I Still Love the Modernists

I've been out of the crosshairs of the literary canon for quite a good long time. During my most recent enmeshment, the writers I "specialized in" during graduate school - The Modernists -  had fallen out of favor. Their deadwhitemale corpses were the cannibal feasts of fierce young Xinists and Xicists who, ironically, had adopted one of the great Modernist mottoes:

Make It New

Everyone was chasing after some new writer and some new angle to (dare I say) fetishize, and being Dead and White and Male pretty much meant a writer was Going To Pay. 

Given, the new writers were mostly wonderful; granted, the old writers (they weren't all men though they were all dead and they pretty much were all white) were not always on the fashionable side of the political fence. They drank, smoke, and screwed with abandon. Some were not very nice to each other or anyone else.

But they wrote with the angels. 

The angels.

I could go off on a rant here about how anyone who still thinks Hemingway is a misogynist needs to go on a very long retreat with a copy of The Sun Also Rises and anyone who thinks Faulkner is a racist should do the same with The Sound and The Fury, but I'll spare you.

Instead, I just want to tease you with a tiny bit of light. This isn't the happiest poem, but glory how it sings.

Take it away, Mr. Eliot.....

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

(T.S. Eliot 1888-1965)


S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question … 
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

...

If you would like to read on, click here.

Canon Ball Target Practice

Tonight was Small Child's end-of-year school Arts Night program, which doubled as a "farewell" for the campus; the district, in its infinite wisdom, is closing a perfect little neighborhood school with a long history of excellence and moving children to a megalomentary.

She sang in the chorus, among all kinds of faces: Hispanic children, Native American children, African American children, children of privilege, children of poverty, gifted children, children who struggle to read.  This true diversity was apparent during performances and presentations by the Art Club, the Dynamic Drummers, and the Jump Rope Team.  

For these children, the "shared texts" were clear: love, success, creativity, community, rhythm, motion, paint, sound.

By the time they reach college, though, they will likely carry canon shrapnel in their numb butts.

In a comment on Tuesday's post, RedMolly wrote:

Does thinking a shared cultural heritage strengthens our society mean I'm a crypto-paleo-conservative in training? Damn...

 

In three words  - shared cultural heritage -  she summons all the casualties of all the culture wars I've lived through in all my years of education. Hell, I might as well go all the way.  She nails the root cause of most conflict, doesn't she. 

It all comes down to who defines those three words.

Tuesday, I complained bitterly about the lack of a common knowledge base. Today, as is so often the case, the Universe did not so much as correct me as remind me that I might actually be setting the bar too low.

Student X enrolled in my writing class this spring. She (I have changed most identifying details) is the American-born child of immigrants who left middle class careers in their native land to give their yet-unborn children better educational opportunities. Together they own a small business, one which you might consider quite stereotypical. While she speaks an Asian language at home, the student speaks English fluently although her writing is disordered in the usual ways. She plans to attend medical  school in three years, and I have no doubt she will gain admission. 

Snore. This is the most predictable story ever.

Not so fast.

What is your "shared cultural heritage" when you are, say, a Laotian-American Pentecostal first-generation pre-med at a liberal college in the Bible Belt?

One of the pleasures of this term has been watching as this young man (HA! I switched those identifying details again when you weren't looking) has discovered that he can use his quite gifted brain in ways he has never been encouraged to do. He's learned that he can explore and evaluate his beliefs without  abandoning them and he can do so in conversation with people who do not share his worldview. This is a revelation, no pun intended.

He will find Marx and Freud and Mill and Darwin (gasp!) and Plato and Nietzsche and all the other dead white guys.  He may even find Buddha and other thinkers of "his" cultural heritage. But he will do so because he is hungry for them. 

What are we doing as parents, schools, and a nation to whet our children's appetites? To make them hunter-gatherers instead of foie gras geese?

Tell me, please, what you are doing either for your kids or for your students if you have them. Are you firing or dodging canon balls?

Canon Ball

Final exams begin next week.  The bad news is I'll be grading, but the good news is I will no longer be prepping for classes.  More time to write and to pack my bags for the annual trip to Oregon. Tick, tick, tick....

I've been frustrated this spring by my students' lack of a common knowledge base.  I could blabber on for days with hypotheses as to this sad state of affairs (blahblahblah BushNCLB blahblahblah Creationism blahblahblah AbstinenceOnly). I noticed some erosion when I returned to the classroom in 2003.  But this year, after 18 months away, I faced a mudslide.

I risk sounding like some kind of Bill Bennett conservative (those of you who know me will have to assure those of you who don't that nothing - nothing - could be less true), but can I please whine about the good old days when I could stand in front of a college classroom and expect my students - regardless of their majors - to have at least a "cocktail party" understanding of Darwin, Marx, and Freud?

In our liberal arts environment, I teach freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the same class. Some will go on as English majors, while others are fulfilling a breadth requirement. I select damn hard but devilishly interesting novels and season them with a variety of critical perspectives.  I know it's an introductory level class, but why should the big kids be the only ones who have any fun? Usually, most students - even the first years - rise admirably to the challenges. This year I removed important supplemental readings from my course (Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Malraux) because my students were having enough trouble with the literature - never mind the theory.   I doled the good stuff out as treats ("Would you like some theory, little boy?") on the sly to the ones who were ready.* Kind of broke my heart.

Sorry to beat the tired old drum of the canon. But I'd be interested in your thoughts.  Our institution recently did away with a decades-old series that began as a course in the foundations of Western thought but then morphed to include history of science (real science, lest you worry) as well as exposure to other, non-dominant cultures.  During my undergraduate years it was known, unfortunately, as "Heritage of Western Man."  Yes, we all grumbled as we took our unsupported ( but then-perky) breasts and bounced off in a feminist huff, but I can tell you that I thanked the curriculum gods during my first graduate seminar and every one thereafter.

Please comment, really.  What should we do about this?  I'm struggling both as an educator and as a parent. I want Small Child to be versed in Post-Colonial literature and history, but doesn't she also need to know why it's Post-Colonial?

Help.

* Here's a special thank you to some students who made it worth my time: the one who decided to audit the course early on then rarely missed another class, the one who asked for Marx's and Freud's writings on fetishism, the one who explained Hegelian dialectic so I wouldn't have to, the one who wrote the best essay on Faulkner when she thought it stank, the one who is facing the real world in ways the others can't fathom, and the one who throws so much heart into every single page.  If you ever find this blog, you know who you are.