All Posts Tagged With: "literature"
The Shakespearean Jack Layton
Like that of Henry V, Prince Jack’s passing leaves a big hole
Photo by Phil Kalina on Flickr
As a Shakespeare prof, I am always interested to see how the popular media represent my particular expertise, so this piece by Don Macpherson over at the National Post caught my eye. Macpherson suggests provocatively that the race to replace Jack Layton as NDP leader is a story worthy of Shakespeare — yet somehow the Bard of the St. Lawrence manages to get through the entire piece without mentioning a single Shakespearean play or character.
But the idea intrigued me, and since I have a passing knowledge of the Shakespeare canon, I wondered if there really was an instructive Shakespearean parallel here.
And I think there is. It’s the end of Henry V.
Without boring you with too many details (you have to shell out over a thousand bucks in tuition fees for that), let me tell you that Shakespeare’s Henry V was a heck of a guy. At first people thought he was a crazy radical, hanging with the wrong crowd and just not cut out to be king. But one day when the moment was right, he caught on, got the country behind him, and, against overwhelming odds, conquered the land of the French. Any of this sound familiar?
But Shakespeare’s Henry V ends on a sombre note. With barely time to savour his victory, Henry dies, and everyone knows that there is no one like him waiting in the wings. Sounding very familiar?
Following the death of Henry V, a terrible, divisive civil war breaks out (chronicled in three more plays) and it’s another generation before the path back to peace and prosperity can be found.
I won’t labour the point by trying to match up every NDP hopeful with a Shakespearean counterpart (is Thomas Mulcair destined to be the tyrannical Richard III?), but the lesson that Shakespeare draws from Henry V should not be ignored. Shakespeare’s point is that a dynamic, charismatic leader is a wonderful thing. He can do what others didn’t even dream of. But such leaders, by virtue of their own greatness, unintentionally set a dangerous trap for the future. Shakespeare saw that no man can cheat death, and the bigger the man, the bigger the void he leaves behind.
The New Democrats find themselves staring into just such a void and on the verge of their own civil war. The rest of us will have to be content to chronicle it as best we can. Oh, for a muse of fire…
Todd Pettigrew (PhD) is an Associate Professor of English at Cape Breton University.
What the Huck?
A new edition of Huckleberry Finn will remove the offensive words.
New South Books has just announced that its forthcoming edition of Mark Twain’s landmark novel Huckleberry Finn will be published without the n-word, that notoriously negative name for those Americans of African descent. In this new edition the n-word will be replaced with “slave.”
As most people know, the novel is a first-person narration from the view of a boy who, after becoming friends with Jim, an escaping slave, begins to question the deep-seated racism that he has always taken for granted. The son of an abusive alcoholic ignoramus, Huck can identify with the degradation of slavery and ultimately turns his back on the people he had thought were his own to protect the man he used to dismiss as just another, ahem, n-word.
Not surprisingly, the reaction has been clamorous, and the objections are both predictable and right. Huckleberry Finn is a classic of literature and should not be rewritten, even if the rewrites are small and the intent honest. It offends the memory of the author, and sets a terrible precedent. Still worse, it prevents its school-aged readers from learning an important and timely lesson: if we want to fight against racism, we can’t be afraid to confront the realities of racism.
At its best, the substitution mutes the intensity of the novel since the n-word is meant to suggest a lesser being than a white man. Thus Huck criticizes two con-men he encounters: “if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.” Substituting “slave” here empties the first sentence of meaning because in our modern ears “slave” does not suggest a bad person, only a mistreated and oppressed one. Of course, Huck is a racist for saying what he says, but that is the point. Huck helps Jim despite his upbringing, even when he doesn’t understand it himself. That Twain doesn’t allow Huck to simply and immediately adopt modern progressive notions of race is a testament to his skill as a writer, for it would have made the novel silly and over-sentimental.
Worse, though, is that in some places, the changes will make a hash of important passages, because, as everyone knows, the n-word is not a synonym for slave. To be sure, in many instances, an innocent reader of the novel might read a reference to Jim as a “slave” and never notice the difference. But consider the following passage from the novel in which Huck’s deplorable father rails against the government:
Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio—a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane—the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me—I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger—why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?—that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now—that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger, and—”
Now, go through that passage and substitute “slave” for the offending word and see what happens. It becomes nonsense. “Free slave” is a contradiction, and how could a slave be a well-to-do professor? And what will editor Alan Gribben substitute for “mulatter”? Half-slave? But more than that, the whole point of the passage is to point out the possibilities of racial progress, that there are places where, given the opportunity, African Americans have prospered, and that it is the narrow-mindedness and self-righteousness of men like Huck’s father (men to whom words like the n-word come easily) that holds them back, not any inherent limitation related to their race. If it isn’t what it is, it’s something else.
