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.
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.
Then why hamstring the young ladies by restricting the interpretations to those three?
"I find the question sublimely stupid," Professor Bloom . . . said yesterday.
And Ms. Allum as well, though much less sublimely stupid.
LOL!
Literature should be loved and appreciated for what it is, not plastered over w/ideologies currently in vogue.
Yeah, this one's full of great lines:
"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."
Hard to interpret Shakespeare from a Marxist viewpoint, since Marx was still 250 years in the future when Shakespeare was writing.
Bibliopath ping?
LOL, I could have so much fun completing this assignment.
Racism and the role of women in Shakespeare's society are central to the understanding of the play but it can't be interpreted through their lenses or the entire meaning disappears into political grievance. The play is about jealousy. The difficulty a lot of the Po-Mo's have with this is that to them racial or feminist politics cannot be considered contributory to this theme but definitive. And they aren't.
There is, as well, a difficulty with the fact that Shakespeare provided this window to the human soul several hundred years before the tenets of feminist and postmodern literary criticism pretended to discover the means of accessing it. And worse, he appears to have been a white male himself and hence incapable of appreciating it. My guess is that they'd just as soon forget Shakespeare altogether and they just might do that. I think he's too big to twist.
i remember hearing (although i don't know if it is true) that shakespeare wrote his portrayal of the evil Richard III in part to curry favor with the House of Tudor. if this claim is accurate, there were propogandistic as well as literary motives at work when shakespeare wrote.
Which view do you want, the period piece or the modern analysis?
Shakespeare's histories both dramatically instructed and entertained the English, and I've read that Queen Elizabeth encouraged him to write them. At any rate, they're superb.
"Literature should be loved and appreciated for what it is, not plastered over w/ideologies currently in vogue."
Acting as a hypocritical adovate of another side, would it be the case that at SCEGGS studying literatures for what they are belong to lower forms' English syllaba i.e. their equivalents of sophomore or junior year, while analysing with "race, class, Marxist angles" is an "advanced level topical study" just because this is what university level English courses are like? In otehr words, studying literarures for what they are is considered elementary stuff and once you get to senior English you study garbage like such? [Shrugs shoulders]
This is what my old high school did when I was a student there. In the accelerate classes junior students in such classes would have already finished senior materials at the end of their junior school, so what are they to learn in their senior year? At senior year for such classes the school put English into specialist studies with things like "Marxist analysis of literatures" along with other legitimate studies such as English language history and general analysis of Shakespeare (individual plays were studied at sophomore and junior years, so this would be an extension of such studies).
I dn't like the Marxist "analyses" either, but perhaps they were thinking this is "advanced materials".
I cut my own throat in class one day by stating that I felt ideological critiques of literary works were nothing more than intellectual masturbation. The audacity of youth, I guess. I held with the New Critical theory, and still do, that art itself is the thing, and that anything else applied to it was meaningless. I angered many feminists and lefties that day, when I stated that Emily Dickinson's work was not a product of her bourgious upbringing or her color or her sexual orientation.
I was the only actual writer in the class among a bunch of literature, philosophy, poly sci and feminist studies majors, and felt I had more of an insight into the mind/soul and experience of a writer. My own work was not the product of my political views etc. I argued this, and was called a jerk in so many words. Boy was I an arrogant scamp back then. Aw hell, I still am.
I once read that at places like Oxbridge in Britain, if you present your arguments to analyuse literatures for their own sake with sufficient evidence and brilliant organization of your arguments, even if the Tutor or Lecturer is a feminist/Marxist/racial critic he/she would still give you high marks and respect your work. Is that the case at your old university?
The leftists and their egos.
I couldn't do that at the uni I went to. The lecturer would mark a big "plagarism" mark even though he/she privately likes that LOL.
To be honest, I did know some who wrote conservative arguments in assignments that got really good marks in return, but they were the minority. Most who got high marks would just parrot what the general direction of the course was even though we all agreed the ideology was bunk behind the lecturers' backs. I was in engineering so perhaps this reflects our South Park-like attitudes towards kneejerk leftism?
I'm from anengineering backgrounds as well. I think the reason fictions fascinates people is that often they reveal something about a world which most readers would have never experienced in. 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.
Having said this, I personally think fictions probably reveal far more about the biases of the author himself/herself than the environment he/she was talking about. A British author writing a novel about a mid-19th century Russian peasant probably reveals far more about his own worldview towards Russia, and secondly 19th century world, then what was really the case with the real life 19th century Russia.
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