And I May Schlafly Write It Now, And You May Schlafly Read
An exciting special offer showed up in my mailbox today, letting me know that if I subscribed to Human Events for a year, I would get Ann Coulter’s new book for free. This is definitely the most inviting deal I’ve seen since I learned that if I got a long, painful case of stomach cancer, I could also get a debilitating stroke at no extra charge.
It’s awfully tempting. Without Human Events, I wouldn’t be able to read brilliant essays by cutting-edge conservative intellectuals like, oh, say…Phyllis Schlafly.
“Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English”, reads the headline, and for once, it seems like Phyllis is making sense. Unfortunately, however, the follow-up text doesn’t focus on how our hyper-capitalist society, degraded by decades of absorbing G.O.P. values, no longer esteems the arts, so if you major in English you will end up working at Der Wienerschnitzel. Nor does it warn that, should you major in English, you run a significant risk of growing up to be Mary Grabar. No, instead, Phyllis focuses on the most dreadful prospect of all: majoring in English will turn you into a mass-murdering Communist.
The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities
“Prove,” a good English teacher would note in the margins of Phyllis’ paper, were she still in academia rather than working in a field where one is rewarded for intellectual laziness.
When I visit college campuses, students for years have been telling me that the English departments are the most radicalized of all departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women’s studies.
Which students? The ones in the English programs? Where? Give examples. Oh, wait, I forgot! It’s Phyllis Schlafly. For “give examples,” read “engage in baseless alarmism.”
That’s why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major.
To recap: The radicalization of college English departments are why it is to be expected that English majors become mass murderers. Phyllis is 83 years old, of course, and may not be familiar with Google or Wikipedia, so she would have no way of knowing that of all the mass murderers in the last 150 years, the number of them who were English majors, English teachers, or English professors stands at a whopping. . .well, one. Cho Seung-Hui is the sole English major in the whole bloody bunch. Avid churchgoers? Lots of them. Menial laborers? Oh, you bet. High school dropouts aplenty. And military veterans? Whoo-doggie! Oodles of those guys on the list. I don’t think Phyllis is fixing to write a column where she says it’s “no surprise” that a mass murderer was in the armed forces, though.
Phyllis’ inability to work the internetting machine may also explain her somewhat deceptive claim that “Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses”. This doesn’t mean that Shakespeare is no longer required — only that it’s been dropped as a requirement in some courses — nor does it mean Shakespeare isn’t taught in colleges, though she’s clearly happy if you walk away with both those assumptions. Funnier, though, is her towering terror of the presence of un-American values even in the classics:
When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism.
Derrida had already pretty well established the tenets of deconstructionism (and was already beginning to repudiate them) by 1967, and he was working off of a foundation put down by Heidegger in the 1930s. So, as fads go, this one’s pretty persistent.
That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,” or “Chaucer: Gender and Genre” at Hamilton College.
Are you people paying attention? Even as we speak, Communist academics are going around, willy-nilly, claiming that there are sexual elements in the works of William Shakespeare! Phyllis wants Shakespeare taught in our colleges, but it’s important that he’s taught the right way, without anything yucky included.
The facts about what universities are teaching English majors were exposed this year by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. English majors are offered a potpourri of worthless courses.
Well, if the American Council of Trustees and Alumni said it, it must be true! An unimpeachably honest lot, they, with a board consisting of such unbiased truth-seekers as Bill Bennett, Georgie Anne Geyer, Irving Kristol, Marty Peretz, and a senior VP of Texaco.
Some English department courses are really sociology or politics.
Which, of course, have nothing to do with literature.
Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness, i.e., view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society. The only good news is that students seldom read books any more and use Cliffs Notes for books they might be assigned.
It takes a brave, brave woman to write an article in which she claims that it’s a positive development that students don’t read books anymore. But Phyllis Schlafly has always been a brave, crazy brave woman.
She is a patriot. You, left lib nutjobs, are terrorists.
She is a moran, Gary (if you really are gary!) I doubt she’s ever read Shakespeare or Chaucer if she thinks they don’t have any sex!
Universities should only teach literature by Dead People?
And, what, a total of 200 people took these courses last year?
Way to go after the big fish, Phil.
Chaucer is nothing more than an endless series of ribald cuckold tales and fart jokes.
Seriously. Apparently, to the medieval mind, the fart joke was the pinnacle of humor – especially if you farted right in someone else’s face.
Heck, even the lauded Bard himself is full of stupid semen jokes.
Do people not know what they’re reading?
a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,”
I’m shocked, shocked to think that anyone would attempt to find sexuality in the works of the noble Bard. Especially since in his day all the women’s parts were played by young boys wearing dresses.
Dammit Jillian, next thing you’re gonna tell me is that “Mistress Overdone” from Measure for Measure is a double-en…
Oh.
Wait a minute.
Crap.
“to the medieval mind, the fart joke was the pinnacle of humor”
I’m not quite sure, but I think I’ve just been insulted.
Gary, unless you’re ready to apologize for baby-killer Timothy McVeigh, who was, after all, one of your own, maybe you should just shut up about terrorists.
