Free Republic

The turn language is taking in politics calls to mind that controlling language to control thought was a prime goal of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’Back in the 1990s, an adjunct English professor at Bakersfield College used to start first-day freshman composition by writing the F-word on the whiteboard in big capital letters. She’d then turn around and explain the word’s etymology, point out that its moral connotation was entirely a construct, and tell the students in no uncertain terms that any scandal they felt was due to their parochial ignorance. She would disabuse them of this...

Having no substance of its own, the left is inherently parasitic; like a cancer cell or virus, it survives by posing as a healthy member of the same host it then attacks and ultimately destroys. This pattern of "mimic-attack-conquer" has given us liberty-hating "liberals," leftist mainline churches that publicly embrace what their own teachings explicitly prohibit, and educators whose goal is to ensure that all children get left behind. This last item is exemplified by the distressing transformation of the backbone of the Western Canon, the liberal arts, into something decidedly "illiberal." Under the direction of leftist educators, the very...

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...