[Mark Allinson]

Here is an Editorial from today’s Australian on the continuing attack upon the study of Literature in Oz.

“The best English teachers are happy to focus on their subject, but those who want to be social engineers and cultural warriors dominate these teachers' associations, which are becoming irrelevant.”

I realize that my postings on this matter are a source of disgust (for some) and boredom (for others), but I can’t seem to help myself.

Put it down to a terminal and irrational love of literature, but whenever I see examples of this putrid P.C. politicization of literary studies my upper lip starts to curl like an autumn leaf, and I find myself posting things like this, or composing verse squibs on the subject.

If this subject bores you, click off!

[Michael Cantor]

Mark - let me make a suggestion.

There is a terrific thread on the Board now concerning the American Idol competition, started by Christy, who has already created other memorable threads on favorite films, favorite poems, favorite silly children's names, etc. Why not direct your passion and learning in this direction? You can rant all you want about why this or that or the other competitor deserves to be honored, or thrown to the sharks, or both - you can be as outspoken and opinionated as you want - and nobody will mind. Not a single eyeball will roll. As a matter of fact, many members will probably mutter, "Good old Mark...he's finally come around and shown what a terrific guy he is..."

American Idol isn't shown in Australia? Not a problem. Most of us don't know what Roger and Marion are discussing on the thread anyway. You don't have to really know anything to express a strong opinion (it's just like being a right wing talk show host.) Invent a contestant - make up a nifty Aussie name - and start writing about him or her (I think it has to be a person, not a marsupial.) Who knows? Your favorite might even do better than some of the real entrants. And it would be much more interesting than another rant about the Study of Literature in Oz.

[Mark Allinson]

Michael, we don't have "American Idol" here - but we do have "Australian Idol", which comes to much the same thing.

In fact, I would guess there is a good chance that "Australian Idol" could well end up as "text" for study in NSW schools, since it involves "meaning making in and through language, across a range of forms, media and expressions." So I might be required to teach it soon at my local "university".

Not that I have anything at all against popular culture, as my "Let's Rock" thread would suggest. Nor have I any problems with the study of popular culture.

But when a "Literature" curriculum bumps stuff like William Blake and Dickens & co. off the menu for the sake of the "text" of "Australian Idol", it makes me want to puke up a gall bladder. When all texts (including the remnants of Blake, Dickens, etc.) are reduced to "politics" I feel even sicker.

And according to the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, the study of literature is "inherently a political action." So say all soul-challenged "teachers."

I am not at all against the study of such contemporary, popular "texts", but in a Cultural Studies course, NOT in Literature.

I don't blame members from getting bored with this stuff, but while I remain alive I will never cease from sneering and snorting at this junk.

[Duncan Gillies MacLaurin]

And good on you too, Mark!

Duncan

[Chris Childers]

It's all well and good, Mark, that you've chosen to combat the gnostic, Marxist, Rousseau-ian, post-modernist life-haters, but what I can't understand is why Eratosphere is the forum in which you choose to do it. I mean, what are you accomplishing? Whom are you defeating? If you really want to fight, don't you need opponents? Like, you know, real opponents? Everyone here just sighs and says exactly what you've written in the thread title, there he goes again. & then, while you pound on the keyboard and spray your screen with spittle, the situation in Australia, whether or not it's as you characterize it, isn't doing any changing. If you're not directly opposing the dominant ideology, you're implicitly supporting it.

Sneer and snarl all you want; at best, you're like Matthew Arnold's description of Shelley, beating your luminous wings in the void in vain. If you want to fight, go find somebody to fight! Michael Cantor, David Rosenthal and Epigone are hardly your Public Enemies One, Two, and Three.

Chris

[Quincy Lehr]

And Mark, though we always clash on this stuff aside, I'm hardly entirely out of sympathy with your viewpoint on the practical level. It's rather that you tend to lose me on the theoretical side, where failure to do sentence diagramming leads to the gas chambers.

[Mark Allinson]

It's all well and good, Mark, that you've chosen to combat the gnostic, Marxist, Rousseau-ian, post-modernist life-haters, but what I can't understand is why Eratosphere is the forum in which you choose to do it.

That's a very fair question, Chris.

First, Erato is a community of poets, and readers who love poetry. And this is an issue which vitally impacts on poetry: the teaching of poetry in our schools and universities - and not just here in Oz, but all across the Western world today.

Second, for better or worse, Erato IS my online community, so I share my concerns (and yes, obsessions) with my fellow members.

It may be of little interest to many to ask such questions as to why some of the brightest and best writers associated with this site never bothered to complete a higher degree in Literature.

Three people come immediately to mind: Quincy, Alicia, and my daughter, Rayne. All three are vitally concerned with literature, all of them highly skilled writers, but none of them finished a higher degree in literature. And I know of many more off the board. Why?

I recall that Alicia said on a recent thread at D.G., that literature departments seemed a little too obsessed with theory. Quincy has more or less admitted to the same thing on other threads in the past. I know for a fact that my daughter was turned from literature to history, in despair of such ubiquitous "theory". And all of these threads of mine are concerned with this "theory" - call it what you will.

I mean, what are you accomplishing? Whom are you defeating?