Well it’s a good thing that we have such luminaries as the Rev. John Donne and his Elegy XIX.
Hey, and there’s nothing like tricking your suitor into literally kissing your ass.
That’s some classy shit, man.
Only a terrorist would root about in something as sacred as “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and find something as prurient as teh Sex.
Let’s see now. One English major is a mass murderer. How many right wing whack jobs can you name? Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and Theodore Kaczynski come immediately to mind. There also have been over 60 rightwing terrorist plots or actions in the last several years. That’s just in the US, if you go into Nazi Germany, Fascist Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and all the other Latin American fascist dictatorships the numbers go off the charts. So which is more dangerous to your mental health and the public order?
No sex in the classics? The woman has obviously never reader Chaucer, Shalespeare, or the Bible which are full of it.
Also, as a Marxist anthropologist, I am heartily offended by the slight she has given my noble calling of subverting the masses.
DrDick, the worst terrorists are still Liberals. They kill babies. They do not support the USA. THey blame USA first.
You need to cut the poor English professors some slack. As coursework becomes more and more specialized, the freshman English course is becoming the first, great, and in some cases only introduction that new students have to the farts. I mean arts.
Heck, even the lauded Bard himself is full of stupid semen jokes.
Speaking of being full of stupid semen, here’s teh Ruppert.
Oh, and Gary? Paul Hill, Eric Rudolph . . . I believe those bad boys were on your side, too.
I learned to despise Schlafly way back when I was a wee lass, in the 60s. My mother positively loathed them both. Mom used to say, “If Schlafly thinks women belong in the kitchen, why the hell doesn’t she shut up and go home?”
Oh, dear. The commenters at Phyllis’s site (except for me!) are all failed English majors ala Mary Grabar, yearning for the days when we appreciated good literature.
[…] view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society.
See: Congress=95% rich, white, male. Argument over.
The funny thing is that, if Schlafly were alive in the day of Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or even Milton she’d be railing against them, because they were the crazy-ass rock and rollers, wildly popular rabble rousers, and shockingly vulgar innovators of their time.
She’s so stupid she’s funny.
This bug, I already stomped it, some time back. How, I say, how does it rise again?
The reason my comment at 5:04 made no sense is that I am exhausted. I had originally included Anita Bryant with Schlafly, as they are always paired in my memories of my mother ranting about hypocritical professional loudmouths travelling around the country talking about how women should stay home and take care of Teh Family. I didn’t proof it well when I cut Anita out in the interest of clarity.
Me mum was an English major. She’d be disappointed in me.
I think I’ll sleep now.
SEK,
You can’t kill it. It’s like the never-ending wingnut claim that Darwin lead to Hitler. It’s Zombie Ignored Shakesphere and he’s eaten Phyllis Schlafly’s brains! Quick, run, you know he didn’t get a full meal!
Shouldn’t this be titled “Schlafly, Don’t bother me”?
Mr. Pierce:
You expose yourself to this contagion, so that we don’t have to. Kudos and thanks, to start.
g has it: the reactionary idolators of Shakespeare would have clucked and rejected him at the time.
Who, but an imbecile, takes his (or her) cultural guidance from Phyllis Schlafly?
I would pay…well, not good money, but certainly bad money, to meet people who say, “God damn it, Phyllis Schlafly speaks for me! She’s right!”
It’s anthropology, at this point. Which is what we say when we try to find something amusing or interesting about fucking idiots.
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides have been replaced by vulgar living authors like Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe, who completely violate teh Aristotelian Unities of Time, Place, and Action!
Phyllis circa 1607.
“The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities”
I’ve read about half a dozen Shakespeare plays in school before I even GOT to college. They’re good and all, but, seriously, it doesn’t take a college diploma to figure out that, “people spoke weird back then.”
“Radicalized”? In what? Violent Thoreau versus Hemingway street gang wars?
“That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,” or “Chaucer: Gender and Genre” at Hamilton College.”
SEX?! In SHAKESPEARE?!!?! Ohhhh, lordy me, I feel the vap’ahs coming on….
And since she’s putting Ol’ Bill up on a podium, shall we count the batshit fuckery that goes on in his plays? The murders? The immoral sex? The Pagan rituals? Macbeth was a serial killer. Hamlet? VT without the guns. I’m pretty sure there’s incest in at least one of those things.
And don’t even get started on the homo-eroticism.
Ohh, and if we want to talk about classics: The Iliad. The Odyssey. Oedipus Rex. The Old Testament. Any works by the Brothers Grimm.
Sit and spin, wingnut bitch.
I would pay…well, not good money, but certainly bad money, to meet people who say, “God damn it, Phyllis Schlafly speaks for me! She’s right!”
Shouldn’t cost more than the price of a bus ticket from Trinidad, Colo. to Woodward, Okla.
shall we count the batshit fuckery that goes on in his plays?
I hear some chick makes it with a donkey in one of his plays!
