Education notes, high and low

I'll say only one thing in the Young Professors defense (there's a reason I'm in the field I'm in and not one of the more modern ones): the primary requirement for a dissertation is that the work the be *substantially new*. If you're in a field like English literature, that's a small, small list. You have to start coming up with fairly strange things in order to be ABLE to write a dissertation that will pass muster.

And we look into questions like "was Shakespeare Gay" because, well, he wrote a lot of hot and heavy poetry to young men. Don't you think the average 19 year old, reading one of those sonnets, is going to ask? And shouldn't we have some kind of answer? (Most likely the answer is simply that there's a two thousand year tradition of writing poetry to young men, and Shakespeare is merely continuing that tradition.) It's not intellectually corrupt, it's a question raised directly by his text.
Now, if you're spending more than one class period talking about it, I question your allocation of resources.

And all of that having been said... this is what happens when you try and enforce Science discipline standards (YOU MUST PRODUCE RESEARCH!) on Humanities departments. People start just making stuff up because if they don't publish, they don't have jobs.

When you've got a high school in which students tote their babies to class, you've got problems that defy a pedagogical solution.

Perhaps they're being kept in school too long. Kids of this sort would be better off learning a trade and entering the workforce. In the manufacturing thread, people were complaining about a lack of machinists. Well, let's bring back machine shop. Let's get rid of the NCLB mentality that offers up the "Yale or Jail" dichotomy.

It's that kind of academic environment that killed my interest in a career in academe. I have no problem with studying that kind of thing and even conducting graduate seminars on it, but my Milton class was derailed for at least a week with that very question "was Milton gay?" The evidence was mighty thin first of all. Who cares second of all. It's mental masturbation.

Elizabeth Anne, twenty eight years ago I was in a Latin class where a fellow student asked if Catullus might have been gay. At the time I was a freshman engineer in this graduate level Latin course. I was taking five other courses and trying to compete with graduate students who were taking three.

The professor answered, "It's just as likely that Catullus was trying to imitate the same-sex love poetry that was popular in his day," which shut the discussion down.

I dropped the course the next day to the complaint of the professor who thought I was doing very well and probably was worried about whether his class would continue with the remaining six students.

As for the rest of my humanities credits, I took the path of least resistance. My disciplines, engineering and math, were unrelated to everyday life. I expected something more from the humanities. I was disappointed.

BTW, if Rod had been the professor in the course and had reduced sexual orientation to what one does with one's pecker, I'd have knocked his teeth out. Thankfully, he was not. There have to be some advantages to avoiding an LSU education for Louisianians.

I'm pretty hopeful about this issue. A lot of English depts went off the rails this way back in the 70s & 80s, but thankfully many of them are now getting back on track and rediscovering their mission. And there are other places in the humanities that were never as vulnerable to this particular mode of politicization as English depts were. I'm a classics professor, and I'm simply too busy teaching Greek and Latin (and ancient history and religion and philosophy and so on) to have time for this kind of junk. I teach at an elite liberal arts college (one of the "little ivies") and it's the same with all my colleagues. The same also goes for my friends who teach at bigger private schools and state schools. There are a few people in classics more broadly who do work on this kind of silly stuff, but everyone else in the field laughs at them.

Elizabeth Anne, I'm not saying that whether or not Shakespeare was gay is an unimportant question, only that to make it (and questions like it) one of central importance to the study of literature is to corrupt learning with cultural politics. It was my understanding that my professor friend complained that cultural politics of a particular kind had overtaken the teaching of literature in his department. Again, my friend is a political liberal, but he finds this approach to his subject tedious and empty more than offensive, or so it seemed to me from our brief conversation.

Joseph,

If you're a classics prof. and you completely avoid such questions, your teaching is junk.

Also, let me concur with Rod in saying to Elizabeth Anne that Shakespeare's sexuality is certainly a valid topic for discussion -- as other similar topics from an academic leftist point of view, like Shakespeare and gender and Shakespeare and race. It's just that those topics are, indeed, now "boring," because they have been discussed through the industrialized production of academic research into them for going on a third of a century now, and very often to the exclusion of discussion of the wide range of other topics that might also be discussed, were the ideological spectrum of the academic humanities wide enough to accommodate those who might bring other points to view to bear. As it is, students enter college English courses, having already discussed "gay" Shakespeare in high school at the behest of an AP teacher who discussed "gay" Shakespeare in college in the 1990's at the behest of a TA who discussed "gay" Shakespeare in college in the 1980's at the behest of a professor who discussed "gay" Shakespeare in the 1970's at the behest of a dissertation director who discussed "gay" Shakespeare in the 1960's -- a decade, which, for some of us, is not brand-new anymore.

