this one weird trick that fucked up high school English classes for decades
so in 1930, a bunch of so-called, uh, "agrarianist" southerners published I'll Take My Stand, right? it's an essay collection plus a manifesto of sorts; the authors said they wanted to defend the agrarian way of life against the incursions of mass industrialization, urbanization, and so on.
the Southern Agrarian movement in its original form petered out-it turns out vaguely-racist reactionary conservatism flew just as well with the academy back then as it does now. (though, fun fact, this is why you have to read Faulkner in school.)
(exercise for the reader: if you are a southern agrarian-why, exactly, would you choose Faulkner, of all southern writers, to uphold as the Bastion of Good Literatures? all his families are hella fucked up! like, they're beautiful in an abstract, tragic sort of way, but southern gentlemen fucking {corpses, their siblings, etc} isn't going to exactly convince me that the south is a Good Fine Place with Good Respectable People. i'm just sayin', if you're going for the naked PR grab...
normally when i say "exercise for the reader" i'm being snarky and rhetorical. here i'm not. i legit have no idea why they picked Faulkner; i only have that Kirkus Review to go off of until the library hurries up and orders the book for me. wild speculation welcome!)
ANYWAY, Southern Agrarianism peters out, but its chaff feeds nicely into the hot trend of the 1940s: the New Criticism. New Criticism was interested in analyzing the work in and of itself, with no reference to historic context, authorial intent, or other extratextual information. focus on form and word choice were paramount.
naively, this seems like an attempt to grant literary studies better legitimacy-physics and engineering had exploded in importance in the previous decades, and many universities were left reeling with the resultant rapid change in the academic landscape. (the Ivy League schools, around this time, moved their standard curricula from Greek and Latin to calculus and physics, much to the chagrin of traditionalists.) focusing on literary objects as objects in and of themselves may make it seem more "scientific" of a thing to study. (see also: the weird fixation with "computational" and "data-driven" humanities today.)
but there's also something little-c conservative in this move. around this time, political/social thinkers were getting Real Dang Horrified by the atrocities of both the Nazis and of Communist Russia, and started backing away from techno-utopian & technocratic visions of the future-what if we just ended up like those folks? some looked to literature to save us: literature, they argued, should be focused on personal experience rather than grand ideologies, on personal freedom and responsibility rather than vaster systems, and by centering on the individual, it would turn us away from dangerous collectivist inclinations.
sounds a bit reactionary, right? exactly. New Criticism gave the Southern Agrarians a revival.
and, hey, while the "close reading" lauded by the New Criticism is a good and useful technique in its place, taken as a totality, as the only way to read literature, it takes on the neurotic, solipsistic quality that you see in-well, in high school classrooms. i remember being bored to tears by essays that said shit like "in Heart of Darkness black symbolizes evil and white symbolizes good and red symbolizes life" and God could you come up with anything more boring to say about a book!
but New Criticism's focus on form meant that symbolism was elevated to an unprecedented status. since good literature should be highly personal and self-contained, symbols should be fully-defined within, and fully arise within, the work itself-without relying on, say, Biblical allusion or cultural trends or what not. Fitzgerald's green light was absolutely a self-conscious move; he was just a bit ahead of the trend.
so, sure, when the schoolkid says "but did the author mean to put that symbol there, i think they were just telling a story and the house is just a house"-most of the time, they're just being a petulant shit. but on the other hand, they're reacting to a real issue-kids aren't dumb, and they can sense that, isn't this an awfully contrived way of reading a work? doesn't it seem weird that the symbols we're looking for are either beating you in the face like that goddamn green light or else phantasmagorical things we're forcing into form? is this really what English is all about?
and most English teachers, somewhat ignorant about the roots of their discipline, will say: sit down and do the homework, jackass. which is a wholly unsatisfying answer.
and note that New Criticism was at its apex in the 40s and 50s. which is exactly when a bunch of soldiers came back from the war to study via the GI Bill, and exactly when an unprecedented number of Americans were getting university educations in general. thus, an unprecedentedly large number of Americans absorbed this little trend in literary theory.
so the reason high school English classes suck? well, very distantly, you can blame some punkass 1930s southern reactionaries. thanks for nothing, Mr. Penn Warren.
* * *
by the way, this is mostly just me summarizing some bits from the first couple of chapters of Workshops of Empire, which i'm not finished with yet, but is a rollicking good time so far.
stuff i would like to do at some point to follow up on this:
* squint at some of the literature/English secondary schoolwork in the 1700s/1800s/early-1900s among the educated classes. i'm vaguely aware that stuff was more memorization and classics-heavy back then, but the kinds of essays they were expected to write back then vs now might be interesting.
* compare this against trends in european literary criticism. i am vaguely aware that New Criticism never caught on in Europe in quite the same way as it did in the U.S., and it's generally less taboo in European academia to e.g. do lots of postulating about authorial motivations and weird psychological theories and whatever, but that's about all i know, and i should know more. this will probably involve bugging a literature PhD and making a total hash of their subject matter, sorry in advance
* * *
colophon. honestly this is what bothers me when people say all the problems with Silicon Valley are just "STEM majors didn't take enough humanities" or something. first, it suggests that you need formal, college-level education to act morally, which is a yikes goddamn take. and, on a deeper level, it ignores the fact that the humanities have their own ideologies and they aren't always teaching the ideology you like or agree with or is the most moral or sensible! it's not like history as a discipline didn't exist prior to decolonization; it just was pretty bad at caring about colonized people. it takes more than a degree to fix that.
this has bugged me for a while, but then Zuckerberg wented and proved my point for me lollollolol
the Southern Agrarian movement in its original form petered out-it turns out vaguely-racist reactionary conservatism flew just as well with the academy back then as it does now. (though, fun fact, this is why you have to read Faulkner in school.)