Not only would they have rejected Shakespeare, they did. The Puritans banned all theater during the interregnum. Judging by her stance on literacy, I’m not having any trouble guessing which side Ms Schlafly would have taken in that little culture war.
Whenever it starts to seem that the Reichtards and the Talibangelicals are unstoppable, I remind myself that Phyllis Schafly didn’t get the Supreme Court seat she expected. The current court is a disgrace, but Reagan’s handlers at least kept the 1980s version of Harriet Meirs from imposing her eighteenth-century standards on the rest of us. The fact that Schafly’s never really recovered from her disappointment is another little bright spot in the prevailing gloom, of course.
Of all the reasons she looks for to explain Cho being a nutjob, she picks English major?
You have to be pretty thick to fail Psych 101, but I guess she managed it.
Yes, my useless English degree is the reason I have a crappy job, not the terrible, terrible job market created by six and a half years of Republican rule. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go massacre some more people. Once more unto the breach, as some guy somewhere once said, I think.
Oh, Lawdy, Lawdy, I have nothing else to do……
Lalalalala….let’s take a look.
UCLA, the Major in English. 12 upper division 4 – 5 unit courses:
Chaucer, English 141A or 141 B
Shakespeare, English 142 A and B (two courses)
Milton, English 143
British literature before 1800 – English 150 -157
British literature 1800 – 1900 – English 160-164
Oh, but that’s only one school…..
Lalalalalala
California State University, Long Beach Option in Literature(ENGLBA01) 2005-2006 Catalog Year
UPPER DIVISION
Take both of the following courses:
4 ____ ENGL 363 Shakespeare I
4 ____ ENGL 380 Approaches to English Studies*
Select two courses from the 450 series (451-459) or one course from the 450
series and one course from the 460 series (462-468). One of these two courses must be in English Literature before 1900.
3 ____ ENGL 451 Medieval Literature of the British Isles
3 ____ ENGL 452 Literature of the Renaissance
3 ____ ENGL 453 Literature of the Late Renaissance
3 ____ ENGL 455 English Literature of the Enlightenment
3 ____ ENGL 456 English Literature of the Romantic Period
3 ____ ENGL 458 English Poetry and Prose of the Victorian Age
3 ____ ENGL 459 English Literature of the Twentieth Century
3 ____ ENGL 462 Chaucer
3 ____ ENGL 463 Shakespeare II*
3 ____ ENGL 466 Irish Literature in English
3 ____ ENGL 467A The English Novel
3 ____ ENGL 467B The English Novel
Lalalalalala
NYU:
British Literature I
V41.0210 Prerequisite or corequisite: V41.0200 or equivalent approved by the course instructor. 4 points.
Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
Lalalalalala
Ohio State University, English BA requirement:
Freshman year – English literature, Medieval – 1800
Sophmore year – British literature, 1800 – present
Junior year -Chaucer; Shakespeare; The Victorian Novel; US Literature 1830 – 1865.
Dare I go on? I suppose we might find some Godless heathenry at hotbeds of liberalism like Amherst…..
Whoops!
English 30 – Chaucer, an Introduction
English 34 – Renaissance Drama, The places of performance
English 95 – Shakespeare
Oh, how stupid of me. I didn’t check Smith, which is where all the lesbians make out instead of reading the classics!
English Language and Literature
Requirements to take effect with the class of 2005:
Twelve semester courses are required for the major, distributed as follows:
199;
Two courses before 1832; (Gen. Lit. 291, 292 can be taken)
Semester courses on two of three major figures: Chaucer (250), Shakespeare (256 or 257), and Milton (260);
A seminar (the course chosen to satisfy #4 may not count toward #2);
Six additional courses.
Oh, well….
Yes, my useless English degree is the reason I have a crappy job,
Heh. I went to school thinking I wanted to get a useless English degree, but I changed majors and got an even more useless degree – a BA in Theatre!
Although, actually, I’ve been making my living in what is roughly known as “the business” since I quit the cookie bakery job in 1980.
Looking at some of Shakespeare’s racier verses, he comes off more like the original incarnation of sort of comedy writer who would earn a Bill Bennett “Silver Sewer” award. That is, once you pull away the flowery language made charming by its being totally obsolete.
I can’t even imagine the ludicrous praise people are going to be saying in 2463 about why we chose to use words such as “teh” and “wtf”.
Damn, SHE’S still around? Blech. Why do the ickiest people seem to linger on forever? And can have a rule that before you rant about how depraved colleges are nowadays, you be required to have actually been to one within the last five decades?
Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities
US News & World Report America’s best universities
MmmKay. Check ’em out. I got #25 and #34 and # 57 above.
I thin we could probably forgive CalTech and MIT if their English programs weren’t stellar. So who wants to check the rest of 1 – 27?
That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,”
Because, surly, Shakespeare neverintended any of his works to be sexual in the least!
Someone needs to send her “Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Most Outrageous Sexual Puns”
That’s why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major.
I have it on good authority that a guy who’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of recent deaths is … an MBA.
Phyllis is just crazy wild about James Joyce. Now that’s some English writin’. And he’s dead. Bonus!
