Posted on 01/07/2009 2:09:27 PM PST by bs9021
Dreams From My President
by: Bethany Stotts, January 07, 2009
Speaking at a 2008 Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention panel, one scholar supplied her own solution to the question “Why teach literature anyway?”
A professor emerita at Stanford University, Marjorie Gabrielle Perloff dedicated the majority of her 20-minute speech to reading large excerpts from Dreams from my Father and commenting on Barack Obama’s highly electable character.
“Why teach literature anyway? I want to posit that the study of literature brings the student closer to actual life than does any other discipline offered in the curriculum,” said Professor Perloff. “It does not promulgate truth, for there is no external unitary truth outside of language, and studying great literature will never make anyone a better person.”
“To read Dreams is to know whatever else, this is not going to be somebody who was going to let himself be swiftboated like John Kerry,” said Perloff. She continued, “You remember when Obama said ‘I’m not going to be swiftboated,’ and the media kept going on and on ‘oh my goodness and oh that’—you learn a lot from reading.”
According to Perloff, the Clinton family, the media and conservatives all failed to understand Obama’s character because they didn’t read his autobiography.
“Without ever mentioning Obama’s political ambition, the memoir shows how and why its author, a candidate all but unknown and untested at the outset of the campaign, had it in him to become president,” she argued. Perloff continued,
“Had the CNN or ABC News analysts read it, they might not have made so many foolish predictions or silly generalizations. ‘Who is Barack Obama?,’ they collectively asked, beating their brows. But reading the candidate’s own self-representation was evidently not an option, for reading literature...occupies an increasingly insignificant position in our culture....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
Nightmares is more like it..
But of course academia isn’t politicized. Not in the slightest.
It would be one thing if academic groups like the MLA were private little groups like a community book discussion club. But in fact they are all directly or indirectly funded with taxpayer money. Which makes their blatant political advocacy in lieu of actually living up to their stated purpose all the more infuriating.
Missing the obligatory barf alert ...
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