(exercise for the reader: if you are a southern agrarian-why, exactly, would you choose Faulkner, of all southern writers, to uphold as the Bastion of Good Literatures? all his families are hella fucked up! like, they're beautiful in an abstract, tragic sort of way, but southern gentlemen fucking {corpses, their siblings, etc} isn't going to exactly convince me that the south is a Good Fine Place with Good Respectable People. i'm just sayin', if you're going for the naked PR grab...
normally when i say "exercise for the reader" i'm being snarky and rhetorical. here i'm not. i legit have no idea why they picked Faulkner; i only have that Kirkus Review to go off of until the library hurries up and orders the book for me. wild speculation welcome!)
ANYWAY, Southern Agrarianism peters out, but its chaff feeds nicely into the hot trend of the 1940s: the New Criticism. New Criticism was interested in analyzing the work in and of itself, with no reference to historic context, authorial intent, or other extratextual information. focus on form and word choice were paramount.
naively, this seems like an attempt to grant literary studies better legitimacy-physics and engineering had exploded in importance in the previous decades, and many universities were left reeling with the resultant rapid change in the academic landscape. (the Ivy League schools, around this time, moved their standard curricula from Greek and Latin to calculus and physics, much to the chagrin of traditionalists.) focusing on literary objects as objects in and of themselves may make it seem more "scientific" of a thing to study. (see also: the weird fixation with "computational" and "data-driven" humanities today.)
but there's also something little-c conservative in this move. around this time, political/social thinkers were getting Real Dang Horrified by the atrocities of both the Nazis and of Communist Russia, and started backing away from techno-utopian & technocratic visions of the future-what if we just ended up like those folks? some looked to literature to save us: literature, they argued, should be focused on personal experience rather than grand ideologies, on personal freedom and responsibility rather than vaster systems, and by centering on the individual, it would turn us away from dangerous collectivist inclinations.
sounds a bit reactionary, right? exactly. New Criticism gave the Southern Agrarians a revival.
and, hey, while the "close reading" lauded by the New Criticism is a good and useful technique in its place, taken as a totality, as the only way to read literature, it takes on the neurotic, solipsistic quality that you see in-well, in high school classrooms. i remember being bored to tears by essays that said shit like "in Heart of Darkness black symbolizes evil and white symbolizes good and red symbolizes life" and God could you come up with anything more boring to say about a book!
but New Criticism's focus on form meant that symbolism was elevated to an unprecedented status. since good literature should be highly personal and self-contained, symbols should be fully-defined within, and fully arise within, the work itself-without relying on, say, Biblical allusion or cultural trends or what not. Fitzgerald's green light was absolutely a self-conscious move; he was just a bit ahead of the trend.
so, sure, when the schoolkid says "but did the author mean to put that symbol there, i think they were just telling a story and the house is just a house"-most of the time, they're just being a petulant shit. but on the other hand, they're reacting to a real issue-kids aren't dumb, and they can sense that, isn't this an awfully contrived way of reading a work? doesn't it seem weird that the symbols we're looking for are either beating you in the face like that goddamn green light or else phantasmagorical things we're forcing into form? is this really what English is all about?
and most English teachers, somewhat ignorant about the roots of their discipline, will say: sit down and do the homework, jackass. which is a wholly unsatisfying answer.
and note that New Criticism was at its apex in the 40s and 50s. which is exactly when a bunch of soldiers came back from the war to study via the GI Bill, and exactly when an unprecedented number of Americans were getting university educations in general. thus, an unprecedentedly large number of Americans absorbed this little trend in literary theory.
so the reason high school English classes suck? well, very distantly, you can blame some punkass 1930s southern reactionaries. thanks for nothing, Mr. Penn Warren.
* * *
by the way, this is mostly just me summarizing some bits from the first couple of chapters of Workshops of Empire, which i'm not finished with yet, but is a rollicking good time so far.
stuff i would like to do at some point to follow up on this:
* squint at some of the literature/English secondary schoolwork in the 1700s/1800s/early-1900s among the educated classes. i'm vaguely aware that stuff was more memorization and classics-heavy back then, but the kinds of essays they were expected to write back then vs now might be interesting.
* compare this against trends in european literary criticism. i am vaguely aware that New Criticism never caught on in Europe in quite the same way as it did in the U.S., and it's generally less taboo in European academia to e.g. do lots of postulating about authorial motivations and weird psychological theories and whatever, but that's about all i know, and i should know more. this will probably involve bugging a literature PhD and making a total hash of their subject matter, sorry in advance
* * *
colophon. honestly this is what bothers me when people say all the problems with Silicon Valley are just "STEM majors didn't take enough humanities" or something. first, it suggests that you need formal, college-level education to act morally, which is a yikes goddamn take. and, on a deeper level, it ignores the fact that the humanities have their own ideologies and they aren't always teaching the ideology you like or agree with or is the most moral or sensible! it's not like history as a discipline didn't exist prior to decolonization; it just was pretty bad at caring about colonized people. it takes more than a degree to fix that.
this has bugged me for a while, but then Zuckerberg wented and proved my point for me lollollolol