Universities should only teach literature by Dead People?
Universities should certainly teach literature by Dead People. It’s very romantic that they’re dead.
It’s very romantic that they’re dead.
But what about literature from before the Romantic Era?
Actually, I would defy anyone to find a university on the US News list that DOESN’T include a Shakespeare course in its requirements for the English BA.
“The bad news is that Shakespeare has disappeared from required courses in English departments at more than three-fourths of the top 25 U.S. universities”
THIS SENTENCE IS MEANINGLESS — what are the top 25? which are the three fourths? (that would have to be 19 to make mathematical sense.) how many of these have “required english courses”? how many students are involved? etc. phyllis’s problem appears to be innumeracy. perhaps she applies creation math to her accounting.
If only Phyllis would stick to ignoring writing as she has stuck to ignoring reality and her son inflicted with teh gay.
(Actually, I recall reading recently that they are close again, but Philly hasn’t wavered on her anti-homo stance. Surely her son just wishes she would ignore him now.)
Actually, I would defy anyone to find a university on the US News list that DOESN’T include a Shakespeare course in its requirements for the English BA.
When I was in school there was a first-year “getting the high-school boneheads up to speed” course called Rhetoric in which you learned to read, write reports and give presentations. Sounds crazy I know, and I was pissed to have to take it. Anyway, Big Bill Shakespeare was a requirement there too. I assume there are plenty of state schools with similar classes in which even the Phys Ed majors have to deal with the guy.
I hate to say it, but this:
“Unfortunately, however, the follow-up text doesn’t focus on how, since our hyper-capitalist society, degraded by decades of absorbing G.O.P. values, no longer esteems the arts, so if you major in English you will end up working at Der Wienerschnitzel.”
…is the worst-written sentence I’ve ever read at this site. (Aside from, you know, anything ever quoted from Marie Jon’, Kaye Grogan, Pastor Swank, etc.)
THIS SENTENCE IS MEANINGLESS — what are the top 25? which are the three fourths? (that would have to be 19 to make mathematical sense.) how many of these have “required english courses”?
Fluffy, if you’re feeling at loose ends, like me, you can review US News’ list
and report back. Don’t bother with Princeton, I checked them – although I didn’t post it – and yes, they do require shakespeare or milton or chaucer.
if you do, of course, you’ll find that – surprise, surprise – that Phyllis is talking out of her ass.
Fluffy, I think it’s possible that what she meant to say was:
At over 75% of the top 25 universities, the required courses in English don’t include Shakespeare in their book lists.
However, the ‘required courses in English’ referred to in that sentence—which I rewrote for her to make it comprehensible to readers of English, the language; not those pursuing the major at an Oxbridge university, if you’re scoring this run-on sentence at home–would be those required for all undergrads, not those required for English majors. Which would support roughly the opposite of her point, if she had one.
Shorter Phyllis: You thought I was confused BEFORE the dementia set in, din’ya?
g — I started to do the same thing you’re doing, and then I realized, wait a minute, I’m fucking fact-checking Phyllis Schlafly, which is as close to Hell as I ever want to experience. Anyway, good on you for doing the grunt work to prove what we all already know, which is that she is 100% full of bullshit.
tomemos — sorry. I am but a humble high school dropout, without the benefit of a Communist-granted college degree, and occasionally my parentheticals wander into incoherence. I cleaned it up a bit but I’m afraid it will never reach the heights of cogency of, say, a Jonah Goldberg.
Thanks, leonard.
I am but a humble high school dropout,
I think, at a certain point in one’s life, that being able to proclaim that as your history is a helluva lot dignified that being able to say “I’m the proud owner of a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from [Giant Midwest State] University with a 2.6 GPO.”
But – hey – I’ve had a damn good run anyway.
“The ones in the English programs?”
Ahem. I think you meant to type “pogroms.”
I thought the reason so many people got killed at VT is that they were all pussy liberal-arts kids who were too lazy to defend themselves. Now I’m supposed to believe that liberal arts actually makes people crazy and aggressive?
If I didn’t know better I would swear these conservative geniuses were just inventing shit out of thin air.
It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but the non-term “deconstructionism” a) is not a word, b) wouldn’t make any sense if it were a word, as Derrida noted, and c) is a huge red flag telling you that the person using it doesn’t know much at all about deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and the like, and thus is in no position to dismiss the application of such ideas in any particular situation (and yes, the person using this non-term is invariably being dismissive).
This is not to say that the pomo rabbit hole shouldn’t be avoided most of the time, but if you refuse to even look at the thing, you’re liable to drop into Wonderland without realizing it.
Well, I’m at a top 10 university, and yes, there are some radical English grad students, though it’s not exactly the most radical. And yes, they’ve scaled back the Shakespeare, because some old professors retired and they are not cranking out new Shakespearian scholars at a prodigious rate. The decline is due to generational turnover among professors, not murderousness.
Specifically, it was Schlafly’s Puritan soul-mates who permanently shut down the Globe, the rebuilt version of Shakespeare’s theater.
