re:
“Maybe abusive authors don’t belong on my bookshelf. But what about in my classroom?”
by Sandra Beasley
The Washington Post
May 14, 2018
Read this op-ed, if you can bear to — it’s painful to read — and tell me what you think.
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I posted a comment on the Washington Post’s comments page in which I stated:
Has anyone noticed that writing instructor Beasley herself can’t write?
“American University, where I often adjunct.” [Adjunct has been ordained as a verb?]
“Most of our craft learning is subsequently channeled through eight to 10 books.”
“I have always emphasized the writer as a fully dimensioned being. What do I do when those dimensional flaws are revealed?”
“That does not make this is a bucolic dawn of justice.”
“These behaviors are not exclusive along heterosexual lines, nor do only cis men commit them, nor have we given proper attention to compounding violence based on class and disability.”
“To put someone on a syllabus is to privilege them with our attention.”
“Are we inviting students into a tall tower from which the world is viewed at a distance? Or are we giving them a compass to navigate toward the horizon?”
“Or choose other authors. To not allow dynamics of our era to inflect how we teach is to gird the argument that literature is a self-contained and impractical pursuit. If your principal hesitation is that you’ll struggle to come up with replacement authors while remaining inclusive, consider that the diversity you’ve congratulated yourself on is merely tokenism in disguise.”
“When you are a writer who learns a beloved author has a dark side, you experience waves of disillusionment. When you teach that author’s work, you feel an additional stab of concern. …”
ENOUGH.
Writing such as this would have horrified my freshman comp instructor. It makes the opaque jargon of sociologists by comparison sound Churchillian.
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Regarding the content/message of this op-ed, I thoroughly disagree. Several comments (see below) posted on the Washington Post’s site by readers of Ms. Beasley’s op-ed say essentially the same things I would be inclined to. The comments which follow are theirs and not mine, but their views are in agreement with views of my own:
If you follow the highly flawed logic of this, then by all means throw out all of Lincoln’s speeches or maybe mention of Lincoln in schools–I am totally sure that, by today’s standards, Lincoln would be sexist, homophobic, transgender-phobic and racist too. Oh yes, and implode the Lincoln Memorial too. Suppose Kubrick said something sexist or racist 55 years ago—so “2001” and “A Clockwork Orange” should be jettisoned from film and cultural history? This all sounds a little, no a lot, Orwellian here.
Historical revisionism is not a way to teach. Should we stop talking about the Crusades because some people were abused? What about the Roman Empire? We have to look at people according to the mores of their times. Lots of people were anti-Semitic back then, and approved of black slavery, and treated women like servants.
So we should get rid of the classics then? Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, etc. make some very racially insensitive statements in their books. Who knows, maybe Mark Twain slapped his wife around a bit, it is rumored that Emily Bronte had an incestuous relationship with her brother. Every single writer from the 19th century would fail #me too scrutiny … heck, even the bible would fall short!
Am I the only one beginning to worry that when the right has finished burning all the books they find morally objectionable, and the left has finished burning all the books they find morally objectionable, we’ll be left with nothing at all?
Censorship has always been the one thing both sides have been able to agree on, although for completely different reasons.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2018
I am left with the question: Is James Levine’s conducting less good because he has been found out as an ogre or is it less good because we are no longer seduced by popularity?
Thanks for the comment, Jan. Interesting, and worth pondering, the way you put it.