The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature

 by Ben-Peter Terpstra  

| View comments |  Print This Post

There is a good feeling that comes with the commitment to treat Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, Dickens, T.S. Elliot, and Flannery O’Conner as real literary heroes, in spite of their politically incorrect leanings.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature
by Elizabeth Kantor, Ph.D.
published Regnery Publishing, Inc. (November 13, 2006)
Ppbk., 288 pgs.
ISBN: 1596980117

The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature is an intriguing, refreshing, accessible, and excitingly offensive work. 

Elizabeth Kantor, the author, states: “When Shakespeare isn’t being arraigned by feminist professors for propping up ‘the patriarchy,’ he’s being searched for evidence of complicity in the slave trade and rape of the Americas.”¹

I feel her pain, and I’m not even on Oprah. 

There is a good feeling, however, that comes with the commitment to treat Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Jane Austen, Dickens, T.S. Elliot, and Flannery O’Conner as real literary heroes, in spite of their politically incorrect leanings.

Why, for logic’s sake, should a great writer, say, Shakespeare, be sniffed at because his famous character, say, Lady Macbeth, waits for a letter at home? This is absurd.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Phyllis Rackin, for example, seriously claims that “the domestication of women appears to be a major project of this play,” because a female character didn’t accompany her husband on the battlefield.²

And, I thought feminists loved pacifists.

Bottom line: Macbeth, the play, we’re told, is sexist. Yes, and Michael Moore’s last documentary was based on cold-hard facts.

To be sure, Shakespeare is blessed with many senseless critics. Unfortunately, they are teaching our kids, teenagers, and young adults. Be afraid – be very afraid.

A classic example of this self-righteous politically correct movement is America’s standard “English” course: a student at a college, say, the University of Pennsylvania, can now study Comparative Cross-Dressing. Forget Chaucer. Enter: Men in high heels.

In all likelihood, campaigning professors will continue to rob their future students of real lessons. Still, their ignorance doesn’t prevent free adults from questioning the elites, or enjoying real geniuses. There is room for hope.

In America, as in Australia, people are echoing Kantor’s deep-seated concerns (as seen below) and have every right to talk about the fact that:

– English departments are advertising more positions for experts in “multicultural” literature than in Shakespeare.

– Even when literature is the ostensible subject of a college English course, students often learn feminism, Marxism or Freud instead.

– PC English professors’ ugly jargon is a barrier to (not a tool for) understanding the literature.³

To be fair, there are some professors who are teaching students about real authors from Jane Austen to Oscar Wilde, but this isn’t to imply that their students are actually learning much of anything.

How many college-age students know, for instance, that Jane Austen wasn’t a radical feminist? She was, in fact, a Christian. Or, that Oscar Wilde, a former homosexual, converted to Christianity on his death bed? Yes, he died a Catholic. 

At times, some academics appear more interested in discussing Wilde’s sexual preferences, as opposed to his witty works. Also, for some mysterious reason, workplace feminists ignore Austen’s funny jibes at nagging housewives, and their appeasing husbands, but wax lyrical about her so-called stand against “patriarchal” values.

This excellent guide speaks for reason. “Jane Austen’s novels,” Kantor writes, for instance, “are full of women who are too free with their tongues. Some are just silly, or, at worst, embarrassingly vulgar – like Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice . . . Other female characters of selfish whining make their families miserable and themselves ridiculous.”⁴

Evidently, Kantor doesn’t back away from challenging post-modernist assertions. She, like Shakespeare, understands the real world. She lives in the real world.

Elsewhere, The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature unveils folly (“Our universities are the only places in the world, outside North Korean and Cuban prison states . . . where Marxism is still taken seriously” — page 192), introduces us to Chaucer’s world (“Chivalry is one of the greatest inventions of Western culture, and it’s contributed enormously to women’s happiness” – page 47), and, hope (“The good news is, you can teach yourself the great literature in English” – page 215).

Most important, great literature can open many doors. I, for one, have been fortunate enough to visit parts of Chaucer’s England; however, many poor rural kids (say, in the rural South) may never be offered the same opportunities.

Kantor is right; teachers shouldn’t hide great authors from pupils. Nor should they deny poor students, of all people, the right to travel to real medieval towns in their classrooms, or imaginary worlds, once freely available to my grandmother’s generation.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

1. P. 26.

2. P. 67

3. P. 189.

4. P. 140

Book Reviews, Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

Read more articles by Ben-Peter Terpstra