On the other hand, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Vlad the Impaler were all English majors.
Semester courses on two of three major figures: Chaucer (250), Shakespeare (256 or 257), and Milton (260)
Well technically this could fit on Schlafly’s list, as students can avoid Shakespeare by studying Chaucer (who, it is now said, wrote in genres and thematized gender!) and that regicide John Milton.
My guess is that Schlafly’s decision to renew this particular rant was prompted by the current twentieth-anniversary celebration of that Culture War classic, The Closing of the American Mind, by noted paragon of Traditional Family Values Allan Bloom.
(For all I know, Schlafly may even mention Bloom, but as Jules Crittenden might say, I haven’t read her article and don’t intend to waste my bandwidth on it.)
echoing Svlad above:
…view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society.
But, I thought that was a feature, not a bug?
I think that I shall never see,
A poem lovely as a pile of corpses.
Doesn’t exactly work as well as the original, does it.
But what about literature from before the Romantic Era?
You mean the rantings of hedonistic, promiscuous, opium-eating Fabian Socialists? Sound like ideal role models for X-ians raised in the social vacuum of home-schooling.
“Heavens!”
Hey, I’ve got a ferkin’ maths degree, and I think I know more about Shakespeare than she does. I suggest she goes wading through Titus Andronicus: there’s more than enough blood, sex, violence, and cannibalism to convince her that Bill is Teh Evil and should be banned. And that’s just one play out of dozens; it’s not as though Bill kept busy writing comedies of manners and dull political plays. The man was writing for an audience. They wanted to be entertained, and in return they’d pay what we call money.
I bet Bill would laugh his arse off if he could hear Shafly making him sound like Bill of Nazareth.
Frau Professor Doktor Grabar is of the same mind, oddly enough.
And I think it only fair to provide a more recent picture of madame.
Let’s see what Sonny Boy Schlafly’s Conservapedia is up to.
Why, it’s new & improved! They’ve added Red, White, & Blue graphics, & a Breaking News sidebar!! What’s on the sidebar? Oh, look:
It was the secular-progressive movement, AKA Murder, Inc., what did it.
Try this one, then.
… you will end up working at Der Wienerschnitzel.
“Do you want mustard on that?”
“NO!“
“Derrida had already pretty well established the tenets of deconstructionism (and was already beginning to repudiate them) by 1967, and he was working off of a foundation put down by Heidegger in the 1930s. So, as fads go, this one’s pretty persistent.”
Ahem…so it may be, but nonetheless, “deconstructionism” as well as its associated detritus, together represent the worst sustained case of mental diarrhea in recorded history. While our fascist friends surely dislike these phenomena for all the wrong reasons, it does not seem to me that they are wrong in stating that this mind-rotting “thought” exercises considerable (and disastrous) influence in numerous Humanities departments throughout the country, especially English departments. Certainly this has been my experience. While on the topic, let us not be too quick to make assertions about Heidegger laying the foundation for Derrida.
Just thinkin’ about those hotdogs makes me hungry!
I think reflexive revulsion to deconstruction is a little unfair. I don’t think most people get Pomo (and to be entirely fair, neither does about a third of Pomo academia); it has some pretty insightful things to say.
For people like Schlafly, though, this isn’t about the value of deconstruction as a hermeneutic device for sorting out the demands of competing social presumptions. It’s about the failure of the academy to provide a fascist education on demand.
Fascist education occurs when there’s a direct and inflexible hierarchy that can be immediately recognized and deferred to. One of the most firm markers of hierarchical authority in the reactionary world of Schlafly and her toadies is KJV-speak. Her idiot reverence for the Bard has more to do with the Baroque dialect than what it actually has to say – just like her idiot reverence for the KJV Bible.
For Schlafly and people like her, the important thing is that Shakespeare talks like Jesus — and obviously the evil communist atheist feminist professors aren’t going to revere Jesus like she does, so keep away from them at all costs.
It’s really useful to remember this when dealing with their bullshit. The substance is absolutely and comprehensively irrelevant; their religion is a nest of knee-jerk social fetishes reinforced by acrolect, and Shakespeare is simply an integral part of that acrolect. Shakespeare has jokes about half-whores and cunts, the Bible – which Schlafly and co. constantly demand that schoolchildren be educated almost exclusively with – involves Israel being a whore for horse cum and donkey dick. (To say nothing of the vile stuff Schlafly would approve of – like Israel being horribly punished for failing to complete a genocide demanded by God.)
It’s illiteracy dressed up for Church. Shakespeare was irreverent enough that it’s been seriously postulated he was a crypto-Jew or crypto-Catholic, and a quick read of the Bible is the best argument anyone has against Christianity, but these are the same sorts of people who fell for (and continue to fall for) the Book of Mormon, which for all of its and-it-came-to-passes and verilies and yeas and priestcraft sounds exactly like Protestant jackasses think Jesus does.
I swear, you could rewrite Das Kapital in baroque Shakespeare/KJV acrolect and they’d want it taught in the fifth grade.