Frank,

I certainly talk about Greek and Roman ideas about homosexual sex in my courses, when these topics are relevant, which is quite often. I normally bring in some distilled version of Foucault's central argument in HoS and of course I present the evidence in Dover and try to grapple with the issue as it gets framed by Winkler and so on. This is part of my field and part of a full understanding of some of the most interesting differences between antiquity and modernity.

But Rod's post was not about talking about gay sex when it comes up. Rod's post was about speculations regarding our authors' sexual orientation. Right? So when I said I don't waste time on this junk in my classes, what I meant was I don't hunt for evidence as to whether really and truly, in his heart of hearts, Homer was gay. Or Catullus. Or Augustine. Simply put, none of them were gay or all of them were gay, depending on which rubric we want to use for thinking about eroticized relationships between members of the same sex.

I've been told a lot of things about my teaching, not all of it positive. But I've never been told it was junk. Are you always this hostile?

There is a hilarious "Onion" piece on an Ethnic Studies major who Teaches for America, which chews him up and spits him out.

Y'all should read John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West". Its wonderful rant against such issues as modern Literary Criticism and other mental "masturbation"

Brett,

Have they arranged for diversity sensitivity training sessions?

You're kidding, right?

Although even at my advanced age I have a strong interest in sexual activity and sexual release, I have never been that interested in anyone else's proclivities, and I have to demur and opine that 90% of the time -- if not more -- the sexuality of an author or any other historical personality is irrelevant.

I realize that for some people sexual orientation is a fundamental identifier, but I just don't see it that way. I don't even think homosexuality is relevant to much of classical studies, except that it explain the intensity of feeling in some places and why Socrates might say some rather odd things in the Dialogues. But it seems to me that if SS activity was taken for granted in a given historical era, then, that's just it, it was taken for granted, we take it for granted, and start talking about something more interesting.

I absolutely reject the view that a person's sexual orientation is worth more than 30 seconds of class time. Anyone who wants to argue that their sexual orientation is something more fundamental or substantial is arguing something that is non-falsifiable and ultimately self-referential, solipsistic, and narcissistic.

And yes, I think there's a good chance Lincoln was bi. So what.

Brett writes:

Regarding the high school students and their homophobia - have any diversity or sensitivity training sessions been arranged as a result of these incidents?

Really? Why play to right wing propaganda? Why not have Krav Maga classes taught for the gay kids? It would do them a world of good. It would teach them that they have a right to defend themselves.

Maybe a "buy a gay a Glock" program would be going a bit far, except in Jamaica or Arab countries.

David White,

My professor's comment amounted to a particularly tortured argument. Catullus is an imitated and influential poet, not an imitative one.

As for questions getting the class off track, I understood that the study of the humanities was intended to make life more meaningful. I don't see how this is possible without relating some material to real life. I took five years of Latin before I entered university, and I studied with a professor one of whose students was the first American to win the Classics Prize at Christ Church. Amid discussing the thousands of lines we translated weekly, he found time for a brief commentary about the social context of what we were reading. Perhaps you do this occasionally for the benefit of your heterosexual students.

Art history is a little outside the area of my degree (B.A. in English from a university well known for critical theory), but " hidden homosexual signifiers in Renaissance portraiture" sounds like an interesting course. I'm aware that many wealthy men who had sex with men (before anyone would have identified as homosexual) commissioned paintings of attractive, lightly-clad men. I'm not saying that every nobleman with a big painting of St. Sebastian was a gay man.

There's a story that for the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest, many men in the audience wore green carnations as a secret code to identify themselves to each other as men who were sexually interested in men.

It's easy to dismiss scholarship without reading it, but then you end like like Sarah Palin, decrying fruit fly studies when there was autism to research (unaware that the study had implications in autism). I love the newspaper accounts of the MLA conferences because the presentations the journalists find most worthy of mockery are the ones I'd really like to attend.

It all gets down to a close and intimate reading of the text.

