the dinner party for that era cringe just to hear you talk… doesn’t make you globally stupid or worthless, along with all you wrote. And nothing stops you from saying, look, Picasso was a pig to a number of women in his life… But cubism is still something you may find a certain love for, giving it a chance. Nor is there anything wrong with saying: we got some good art now, we had some good art then. Let’s not limit ourselves entirely to either, out of some misguided anxiety we’re going to get racist cooties or something off the bones of John Donne.
It also seems to me so very sweep it under the rug. Look, that _is_ our culture (or pretty much is mine, at any rate), too. We’re a product of that, we’re continuous with that, a few hundred years just isn’t that long. You don’t magically make a clean break with it by excitedly denouncing it, and pretending it never happened; you’re better saying: this was the world then, this was how people thought. We think different, that’s probably got some good in it, but let’s also not get too cocky. We probably don’t think _that_ different, and in a few hundred _more_ years, it’ll probably be pretty hard to see much difference.
(But noting FM’s additions: really do have to say: that sounds vastly less unreasonable. Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Always more to it.)
Freemage @ 1 – Huh. Again we differ. I read the column and I think it’s shit. It’s not entirely wrong, but it’s shit – badly, bureaucratically written, with not an original thought or wording in sight.
Andrew @ 3 – the post and the Guardian piece were mostly about the petition: Miele’s piece didn’t come into it until the end. And Freemage overcorrected the Graun by making it sound more reasonable than it is.
For instance –
I beg to differ; I don’t think Miele is a writer yet. Putting that aside – why would the department be expected to “cultivate a well-rounded academic experience” in the sense of not teaching its own subject? That’s a silly expectation and thus a silly criticism.
English isn’t Comp Lit. It’s silly to scold it for being English rather than Comp Lit.
Ophelia: I’ll admit, I wasn’t looking at the column from the standpoint of how well written it was–merely if the points she raises are reasonable issues of contention. I think they are, even if her more rhetoric-laden passages are lacking. In particular, the notion that it’s possible to graduate with a degree, and an English major, without ever having to read anyone but a white male? That’s a major issue for me (again, if accurate–I cannot speak to that issue, and would love to have it dispelled, simply because it means the world may not be quite as horrible as I sometimes fear it to be).
And the Guardian specifically states that her column is about the petition, which is absurd, since it preceded it, and only mentions the poetry courses in passing.
And again, the petition itself is silly, and looks sillier every time I go back to it.
Freemage, well, it’s a particular kind of bad writing – bad in the sense that it stitches together stale formulas instead of expressing actual thought. It’s the kind of bad writing that reflects bad or no thinking. I tend to be unpersuaded by writing like that even if I basically agree with it – it makes me want to stop agreeing with the underlying ideas because it’s so defective in its thinking. (Too many gerunds; sorry.)
I wonder if it really is possible to graduate with a degree in English without ever having to read anyone but a white male. I wonder if you can really skip Austen and Emily Bronte and Eliot and Woolf – that seems highly unlikely to me.
It is a sad reflection on their education so far that they have no better understanding of history than their argument demonstrates.
A bit more Aphra Behn would be good, eh.
Personally, I’m outraged the the Youngsters These Days can’t come up with their own tiresome culture wars hobby horses and are just recycling stuff from ~25 years ago.
Lazy kids.
Do we have any verification of this? Or is this hyperbole on her part? I’ve been part of the university system and community college system for more than 30 years now, and i find this absolutely impossible to believe.Even 35 years ago, I was introduced to a collection of female writers. Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters were regular fare; George Eliot and George Sand. Emily Dickinson was brought in for poetry, as well as Edna St. Vincent Millay. This was not part of a course in women writers; I never took a course in that until my playwriting program two years ago. These were part of the standard curriculum.
There probably are more male writers in these courses, and some of the writing is misogynistic and some is racist. I agree with the general consensus here that we shouldn’t totally avoid these challenging works, because they can lead us to think about the changes in the world, and to begin to recognize the things that haven’t changed as much as we like to think. And getting rid of historically bad ideas from any discussion or reading doesn’t give us the chance to discuss and dissect those ideas and why they were bad. Our ideas become stronger if they are able to withstand challenges successfully, and we can understand why we think the way we do rather than just parrot what we think is right.
I would also be surprised if there was no discussion allowed. I know from what Freemage says that it appears that way; but I also know from my own experience with students that they often assume if their own ideas are not accepted wholesale, or if other ideas are presented, they feel that somehow they have not been able to express their views. Many students (like many other people, including us probably at times) perceive themselves as the center of the world, and when they are not viewed that way by other people (who each think THEY are the center of the world), they tend to feel upset.
So what I’m saying is, I think there may be some valuable ideas here, but overall, I find it problematic, especially since I find it difficult to believe.
AcademicLurker – right?? This is such.old.news.
Yeah, I have some sympathy for critiquing the Dead White Male syllabus. One thing to consider is how many women poets who actually existed have been “malewashed” out of history – just like women scientists. I’d expect to see Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Sidney and Anne Askew in the 16th Century modules.