Capital is money, capital is an Article. By virtu of it being of Worth, it hath acquired the occult abilitie to add value to itself. It bringeth forthe living Progenie, or, at the least, layeth golden Eggs.
Oh God, she’s got another book.
I’m always happy to see a new post from Leonard Pierce.
And if anyone needs it, a real good book on this subject is Patrick Brantlinger’s Who Killed Shakespeare? (the title’s a bait-and-switch, his answer is nobody). It serves as a nice primer on the histories and big ideas of all the -isms that conservative half-wits like Schlafly seem so afeared of, too.
Chaucer is nothing more than an endless series of ribald cuckold tales and fart jokes.
Um, no. Knight’s Tale, Monk’s Tale, Clerk’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, Troilus And Criseyde, The Former Age…but if you want to know more about the medievals and farts, you might want to read this book.
because they were the crazy-ass rock and rollers, wildly popular rabble rousers, and shockingly vulgar innovators of their time
Well, not exactly. Chaucer was a high-ranking bureaucrat for most of his working life. You want a rabble rouser in Middle English? Try William Langland, Piers Plowman B version.
While our fascist friends surely dislike these phenomena for all the wrong reasons, it does not seem to me that they are wrong in stating that this mind-rotting “thought” exercises considerable (and disastrous) influence in numerous Humanities departments throughout the country, especially English departments. Certainly this has been my experience
Boohoo. You’re reading the wrong stuff then, or you’re reading it wrong. Just reread Derrida’s Positions. It’s short, straightforward, and, so far as I’m concerned, unobjectionable.
…and I just finished teaching King Lear in a required ‘Core’ course, so go figure. The other two classes? Bible as Lit and Medieval English Lit. I doubt Schlafly would object to the content, but if she doesn’t object to the way I’m teaching this stuff, I’m not doing my job right…
Incontinentia Buttocks: christ on a crutch, that’s hilarious.
I’m with you, Alec, both on the utility of deconstruction (I think it, and its affiliated bugaboos postmodernist theory, relativism, post-structuralism and neo-pragmatism are the most important and useful things to come out of philosophy in a hundred years) and on the hollow, kneejerk formalism of conservative critics of the academy.
And John Pourtless, I don’t want to turn this into a whole referendum on theory or anything, but your post, absent any example, seems pretty reactionary to me. And I’m not sure why you have a problem with finding a direct line from Heidegger to Derrida — almost everyone writing about Derrida, including Derrida himself, has done so, and to my read, the arc from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Derrida couldn’t be more clear. Some of Derrida’s most important books and lectures dealt with Heidegger, and the man himself wrote that without Heidegger and Husserl, he’d never have written a single word. So what’s the problem?
I trace the roots of my feminism to a movie I watched as a child when home sick, some time between 1957 and 1962. It told of a princess under a spell who was married to a handsome knight. She was beautiful and young during the day, and an old hag at night. She asked her husband to choose when she would be beautiful, day or night. He said it was her life and her choice. Granting her that choice broke the spell, she became beautiful all the time, and they live happily ever after.
It was years later that I learned the story was based on “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterburry tales.
Get thee to a nunnery where you can practice your subltle whoring in a proper venue, you illiterate biddy.
md
Proud math and physics major
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t students who take courses in which they study “radical” readings of “classic” texts free to reject any idea that passes over the transom? Isn’t academia supposed to be a good place to try on some new concepts and decide for yourself if they fit?
Oh, I know Phyllis would say that professors cram their ideas down students’ throats and they have no choice but to submit. The teachers I know are thrilled if a student can construct a decent argument, whether they personally agree with it or not.
Let’s see. Susan Smith, stepdaughter of a Republican official and organizer for Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition who sexually molested her as a child, murders her own children, and Newt Gingrich uses it as an excuse to blame depraved liberals and urge people to vote Republican to stop such killings. Tom DeLay pins Colombine on liberals for focusing on gun control and keeping the Ten Commandments out of schools. And now, Phyllis blames depraved liberal English departments for Cho’s rampage. Gosh, it seems that every major crime in the news is the fault of Democrats.
Clearly, Human Events is where wingnut sheep may Schafly graze.
Does this mean they’d have to leave out the scene from Gulliver’s Travels where he puts out a fire in the royal palace in Lilliput by pissing all over the building?
And I thought Debbie Schlussel and Blogs-With-Ethanol told us that Cho killed all those people ’cause of Teh Muslimism.
The teachers I know are thrilled if a student can construct a decent argument, whether they personally agree with it or not.
Sorry dear, but when we say that they want students to learn to “think criticially”, what we actually mean is “think correctly”.
The fact is, we do not study canonical texts to explore our cultural assumptions or to avoid reinvinting the wheel; rather, we all read and quote the same words because it encourages conformity. It doesn’t really matter what Shakespeare and Chaucer actually said, and anyway, the Victorians already gave us the correct interpretation.
All of this, “any argument that can be supported is a good argument” sounds an awful lot like moral relativism and social anarchy, and that leads straight to sharia law.