When I was getting my B.A., I wrote a paper for a class on lesbian themes in one of the major 19th century novels. The topic sort of popped into my head when he had us shout out ideas just to get everyone's creative juices flowing. I decided that I wouldn't have said that if there wasn't something prompting me.

I wrote the paper and I found the theme running through the whole novel. My professor noted that he had been teaching the novel for years and had never added these things up and that he had to reevaluate his reading of the novel. It was there just waiting for someone to find it. I got an A.

Alicia writes:
"I doubt very much whether any of the great gay actors or writers of the last century really care whether or not Shakespeare was gay. Can you imagine Tennessee Williams wasting more than a moment of his time wondering this?"

Tennessee Williams understood just how narcissistic his straight audience was (an is) and carefully began "straightened up" his stories by changing the male characters into female characters. Do you really think Holly Golightly was originally a woman?

Alicia writes:

"I doubt very much whether any of the great gay actors or writers of the last century really care whether or not Shakespeare was gay. Can you imagine Tennessee Williams wasting more than a moment of his time wondering this?"

No, but I can certainly imagine Tennessee Williams asking the question about the hidden sexual orientation of characters in fiction. You see, he discussed the very subject about his own writing. He wrote a large volume of fiction for a gay audience and at one of his readings of this work, he volunteered that many of his characters and story lines in his more popular works were drafted as gay characters. Holly Golightly, for instance, was originally male.

Hate to burst your bubble. Actually, I loved bursting your bubble.

Frank,

I agree with David J. White. Catullus is probably the last guy you would accuse of being a spintria. The Romans looked askance at receptive homoerotic acts, though as long as they were doing the peckering and not being peckered themselves was less condemned.

Bone up (if you'll forgive the little lusus verborum) on Catullus carmen XVI I think it is. It tells you all you need to know about whether Gaius was gayus.

Frank,
If you think Catullus isn't an imitative poet, you don't know him as well as you seem to think you do. Much of his work is, in fact, direct imitations if not outright translations. And to write within a tradition is not simply "imitative", it's part of being a poet. Writing homosexual poetry was such a integral part of writing poetry that Ovid had to explicitly apologize for not doing so.

Rod,
I think we agree, and I stated it badly because I was racing out the door to (irony!) teach. I was saying basically what you were: it's a valid point of research and inquiry, but if it takes up too much time, yup, there's a real problem there.

First, I apologize for the hostility.

Second, students sometimes ask question the sexual orientation of historical and literary figures for reasons that aren't readily apparent. They want to know whether the humanities can help them find meaning and fulfillment and a connection with the rest of humanity even if they are gay. Same sex love poetry whether it's written by Shakespeare or Catullus certainly presents this question because it can rise above vulgarity.

As a former Lit. major myself, with a degree from that much-maligned Catholic college, Franciscan University of Steubenville, I've got a couple things to say.

One is that my professors were wonderful. Really. We didn't waste a lot of time trying to make authors of the past fit the politically correct stereotypes of the day. Did issues about authors' proclivities ever come up? Sure. Did we get pressured to force a reading of, say, Dickens that pretended that Dickens was a secretly conflicted would-be transgendered individual with a strong identity with some particular ethnic group of which he was not a part? No; I would have demanded my money back if we had.

Something I think many modern students of literature don't understand is that it's a bit of a stretch to call any author of the more than immediate past "gay." Were there some who engaged in same-sex activities? Naturally. Were some of them exclusively same-sex attracted? Probably. Were there any who would have actually identified themselves as being "gay" as we use that term today--e.g., seeing that quality of being same-sex attracted as being an important self-identifier through which every experience and insight had to be understood? Not, in all probability, before the early to mid nineteenth century, and even that's going back a bit farther than I think is workable as a theory.

Something even more people, lit majors or not, don't understand is what several people have already referenced in this thread: a reading of any work of literature that takes the author's biography and tries to force a reading of the text as if that biography is the most important clue to the meaning of the work is going to be a limited and stunted reading, however interesting the author's life might have been. The ideas and culture surrounding the author are a different story. For example, it's far more important to care about why George Eliot was influenced by Naturalism and how that plays out in her books, than it is to insist that her choice of a moniker not only concealed her "marriage" to an already married man but possibly indicates bisexuality; similarly, I'm more interested in Jane Austen's critical and humorous eye on her society than I am in knowing her sexual appetite or appetites.

