How Postmodernism Killed Great Literature
Last week, I finished reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling 2018 novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation. While I usually do not read books from the “Millennial Sad Girl Navigates Modern…
Posts tagged with
“literature”
Are English Departments Really Dying?
In an earlier millennium, yours truly undertook graduate studies in history and persisted a couple of years before getting cold feet. Some new PhDs could not find academic positions; some…
Why the Canon Wars Still Matter
Like an overlong proxy war, the “canon” skirmishes of the 1980s and ’90s no longer feature in the media, though the conflict persists. As in a battle over this or…
Reading: Feeding the Mind and Soul
Imagine a room full of fresh-faced humanities graduate students tasked with answering this timeless question: “Why read literature?” These eager youths race to the white board, markers in hand, scribbling…
Did You Know? Disrupt Texts Is the Latest Attack on the Western Canon
Penguin Classics is partnering with Disrupt Texts to replace Shakespeare and Homer with Ibram X. Kendi. What is Disrupt Texts? For the uninitiated, it is a new radical movement in classrooms which seeks…
They’ve Got to Get Rid of Western Civ—They Have To
For ten years I served on the GRE Literature Exam committee. The exam is one of the special subject matter exams separate from the regular GRE (with math, verbal, analytical…
Did You Know? The Disappearance of Civic Education at Elite Colleges
Modern universities are ignoring their civic duty to teach their students how to become engaged citizens. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report in 2018 that showed…
A Professor’s Tough Examination—Of Our Higher Education System
There are lots of people in our higher education system who claim that it is “the envy of the world” and just needs more money to graduate more young Americans…
Why Literary Scholarship Matters
A recent book by Thomas L. Martin and Duke Pesta, The Renaissance and the Postmodern: A Study in Comparative Critical Values represents something of a critical cat among the contemporary…
Teaching Freshman English: It’s a Battlefield
So you think you might like teaching college English. You love the language and its great works. Lots of people are like that, including me. Good, but beware. Teaching college…