I thought the reason so many people got killed at VT is that they were all pussy liberal-arts kids who were too lazy to defend themselves. Now I’m supposed to believe that liberal arts actually makes people crazy and aggressive?
It’s teh multiculturalisms! They (teh multiculturalisms) remove Shakespeare–Western-ways-trainer–from teh curriculum! They (teh multiculturalisms) train people in non-Western ways! The Western ways is violence when violence good (i.e., not being pussies). The non-Western ways is violence when violence bad (i.e., crazy aggressive). And teh multiculturalisms are all about being crazed violent or pacifist pussy, whichever will do the most to undermine the West. And don’t forget, the post-structuralism and the deconstruction and the whatnot are, um, teh multicultural, because, er…Damn you Scott Beauchamp and your French brethren!
And I just had to check the English reqs at the “University”* I teach at:
Yep, Shakespeare class needed for English B.A., [cue sinister music] but only for Literature concentration. I suppose this means I’ll have to start handing out burkhas in my class any day now.
Bonus oxymoron: English has a Required Elective.
*Not anywhere within sniffin’ distance of the “top 25.”
UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS LOCKED DOWN AFTER STUDENT ATHLETE REPORTEDLY IS SHOT DEAD OUTSIDE DORM More depravity on another of our college campuses! Secular-progressive movement claims another victim.
The Rolling Secular-Progressive Gang is inna house! Flashing signs, colors, tattoos.
I grew up in (then) a Communist country so I had to go through some Shakespeare. I am appalled that someone could see a significant amount of sex in his tragedies which are pretty much dominated by mayhem. If only one English major committed a massacre, it proves that something is wrong in the way they teach classics. Take Macbeth: kill them or they will kill you. Plus, staying in power requires stern measures that are too much for fragile female minds.
But with all this reconstruction mamby-pamby English departments cannot produce high quality psychopaths who would cheerfully volunteer to bash Islamofashists. Part of the problem is that there are too many girls there, and girls are just not too good as killers.
A little example from my (now capitalist) old country. A women was fired from a county office, in her perception, unjustly. So she decided to “go postal”. And what does she do? Buys a katana (free market! but, alas, with gun control), comes back to the office where she was employed (good, good!), scares the hell of everybody (yes, yes!) and hacks some furniture (bummer).
And teh multiculturalisms are all about being crazed violent or pacifist pussy, whichever will do the most to undermine the West
‘Tis true. I read The Joy Luck Club in high school instead of another Shakespeare play (in addition to Hamlet, Macbeth Julius Caesar, and Romeo & Juliet) and now just look at me!
I’m a murderous vegetarian and a brutal pacifist.
I grew up in (then) a Communist country so I had to go through some Shakespeare
Wait, back up. You guys studied LITERATURE? They told us that all that you learned in school was how to build the bombs and hate God and freedom!
Or was this one of those special schools where you learned how to blend in with Americans so that you could destroy us from within?
a Vanderbilt University course called “Shakespearean Sexuality,”
Oh shit, my wife took that course… I’m locking the guns up!
Speaking of schools and Shakespeare:
School official stops performance
“There was inappropriate language and the content was very suggestive. I don’t care what students hear on the streets, that’s not what we believe in presenting to our students,” Kissane said about the “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).
quote from linked story.
I’m flabbergasted. Although it doesn’t specifically say so, what the story implies is that the students were taken to a Performing Arts Center as a field trip, where the play was presented, and this school official stopped the show in mid-perforamnce?????
I am curious how that actually came to be. Did she dash backstage and demand the curtain come down? What performing arts center management would allow such a thing? Were her school’s students the only ones in attendance, or did she spoil the show for other patrons?
So she claims English departments are bad, that not enough folks are studying Shakespeare and post-modernism or anti-intentionalism or whatever has taken over, and to prove it cites a course on Shakespeare? Color me confuzzled.
And if one murderer is enough to taint something, has anti-feminist Schlafly ever heard of Marc Lepine?
Real shorter Schlafly:
If you don’t study Shakespeare, or only study his works in a non-traditional fashion, you’ll turn into a mass-murderer!!!
I’m with you, Alec, both on the utility of deconstruction
Maybe somebody could explain the utility of deconstruction to me because I don’t get it. The Wikipedia article article about it is relatively clean and clear as these things go, and if it has merit then things like this seeming like obvious bullshit presents a problem for me. After that there are truisms dressed up in funny language and the general inability of adherents to make plain what it is they are talking about, at least to me.
In its favour I guess is that deconstructionists appear to be funnier than their critics.
Someone should tell Schlafly that Seung-Hui Cho started his university career as a business major. I believe he was, in fact, a business major longer than he was an English major.
I’ll never see Terence and Phillip again, without thinking of this thread …
I can’t spealk for Shakespeare, but Mr. Chaucer can speak for himself. For some reason he seems preoccupied with a “Britney de Speres” right now.
And a revolt by a bunch of DFPs.