In fact, trying to "force" Austen's stories, or many other past works, to include gay themes is a bit like the recently released book, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" which adds battles with the undead to Austen's famous work. I think the idea is highly humorous and would probably have amused the author of Northanger Abbey to see the story of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy re-imagined as part horror-novel, but anyone who seriously tried to argue that the zombies were a theme all along in the original text just waiting to be discovered by some intelligent reader would be reaching, rather.

I'd like to be clear, to those same-sex attracted readers of this blog, that I'm not disparaging them or their life experiences by saying any of this. However, shouldn't we be at least willing to look at the open homosexual movement as something which is fixed in time? That is, it's history, isn't it, that the push for people who feel themselves attracted to the same-sex to identify themselves in this way, to live a lifestyle which celebrates same-sex encounters and relationships, and so on is a relatively recent phenomenon? Like most social movements, then, doesn't the literature mostly *follow* the phenomenon, not precede it by hundreds of years? I would think, then, that the push would not be to "read" all kinds of super-secret gay themes into long-past literature when most of the time that isn't really true to the text, but instead to create and refine the "gay literature" of the movement as it is emerging. I do think that to do this in an authentic way the voices of those who struggle to live chastely, according to their deeply held beliefs that this is the best way, as well as those who embrace the homosexual activity ought to be heard, because nothing is as fatal to literature as a kind of political orthodoxy imposed from outside; but I realize that some might disagree.

No problem, Frank. I guess part of what bugs me about the "Was Shakespeare gay?" question is the reductionism implied in too much obsession with this single question (or any single question). But I get what your saying about the question enabling students to identify with someone such as Shakespeare with whom they may feel they have little in common.

While we're on the subject, I've always wondered whether Oscar Wilde was gay. He was drôle in the extreme, but was he gay?

"They want to know whether the humanities can help them find meaning and fulfillment and a connection with the rest of humanity even if they are gay."

Now, Whoa. That's a lot to lay on a professor of humanities. I used to teach history and, if I talked -- not during lecture -- to kids who came from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds, sure, I'd remind them that, say, Pushkin was part Black or that some say Beethoven was part Black, etc. etc. Maybe at times the claims might be suspect, but, I was trying to get kids from outside backgrounds to get into the culture altogether.

It sort of reminds me of 20 years ago or so there was the "Black Athena" moment, and a lot of people vociferously opposed it, but I didn't, and I will tell you why: it got some Black people to drop the blinders and realize that they were a part of and had a stake in, our common culture. I mean does it really make any difference if Socrates or Nefertiti were Black or White or Puerto Rican? It makes no difference at all, but it MIGHT make a difference to some child of color who doesn't feel that our culture speaks to him.

Now the same goes for gays or anyone else. If I had had a gay student who felt alienated about it, I might talk to him about it walking to the office or over a cup of coffee, sure. But not in a lecture. That's not the place to try to be an older friend and counselor to a student. And, frankly, I'm not sure a lot of profs would do that much.

But, OK, sure. If someone is gay and tells me and wants to feel tied into the rest of the world I will share with him every bit of historical gossip I can to help him feel as though he's part of the action. Eventually, he'll realize he IS part of the action and won't be expecting gayness as such to be relevant, in terms of authors he goes to for answers, and so on.

I don't know if Gerald Manley Hopkins was gay, I do know that he wrote two of the most mind-blowing poems of all time for someone who's trying to figure out who, where, and how they fit in.

Peace out.

I'd like to be clear, to those same-sex attracted readers of this blog, that I'm not disparaging them or their life experiences by saying any of this. However, shouldn't we be at least willing to look at the open homosexual movement as something which is fixed in time? That is, it's history, isn't it, that the push for people who feel themselves attracted to the same-sex to identify themselves in this way, to live a lifestyle which celebrates same-sex encounters and relationships, and so on is a relatively recent phenomenon? Like most social movements, then, doesn't the literature mostly *follow* the phenomenon, not precede it by hundreds of years? I would think, then, that the push would not be to "read" all kinds of super-secret gay themes into long-past literature when most of the time that isn't really true to the text, but instead to create and refine the "gay literature" of the movement as it is emerging. I do think that to do this in an authentic way the voices of those who struggle to live chastely, according to their deeply held beliefs that this is the best way, as well as those who embrace the homosexual activity ought to be heard, because nothing is as fatal to literature as a kind of political orthodoxy imposed from outside; but I realize that some might disagree.

I find it really odd that you can only conceive of an "open homosexual movement" having any effect on an artist's life and work product.

