Posted on 04/14/2006 2:47:18 PM PDT by CheyennePress
ONE of the world's leading authorities on Shakespeare's work, Harold Bloom, and the nation's pre-eminent poet, Les Murray, have declared literary study in Australia dead after learning that a prestigious Sydney school asked students to interpret Othello from Marxist, feminist and racial perspectives.
"I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom, an internationally renowned literary critic, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, said yesterday.
"It is another indication that literary study has died in Australia."
The question was an assessment task in March set for advanced English students in Year 11 at SCEGGS Darlinghurst, an independent Anglican girls' school in inner Sydney. Considered one of the nation's leading schools, it charges almost $20,000 a year in fees for senior students.
The assessment task asked students to write an essay explaining how Othello supported different readings.
"In your answer, refer closely to the prescribed text and explain how dramatic techniques might be used to communicate each reading. You must consider two of the following readings: Marxist, feminist, race," the question says.
Bloom is a renowned defender of the Romantic poets and a critic of Marxist and post-modern approaches to literary criticism, among others. His 1994 work, The Western Canon, attacked the rise of ideologically based criticism.
Murray, who has just published his latest volume of poetry, The Biplane Houses, described the question as horrifying and said Australian literary study was "worse than dead".
He said literature should be removed from school curriculums, which, in the words of US poet Billy Collins, teach students to strap poetry to a chair and beat meaning out of it with a hose.
"Students are being taught to translate (poetry and literature) into some kind of dreary, rebarbative, reductive prose for the purpose of getting high marks," Murray said.
"They're being taught to overcome it, not to appreciate it, not to value it, not to be changed or challenged by it but to get mastery over it."
But SCEGGS head Jenny Allum defended the question, arguing that it asked students to show their understanding of Othello's themes.
"It's phrased in a slightly different way ... but it's about the role of women, the role of black men in that society, the role of the worker, which I think are clear themes of Othello," she said.
Ms Allum, also chairwoman of the academic committee of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia in NSW, said it was a legitimate way of interpreting Shakespeare's themes using a modern-day understanding of feminism, race relations or Marxism. "There's always been different ways of looking at a play and drawing different meanings," she said.
SCEGGS head of English, Jennifer Levitus, said terms such as Marxism and feminism were modern labels used to help simplify the universal themes found in Shakespeare.
The president of the English Teachers Association of NSW, Mark Howie, said the assessment question was in keeping with the syllabus - that students develop a personal understanding of the text and can relate to the notion that it can be interpreted differently in different contexts.
I think you are probably right, but the quality of that experience is highly questionable. In order to determine if that information is valid, you still need to consult non-fiction.
It is not easy for someone growing up in a newly developed places like Hong Kong to vision what life was like for the upper class aristocrats in pre-WWII Britain was like. And reading Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time achieves precisely that.
Seriously, how do you know that? It might be accurate, and then it might not. Maybe it's a little of both, but you'll never know which is which. After all, it's all made up. Don't get me wrong, I like a good story as much as the next guy. What I object to is such questionable information going into public policy.
As I sais on the last post, it really depends on the individual authors. Anthony Powell's descriptions of the pre-war British upper classes are more credible than had the work been written by Red Ken because Powell was one of them himself.
And it also depends on whether authors had creeped his biases into the works. Angles are often unavoidable (not even in engineering) surrounding issues that can't be easily quantified. The only thing is to analyse and see if the judgment is justified or not. And this will involve background research, and perhaps a reading of some history or travelogues works of the corresponding period and/or place.
Perhaps, you should go ahead and post a response for the young ladies to consider. They may need so sane guidance on the top...
Just a suggestion, mate.
Mostly because you can't play around with the absolutes of math and physics, there's no room for interpretation--so a prof can't explain a math theorum or something within marxist or radical terms. However, in the humanities, weak minds abound. More and more, students just skate by on feelings and unfounded observations.
In the Creative Writing department of my school, there were only TWO deeply closeted conservatives (myself, and my best friend). Our fiction was one thing--we could actually float by some really subversive, libertarian ideas amid the standard, liberal drek, but we found it very difficult to stand out and make our own statements in the literature classes that were part of our 'foundation' courses.
Still, and I say this with a great amount of shame, there was such a hatred of anything conservative, that we often just kept our mouths shut in class, at the department cocktail parties, etc.. The surest way to kill a book deal or a possible meeting with an agent or editor is to say, "Ronald Reagan was the GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER!" or something.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with using these approaches to study literature. But I think they have erred in forcing the students to only consider those three approaches. It indicates an obvious agenda.
I bet that witch will never ask her students to interpret Shakespeare from a free market perspective.
The best humanities professors I had were foreigners, who weren't so eager to adore the latest French theory, like their native colleagues. On the other hand, my worst math professor was a Romanian who had only six weeks' experience in the English language.
Calculus.
It could be like how Michael Savage does the Michael Un-Savage routine on his radio show sometimes...
It amazes me that parents pay huge premiums at elite institutions to indoctrinate their own children. I can only conclude that they are not interested in their children's actual education, just in getting the budding airhead's ticket punched at a name brand college or school. Not a very loving attitude, in my opinion.
Quite true. Henry Tudor, hero to Richard's villainy, was Elizabeth's grandfather. To portray RIII as anything else would have been tantamount to accusing the Tudors of Regicide and usurping the throne.
Probably having to live across from Pasco was enough to do him in.
Ever heard of Lysenkoism? Crippled Soviet science for decades.
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