Wow, I finally understand why I’ve never killed anyone, had an abortion, crucified Jesus, or gotten gay-married – I read a ton of Billy Shakespeare in high school and college!
Does this mean they’d have to leave out the scene from Gulliver’s Travels where he puts out a fire in the royal palace in Lilliput by pissing all over the building?
Or when Gulliver describes how many carts it took to dispose of his turds? Or the one where the Brobdingnagian ladies strip him down and take turns putting him between their breasts? Ah, the classics. Eternal verities.
Hope you don’t mind, but I’ve cleaned up a few redundancies.
The fact is, that gay marriage is an abomination because you are rejecting His sacred plan for you to marry a heterosexual spouse and produce lots of Christian babies. By choosing to be gay, you would be effectively murdering your unborn babies, which is also synonymous with abortion. That just crucifies our Dear Lord all over again.
Glad to hear that Shakespeare saved you from the gay, however. I will recommend his works to a formal pupil of mine. He wrote a very suspicious essay on Oscar Wilde, but was fortunate enought to have good Christian parents who shipped him straight off to a rehab program, where he has been ever since. Can you imagine if he had gone to college with those literary tastes? Most of those English departments are simply rampant with sodomites.
Which one of you multicultural deconstructionists stole my slashes?
Wow, I finally understand why I’ve never killed anyone, had an abortion, crucified Jesus or, gotten gay-married – I read a ton of Billy Shakespeare in high school and college!
Which one of you multicultural deconstructionists stole my slashes?
OK, I admit it. I always-already did.
Thanks. A thorough and entertaining takedown.
“Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English”, reads the headline, and for once, it seems like Phyllis is making sense.
OK. This is like the third post in a week dissing English majors. Enough already. Some of us are actually a) charming, b) literate, c) conscientious, d) productive members of society, and e) loads of fun at parties. In addition, a few of us can reliably spell all of those things.
Sheesh.
And the Book of Mormon is full of and-it-came-to-passes and verilies and yeas precisely because the King James Version is the only example of a religious text that Joseph Smith would have known.
OK, I admit it. I always-already did.
Heh.
[…] October 3, 2007 Posted by Evil Bender in education, language and lit, wingnuts. trackback Sadly, No! and Shakesville are already all over Phyllis Schlafly’s latest screed, “Advice to […]
[…] Sadly, No! via […]
and a quick read of the Bible is the best argument anyone has against Christianity
To be fair, Alec, it’s mainly the old testament that’s scary. The New And Improved Testament, built out of a selection of writings more-or-less about Jeebus, all say a lot about how it would be good if everyone was nicer. The OT was written before there was a Christianity, but for some reason the Council Of Niceaea stapled it on the front when they declared the New And Authorised Bible Which Will Make Your Whites Whiter.
Coincidentally, it’s from the OT that most wingnuts take their examples, because that’s chock-full of smiting and genocide and stuff.
I dunno, Qetesh………….the NT scares me in places, too. Could Paul possibly have been any more anti-woman if he tried? I mean, I’m not saying that he was one of those Byronic, woman-hating type gay men who only ever associate with men and think women are inferior and beyond icky – I’m just saying he does an incredibly good imitation of one.
Okay, you’re right: Paul was a bit scary. And the fact that it was all written well after the fact inclines me to take it less seriously. But Jeebus spent a lot of time saying how we should all be more tolerant and understanding and kind to each other, and he did have a whore (or seamstress, if you want to be polite) as one of his disciples (although the blokes tended to write her out of things).
Then again, if you take the view that Barbara Thiering does, then it’s all code for politics among the various sects anyway. Not saying I believe or disbelieve: her stuff is fascinating, if rather lengthy and convoluted.
And the Revelations of Saint John the Invincibly Loony of Patmos are worth the price of a ticket: that man must have had access to some very high quality pharmaceuticals.
[…] Sadly, No! brings us the bulletin: “Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English”, reads the headline, and for once, it seems like Phyllis is making sense. Unfortunately, however, the follow-up text doesn’t focus on how our hyper-capitalist society, degraded by decades of absorbing G.O.P. values, no longer esteems the arts, so if you major in English you will end up working at Der Wienerschnitzel. Nor does it warn that, should you major in English, you run a significant risk of growing up to be Mary Grabar. No, instead, Phyllis focuses on the most dreadful prospect of all: majoring in English will turn you into a mass-murdering Communist. […]
“of all the mass murderers in the last 150 years, the number of them who were English majors, English teachers, or English professors stands at a whopping…well, one.”
Haha! That’s fantastic!
Great piece, and I love your dry sarcasm. I wrote a similar one myself, but I enjoyed reading yours too.
Interesting that you opened the blog by mentioning the HE book premium. This is how almost all of the rightwing book authors get their numbers into respectable double digits: by allowing rightwing publications like HE, the National Review, Commentary, etc offer them for free as premiums with magazine subs. Hence the “dagger” next to Coulter’s name on the NYT bestseller list—-a practice attacked bitterly by wingnuts since it exposes the large numbers of “books sold” as being just that: bulk sales to magazine publishers who use them as giveaways.