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The problem with this is that the discourse of critical analysis has traditionally been skewed to favour good old white men, of course...
I could do with having this unpacked, if it won't derail the thread. I've always been a bit unsure about this statement. Does it mean "skewed in favour of those who were in a position to get a good education, rehetorical skills, the power to publish and a feeling of entitlement to use the above; which for a long time has meant (mostly) white males"?
I ask this because ultimately, and I say this with respect and in the knowledge that I'm part of the problem, a lot of the projects in our current status quo designed to get voices other than that of the white male heard seem to fall into the Liberal Capitalism trap - that is, to expect (particularly secondary school) literature courses to add a story by or about an asylum seeker, say - without putting the onus on the government or on industry to change the way the real economic base works, and so not really doing anything at all about the fact that white males are still "in a better position to get a good education, rehetorical skills, the power to publish and a feeling of entitlement to use the above" - doing nothing about racism in the police, or about the privatisation of people's environments and public services, and the system of priviledge that creates.
Which is a bit like making it illegal for the citizen to smoke but still letting tobacco companies sell and advertise cigarettes 24/7 - yeah, fine, smoking is bad, we all know that, but it's the weaker of the two guilty parties (the citizen and not the tobacco company) who gets pushed about; likewise it's the weaker of the two parties (the Literature Department, broadly, and not the economic base it is a superstructure of) that gets pushed about and obliged.
So we've acheived the stage where we're putting a "Poems from other cultures" section in the GCSE Literature Anthology, which is great, but it's not a full solution to the underlying racism/inequality problem, and it can take up time that needs to be shared out fairly between study of social context and study of technique and form (which last two are incredibly important - to use language in the clearest and best way possible is a skill everyobdy needs if we are to avoid the problems Orwell points out in "Politics and the English Language" (my italics):
"Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
Now what I've just said needs some caveats. I'm not for one minute suggesting that "real literature" (which is impossible to define anyway) is being forgotten in favour of "political correctness", and I'm not saying that the experience of minorities in literature, how literature relates to social powers, and all the related lines of questioning, are not worth following closely. You wouldn't really be studying literature at all if you didn't look at the social conditions it sprang from. I'm just saying that this "fighting off the Dead White Men"/"listening to other voices" idea is a bit of a bait and switch, it gives a lot less than it offers.
All of which is an incredibly long-winded way of ackowledging that in our society, to get back to the thread abstract, we actually still don't have "Equal Respect" in any major way yet, which makes it seem like even more of a straw man except in the ways that have been outlined in other posts.
I would argue that a very honest and authentic poem which was poorly written might in fact very much be worth reading or as "good" as a more technically achieved poem. I just wouldn't point to it as a good example of technique.
Oh yeah, I mean on a lot of nursing/caring courses there's a lot of work done with reading the writing of patients and so on, and in a lot of community education projects (and alchoholics anonymous etc) people who otherwise wouldn't get a chance to say what they think, or who wouldn't be comfortable doing so, are encouraged to write down what they feel. So this kind of writing certainly has uses - just not, really, as literature, on a literature course. Which is basically what you said. |
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