Chris, you name three members below - but I know for a fact that there are many others on the board who support this politicization of literary studies.

But my rants are not directed towards such folk - I would sooner attempt to convert fundamentalists of religion - but rather towards the many others on this site who feel as I do (thanks, Duncan) whether they teach or not. I would like to encourage such folk to stand up and be counted as friends of poetry in our schools and colleges, against those who would level all art to mere politics, for the sake of their social-engineering ideologies.

As we know, all it takes for wickedness to triumph is for good folks to say nothing, and avoid rocking any boats. As you say, Chris: "If you're not directly opposing the dominant ideology, you're implicitly supporting it." And I am afraid to say that the P.C. ideological movement IS the dominant ideology all around the Western world today.

But no one here is REQUIRED to open any threads - and if any reader wants to avoid this stuff, as I said, click off!

[Chris Hanson]

Hi, Mark. The topic doesn't offend me.
I generally agree that English study in high schools has become a sugary syrup of postmodern rubbish, but I'm at the point where I'm over it.
I read the article this morning too, and wondered how long it would be before the next wave of syllabus documents filtered through to our staff-room, and how many meeting would be spent dealing with the contents.

I now resolve to simply put up with it. Having dealt with the white noise from the Department of Education for these past eleven years, and four soul-destroying years at Uni before that, I feel that nothing they throw at us can be much worse. You want me to teach cartoons to senior students? You beaut--it's just too easy. You want a feminist reading of King Lear? Done. Australian Idol?-- we could discuss modality of language, culture, gender issues (this is sounding more like a HSC module as I go).

Thing is, it's those in the senior positions of the ETA who are pushing political and cultural issues at the curriculum committees; your rank and file teachers, who are often members of their respective associations, are very cynical about the whole approach to the syllabus. Even the students are sick of coming away without having learned anything much about language or literature.
We all wish it were otherwise, but it's not, and there you have it.

Honestly, Mark, you'll find an early grave for yourself if you let it get you down.

Best wishes
Chris

[Chris Childers]

Hey Mark--

I didn't study English in college. I was warned away from it by a much-loved English professor because there was too much theory. So I learned Latin and Greek, but have been avoiding grad school in the Classics at least in part because I would have to get familiar with theory. So I'm not exactly disposed to embrace the stuff either.

Here's what I see. You cast yourself as the valiant crusader whom the Powers That Be aren't going to keep down. They may not want to hear it but you're going to stand up and fight to the last breath. So of what does your fighting consist? Ranting on Eratosphere! Imagine yourself as a general recruiting allies in the War Against Theory--Petraeus you aren't. Some people on this site will agree with you, and do not need to be converted; some people will disagree, and no increase in stridency will cause them to change their mind; & some may be on the fence, but are just as likely to be turned off by the knee-jerk repetitions of your discourse as by the lucid (or not, as the case may be) argumentation. & say you do convince somebody--a person here, a person there. What would you have them do? Find another website and rant, in imitation of you? Or maybe one of the people you happen to convince will be the President of Harvard, and he will enact sweeping reforms in education to eliminate theory once and for all! Yeah, maybe.

What you're doing Mark is not fighting but whingeing. This rebel-with-a-cause thing is a pose, and it's a bit preposterous. Australian education may well be as bad as you say. But surely there's a better way to address the problem than yelling on a website? Oh, but then you might have to talk with people, rather than at them. & maybe, just maybe, avoid comparing them to Hitler.

Chris

[Mark Allinson]

Quincy - I didn't see you there till just now.

You see, I think the fact that such "theory" turned you away from a career in a Literature department reason enough for rage.

Chris H., thank you for your observations. I can well understand you resigning yourself to the "sugary syrup of postmodern rubbish". It becomes too tiring to fight the goo everyday as well as teach, I understand.

But what it means for me, personally, is that I cannot teach literature anymore at university level, and I loved it - I tried it once a few years back and it nearly drove me out of my tree. So a lot of my frustration comes from my personal situation.

Honestly, Mark, you'll find an early grave for yourself if you let it get you down.

Actually, Chris, although it may not seem this way to others, I feel it works the other way: in fact, I am quite prepared to admit that this stuff actually inspires me, in various ways. I do have a paradoxical relationship to it, I admit. My enemies are very important to me. "Opposition is true friendship", says Blake.

Augustine was inspired to write against the Manichaean gnostics of his own time in the same way that D.H.Lawrence was inspired by the social idealists of his day: "All my work is a shot at their very innermost strength, these banded people of today," he writes in a letter.

I feel much the same.

The daemon who runs my life (and I use the term as a metaphor, rather than a literalism) FORCES me to write on these issues, in verse as much as in prose. I get carried away.

But I CAN see how boring it might be to many others - whom I am sure already steer clear of such threads and poems by now. And I don't blame them.

Chris C., I have discovered that there is theory and "theory" - I have studied the great theoreticians of literature from Plato to Aristotle to Longinus and into the twentieth century. M.H. Abrahms The Mirror and the Lamp is one of my fav books. So theory alone is no problem for me. But postmodernism is quite different - it has more in common with a sledge-hammer than with literary theory - it is sophism of the first water.