To be sure, reading Huckleberry Finn today can be supremely discomforting, and many young people might have difficulty trying to contextualize and interpret the racist language in the book. But faced with that challenge, surely saving the actual book for a later grade is a better solution than giving them a more comfortable version now.
But if that’s the case, let’s not let “later” come to mean “never.”
No love for Mordecai Richler
Hollywood may be reading the Canadian icon but university students are not
Even nine years after his death, Mordecai Richler can’t seem to get a break.
Just one day after the local government in Richler’s old neighbourhood announced that they would not be naming anything after him, the Globe and Mail is reporting that his works aren’t being taught at Canadian universities.
Well, it’s not quite as black and white as the Globe makes it out to be, but it’s still concerning.
At Montreal’s Concordia University, a school which claims to take particular pride in the city that surrounds it, only one course has any Richler as required reading and that’s a religion course on Jewish literature, not an English class.
According to the Globe, students at Montreal’s other English-language university, McGill, are only reading one Richler book, The Street, in a course on urban writing.
Ironically, despite the almost complete lack of Richler works being taught at McGill, the university’s writer-in-residence program is named for Richler.
Several other universities and colleges are teaching his work, but they’re few and far between and when his work is taught it’s generally in classes where his exclusion would be almost impossible, like “The Worlding of Canadian Fiction Since 1967,” a class at the University of New Brunswick.
It’s hard to say what’s causing this lack of Richler in the classroom, although it does seem like his works were taught more often in the past, it may just be that he’s back in the public eye with a film based on his novel Barney’s Version arriving in theaters soon and the TV documentary on his life that premiered last week.
But while Richler is being taught in some Canadian and Jewish literature classes, Canadian universities don’t seem to be teaching his works anywhere else.
It’s not just Richler though. It’s been a while since I took a literature class (and I’ve never taken a Canadian literature class) but since high school — and quite probably earlier than that — the only Canadian writer I’ve read in an academic setting has been Margaret Atwood. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Globe reports that studies of Atwood’s work have received more research grants than those of any other Canadian author. There’s nothing wrong with this, Atwood is a great writer, but there should be room on the shelf for a little bit of Richler beside her.
Canada has had a vibrant literary community for decades, too bad you couldn’t tell from looking at academia.
Against specialization
Remember when choice and flexibility were good things?
With Nova Scotia’s O’Neill report in the books, and a similar report just released in Ontario, specialization is the new watchword for Canadian universities. Thus Bonnie Patterson, President of the Council of Ontario Universities: “the funding realities mean we’re going to have to build on the differences that already exist.”
Setting aside the question that the so-called funding realities are really funding decisions, the emphasis on specialization is troubling from the point of view of quality higher education.
Of course, some specialization is inevitable, or at least practical. Not every university can have a medical school, and a law school, and a major in South American Urban Geography. Fine. But I worry when I hear people like Harvey Weingarten, President of the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario say things like this: “If Ryerson were to say its priority is undergraduate programs that graduate the next wave of entrepreneurs, for example, it might be that the U of T wouldn’t have a program exactly like that.”
Setting aside the fact that if Ontario really wanted to save money it could eliminate a few of these education councils, Weingarten’s comments hint that specialization is all about output. If Ontario needs graduates in various areas, the implication runs, it doesn’t need every school to fulfill that need. Put another way, if a student wants program x, she only needs one school to offer it and she can go there.
But the underlying assumption is that a university education is designed only, or mainly, as an economic investment. Universities are understood like factories, turning out useful products and thus should be specialized so as to be more efficient.
Setting aside the fact that it is inherently repugnant to think of people as products (the report calls for graduates who, like iPods should be “highly valued and competitive” [p.15]), the specialization perspective assumes that students know what they want to study when they go to university and will stick to that field of study all the way through. Anyone who teaches at a university knows that these assumptions are actually false, and idealists like me see them as deeply troubling.
For one thing, circumstances mean that students are not infinitely mobile. A student in Sudbury may not feasibly be able to move to Windsor to study. Consequently, specialization means limiting choices. The report claims that “differentiation” will mean more variety of programs overall (p. 6) but later reveals that claim to be false by insisting that universities must work with their existing programs (p.10). In other words, the Kingston girl who might have been a world-class artist may end up toiling as an accountant because Fine Arts was only available at Western, not Queen’s. Such things may happen even now, but they become more likely the more specialized institutions become.
Dance, monkey, dance!
Balancing the circus of life with the meaning of life is very hard.
First, some Robertson Davies to justify my copious use of quotations: “God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!”
Youth is indeed a time of turmoil, in many senses, which is why I think it’s justified that I invoke these little pieces of wisdom to help me though these uncertain times. Another quote then, this time from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, to describe this week’s turmoil: “When you have to attend to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality fades.”