For the 17th there’s Aphra Behn, Mary Wortley Montague, Katherine Phillips, Mary Chudleigh, Anne Killigrew, Anne Bradstreet (US), Susannah Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, Anne Ley and Jane Cavendish.
18th: Martha Wadsworth Brewster, Mary Robinson, Joanna Baillie, Helen Maria Williams, Susanna Rowson, Emily Eden and a hell of a lot more.
Many of those are just as good as some of the Dead White Male poets who get taught but history teaches us that men’s work is automatically more worthwhile.
OTOH, noone should be able to gain an English degree without reading Shakespeare or Chaucer. That’s just silly.
Ophelia: I do understand the bit about a bad argument making it hard to agree with the person. (I distinctly recall my own conversion on gay rights being delayed by about 2 years by some very, very bad arguments put forward by proponents for a GALA group on our campus, which at the time was still affiliated with the Lutheran Church.) I guess I’m getting more tolerant of the young’uns as I get older–I ~expect~ them to be in desperate need of seasoning, these days.
On the issue at hand:
I’m working through the Yale website to figure out the degree requirements, to see if it’s as horrible as suggested–that you could avoid anyone other than pallid phallus bearers and still get a degree. My goal is to create a curriculum that an MRA could love. See here for my source: http://english.yale.edu/undergraduate/requirements-major
We need 14 courses total, with various requirements along the way, and caps on certain types of courses.
English 125 & 126: These are the poetry courses in the petition.
One Junior Seminar, one Senior Seminar. The topics here vary, but the Senior Seminar, in particular, seems to be largely self-directed.
Up to 2 Creative Writing courses (You have to avoid the “Journalism of Ideas” course, which distinctly mentions women and journalists of color, but otherwise, you’re probably safe).
1-term Senior Essay
150: Old English
158: Middle English
275: Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville (whew–got the American Lit requirement)
200 & 201–all Bill Shakes, all the time.
264: Victorian Crime
353: Medieval Celtic Literature
As a bonus, have 501: Beowulf and the Northern Heroic Tradition
Okay, yeah, that’s pretty bad. Sure, you have to TRY to do this, but the rules allow for it–and meanwhile, a similarly unbalanced counter-program (focusing entirely, say, on women authors) is functionally impossible due to the foundation requirements.
A lot of students mistakenly believe that an English Lit degree is about literature written in English. Sigh.
A petition requiring better representation of other groups, with a list that would still meet the criteria of ‘canon’ poets would have been smarter; people would have looked at it and thought, ‘Dammit, this is reasonable! Why aren’t we doing this? I must sign this!’. A petition to just get rid of stuff, when a huge part of English Lit is about preservation of knowledge and creating a passion for the written word? Yeah, I don’t think so. Censorship is never going to fly well in that crowd.
Steamshovelmama makes the important point: are there women poets they could be reading and evaluating, or are there none?
Apparently there are quite a few. (I wouldn’t have known because I totally vagued out in English Lit. It was all dead white males, y’know?)
So the student has a point, even though it’s buried in her priggish writing. There are women her Department could be un-ignoring. They can’t become part of the canon until people start reading and evaluating them on an equal footing with the rest of it.
All of which, as everyone has pointed out, does not justify ignoring Shakespeare.
Ugh, I almost closed-tab in a fit of irritation at “actively harms,” but I pressed on and now here’s “actively oppress” and “actively contributes” and I have to stop again and vent: What does the “actively” part even mean? It seems like such a random adverb to keep tacking on everywhere, like she’s just grasping for extra syllables to aggrandize her prose…
There are women, but…are they really as good as the “canonical” men? Or for that matter the canonical women? Not in my experience. That level of good is very rare, and the pool is much smaller for women until quite recently.
The petitioners aren’t just asking for better representation in the curriculum (which would be a reasonable request), they want to “decolonize — not diversify” [lol!], by having Major English Poets “abolished” and replaced with some kind of… uh, diversity sampler menu. They demand the English department stop centering on the English language (so colonialist!), and instead serve up a pupu platter of works catered to the students’ 21st-Century political tastes.
I’m with Ophelia on this – desperately wishing this were parody. I completed an English major at one of Australia’s premier Universities. Since it was ten years ago I don’t remember all the texts I studied but I do remember a great number of female writers. Particular standouts for me were Jane Austen, Emily and Anne Bronte, Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth Inchbald and Elizabeth Gaskell.
I did undertake similar poetry courses to those described at Yale (16th, 17th & 18th century Lit and 19th and 20th century Lit) because they were prerequisites for an honors degree in English which I was interested in doing. However, I can’t imagine any way that you could call yourself well versed in English Liturature without some familiarity of the canonical writers of these centuries.
As an aside, my course materials for these courses were huge anthology books with samples of countless writers from those centuries, including many women. I recall touching on the works of some of these women as we moved through the course when we discussed key themes.
Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor would actually be great for a literature student who wants to talk about how women are seen by non-women. On the other hand, if professors discourage that kind of topic, I can see that being a valid concern.
There’s a lot about colonialism and othering to consider in Shakespeare. Just yesterday someone pointed out to me that two of his plays–the Tempest and the Merchant of Venice, and I suggested adding Othello as well–were vehicles to allow a representative of the ‘other’ to confront Shakespeare’s world and speak to it directly.
