Dan Green at The Reading Experience lashes out at this report by Reason editor Nick Gillespie on a Modern Language Association convention panel called "English Studies and Political Literacy."
Gillespie seems to think that "political literacy" (translated here as reading The Nation and/or The Weekly Standard) is a necessary component of the study of literature. This, says Green, is "bullshit."
This is where the transformation of literary study into another mode of "political literacy" gets us. Left-wing "scholars" want to indoctrinate students with a "negative" view of American history, while their right-wing counterparts want to cultivate "positive feelings." A pox on both.
I tend to agree with Green, plus a few caveats: Politics, while not a necessary component of literary study, is sometimes a useful one. The same goes with history. The same goes with theory. And while it is true that a teacher's politics can be used to manipulate rather than illuminate, that isn't an argument for removing politics altogether from an English classroom. (To be fair, I'm not sure that Green is going that far.)
Based on my own academic experience on both sides of the lectern, teachers of literature need to focus less on their ideas and more on the process of reading. I can count on one hand the number of professors who taught me how to read. Students, though, need to understand that disagreeing with, or even being offended by, the ideas being presented is a necessary & critical function of learning.
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