A little context: Without much protest, I think most people would agree that having a sense of meaning and connection to something beyond yourself is really important in life. Whether this comes through good friends, a hobby, religion, family, or anything else that gives people a sense of purpose, this is what I understand Conrad’s “reality” to mean.
So what exactly is getting in the way of this reality? Well, this week and next are midterms. That involves a lot of work, which, given the choice, I probably would rather not do. It’s interesting stuff for the most part, and I enjoy the initial learning of it, the gaining of new knowledge and perspective, but studying it for 7 hours a day is a bit much. Jumping through these hoops in order to do well in school and come out with a degree is what I understand Conrad’s “mere incidents of the surface” to mean.
This kind of thinking really makes me want to drop out of school and move to Thailand to teach scuba diving, writing off the mere incidents of the surface in favor a soul-searching adventure in paradise, but I like to think I know better. Conventional wisdom would have me believe that by working hard to jump through the hoops now, I’ll be able to enjoy a much better lifestyle in the future than I would if I dropped out now and moved to the tropics. This argument doesn’t hold any water as long as my picture of the ideal life involves living on the beach, but I expect this yearning to subside, only to resurface with the next round of exams. I suppose this balancing act is something I’ll have to get used to, as I don’t expect life after graduation to be any less full of hoops to jump through.
Maybe conventional wisdom isn’t so wise after all…
Turning classic novels into “Twitterature”
College roommates rewrite Dante, Shakespeare and others ― 140 characters at a time
Did you ever feel that Hamlet was too wordy? Was Moby Dick too long?
The Chicago Tribune is reporting that someone has “found a solution” to your problems. That someone is a pair of first-year University of Chicago students who have signed a book deal with Penguin Books to rewrite 75 classic novels and plays as “Twitterature.”
Nineteen-year-old roommates Alex Aciman and Emmett Rensin will rewrite classics by Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dante and other literary greats, and plan to do so in 20 or fewer 140-character tweets.
“Imagine if Achilles had a Twitter account and an iPhone, and he was telling his story in real time,” says Aciman, a comparative literature major from New York. “That’s what this book is going to be like.”
The students claim to have already read all the books they plan on tweeting. That is, except for the popular teen vampire novel Twilight. “A modern classic,” deadpans Rensin, a philosophy major from California.
University of Chicago literature professor W.J.T. Mitchell is backing the project. “This is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect University of Chicago students to come up with.”
What do you think? Are you horrified? Think it’s a great idea? Let us know.
Alberta may make evolution classes optional
Opposition says province is headed towards its own Scopes Monkey Trial
Educators and human rights experts in Alberta are worried that a proposed change to human rights legislation could make it tough to teach a number of controversial subjects.
The change says parents should be notified when classes “include subject matter that deals explicitly with religion, sexuality or sexual orientation,” and should have the right to ask that their child sit out that part of the class.
The term “religion” is extremely broad and could edge its way into almost anything that comes up in the classroom, said Dan Shapiro, research associate with the Calgary-based Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership.
“It’ll be like a kind of Monty Python skit. You have to say: ‘Well, today we have to think about the Hindu student’s going to object to this and tomorrow the Jewish student to this and then the Catholic student to this,’ ” said Shapiro.
“It’ll be madly off in all directions. (Teachers) are strapped enough for resources and time to do their job properly and help educate children.”
Frank Bruseker, head of the Alberta Teachers Association, said he’s also concerned about what the new rules could mean. He’s worried that some parents might think mentioning different classes of worms would constitute a reference to evolution. He said a discussion of ancient geologic formations can’t be had without mentioning the world is billions of years old, much more than a literal reading of the Bible would suggest.
Meanwhile, history and literature from around the world are chockablock full of references to religious upheaval.
“Religion is kind of a fuzzy thing, in a sense, in that what some people see as religion others might not,” Bruseker said.
Opposition parties have hammered the government on the issue, saying the province is headed back to the time of the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a high school biology teacher in Tennessee was tried for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Premier Ed Stelmach conceded to reporters last week that the provision could be used to pull students out of classes dealing with evolution if parents preferred their kids be taught what’s in the Bible instead.
“The parents would have the opportunity to make that choice,” he told a news conference.
But Lindsay Blackett, the Tory minister responsible for human rights, said in an interview that the intention of the law is to only allow parents to pull children out when the curriculum specifically covers religions, something that only happens for a few hours each school year.
“It’s talking about religion (such as) Hindu, or Muslim, or that type of religion, not … the curriculum with respect to, for instance, evolution,” he said. “That’s science and we’re not arguing science.”
The rule wouldn’t apply to any topics that come up spontaneously in a classroom, he said.
“It’s not discussion, it’s curriculum. You cannot be the thought police, and we would never ever advocate that.”