And it’s possible Shakespeare was ‘queer’ (bi).
In my experience, no, sadly. Aphra Benn is a fascinating individual but a very minor writer, for example. If she were a man, she would be long forgotten. It is hardly surprising , given the opportunities for women especially in the pre-18 centuries.
The thing about ‘rich’ men is silly as well. Some of them, like Shakespeare and Dickens, became rich, by writing and selling and working and a small few like Byron, started rich, but, on the whole, most of them started and ended penniless, living in a state of poverty unimaginable to a modern day Yale student, I should think.
As to ‘queer’, perhaps if she read more deeply she would stumble on Christopher Marlowe. She might even find she doesn’t have to hold her nose to read him.
I once seriously considered getting a degree in French Literature, but backed out when told I’d absolutely have to read French authors.
What an outrageous demand!
Is there anyone who disagrees at this point with any of the following?
1: The petition highlighted in the original article is absurd, poorly thought out and, in the unlikely event of being heeded, would do little on its own to correct the problem.
2: Miele’s column is not well-written, full of overblown rhetoric and stock phrasing, and as such does a poor job of presenting her actual argument.
3: The fact (which I’m now comfortable calling as such, since my last post) that you can get a degree in English at Yale based entirely on the Pallid Phallus Curriculum is an actual problem, as are the faculty and guest-speaker numbers Miele cites in her column (these, I have not verified, but they wouldn’t surprise me, either).
Freemage – while I can agree in principle, the truth is that students often are able to manipulate their degrees to ignore what they don’t want to hear. Where I teach, students can get a degree without a single course in math, and they can make their only science Psychology, thereby avoiding the unpleasantness of things like evolution.
A school I am familiar with has recently decided that, because there are students who want to study environmental science but don’t want to take science, they are going to put in an environmental studies program that avoids all science – which other schools have already done, and has led to people with high level degrees who don’t understand the very basics of what they are doing, and can’t evaluate the effects or consequences. No one would presume to offer a medical program without anatomy and physiology courses (at least, I hope they wouldn’t), but it is possible to get a degree in environmental studies without taking environmental science to find out how the very thing you are studying works.
So while I think it isn’t great that you can get an English degree without reading any women or writers of color, I don’t find it surprising, nor the worst thing that could be…I find it much worse to think the future of our world is in the hands of people who don’t understand how it works. (and these are the degrees that companies hire to be sustainability coordinators).
In short, this is the affect of education being a business. You give the students what they want. A male student doesn’t want to read female writing, you make it possible for him to do what he wants. A female student doesn’t want to read any males, then, she feels entitled to the same opportunity. Neither of them should be getting what they want; they should read a mix of the best writers (which is, of course, somewhat subjective).
No, I don’t really agree with 3.
It would depend on how the degree in English was structured, but if for instance one could get such a degree by focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries, then it would be all white men. The field isn’t an employment opportunity; I don’t see a whole lot of point in pretending not very good writers need to be included just to represent. I’ve always found that slightly patronizing.
I think institutions should be doing far more to include women and non-white people in movies and tv and publishing now, and academics should object raucously if anyone is teaching the 19th century novel while omitting Austen & Brontes & Eliot…but I don’t think there should be pretending that a minor poet is major just because she’s not a he.
iknklast: A fair point. The business-model of higher education has a lot to answer for, in general. That said, i do think this specific case is an example where that overlaps with general sexism in our society.
Ophelia: I agree that we shouldn’t shoehorn in writers who aren’t up to snuff. Better to simply note that in the 16th and 17th centuries, women were actively barred from being writers, and thus acknowledge that most of the good stuff is going to be from white men, and move on with the course matter.
I do think that having the degree as one’s major should require a broader course of study. It may not be as egregious as iknklast’s environmental science example (seriously, that’s the stuff of dystopian horror), but it does point to a significant lack in the program. I’d say that, for instance, there should be a mandatory course that covers the overall history of the written English word, and perhaps a single course on different approaches to literary criticism and analysis. (It’s worth remembering that high schools are increasingly not giving a full grounding to students, so it’s not safe to assume that they are arriving with the broad baseline of understanding, either.)
That way, even if the student spends their advanced course slots just on dead white dudes, they still have some exposure to the rest of the glory of the English literary tradition.
I think we have a whole generation raised in such isolation from uncomfortable facts that a petition like this seems reasonable to them.
The real unpleasantness of history and culture is alien to them. They only see a handful of texts carefully orchestrated to generate self–righteous indignation. Never enough to teach them to question their OWN orthodoxy.
It would be worthwhile to slant a program to encourage more digging around the edges of surviving literature. Keith Windschuttle (not a Nice Man, I know) wrote of some Australian hack claiming to speak FOR the silent mass of Australian convict/colonists. Windschuttle pointed out that, there are actually tons of material from convict writers going unstudied: journalism, poetry, memoirs, letters, novels, plays, all written by convicts and exiles, but not lying around in prefabricated anthologies for 18 year olds to sharpen their anger on.