And as to the larger question, if sexual orientation is so inconsequential, why was discussion of it so out of bounds for so long?

I'm sure Erin is aware of the discussion of homosexual and heterosexual orientation in Plato's _Symposium_ as well as the condemnation of societies which persecute same sex relationships contained in it. If literature follows movement, certainly the movement of "open homosexuality" predates the Christian movement.

Well, Frank, I'm afraid that's a bit like saying that there are hidden pro-polygamy narratives in every great work of literature of the Christian Western era because polygamy predates Christianity.

And BobN, you're attempting to put words in my mouth. I didn't say an author's sexual habits, however extreme, don't influence his work. I did say that trying to force a "gay" reading of various classics quickly errs on the side of presuming 1. that biography is the most important way to understand literature and 2. that an author's sex habits were the most important part of his biography, two presumptions that are not usually made *apart* from what I called the modern "open homosexual movement."

Erin,

You're level of irony impairment is breathtaking. You complain about "political correctness" although you attended an institution that would fire any professor or expel any student who espoused a dissident opinion. In fact you consider your support of such intellectual narrowness a fundamental civil right. You simply espouse a different kind of political correctness.

A

Yes on the recommendation for smaller liberal arts colleges. I went to grad school at a well know NYC University - and three months after getting my own BA as a TA was teaching kids whose parents were dropping 250 a credit - Probably not what mommy and daddy expected for all that money.

I agree with Erin that part of the study of literature is about placing the work within the context of that society - and I think this is often overlooked and to me is part of what makes studying literature critically interesting.

I thought the big topic with Shakespeare nowadays was wheither he was Catholic or not, the gay issue is kind of 80's isn't it?

That's a pretty cheap tuition actually.

And I never have been much for literature, or even fiction. I did lit very intensively in high school in preparation for the AP exam. I think I got a 3 on that. So I didn't have to take lit in college. So I don't know how much time the profs spent out in left field, I don't reckon it wasn't much time though, since it was a small private college and the students were fairly conservative, if the profs weren't.

All of the upper level German courses were literature-based, which wasn't a lot of fun to me, but it is a good way to dig into another language.

I enjoyed Kafka and Poe, and the poet John Donne. The Greek dramas weren't too bad, and Shakespeare was okay if you could catch the references. Other than that, had a lot more fun in linguistics and advanced grammar, psychology, international politics, and of course religion (our prof in that subject was a non-conformist and rather fun, if you managed to get past his stodgy exterior and dry tone. A lot of students didn't.)

This thread has degenerated into yet another screed on homosexuality, when its true purpose was to elicit the opinions of academics on the sursum et deorsum of the teacher biz.

I am far more interested in which writers of either "orientation" were inveterate wankers. Let's give the undergrads something they can really identify with.

John D
It's easy to dismiss scholarship without reading it, but then you end like like Sarah Palin, decrying fruit fly studies when there was autism to research (unaware that the study had implications in autism). I love the newspaper accounts of the MLA conferences because the presentations the journalists find most worthy of mockery are the ones I'd really like to attend.

If something that science is doing looks stupid, there are three explanations:

a) It really is stupid, and other scientists think it's stupid. Rest assure that just because 'scientists' are doing something doesn't mean that anyone's going to publish that.
b) It's a PhD dissertation in a very well explored field, so people are reduced to looking at crazy things to get their PhD. Most of those people stop doing 'research' the second they get their PhD, and aren't actually scientists, but 'technicials' and 'teachers', so it's not important.
c) You have missed something important about what's going on, aka, you're Palin.

Don't feel to bad about c. Science is huge. Of the stuff you don't understand why scientists would do it, 95% of actual scientists probably have no idea why either. (And another 4% understand why they're doing it, but think they're factually wrong in what they're trying to prove.)

Just don't run around criticizing things because they look silly. If they actually are silly, science already knows, and if they aren't, science will fight back.

I'm late to the game on this one, but I completely agree with what Jefferson Smith said.

At SDSU, the push is research! research! in the president's and provost's bid for research laurels. They are mighty proud of our being "the number 1 small research university." As if most students care about that - I don't. Student want courses offered in a timely manner and in enough quantity to handle enrollment so they can graduate. Education goes out the window.

Oh, sorry John D, I wasn't talking to you. You understand, I'm sure. My 'you' was a generic.

I actually had an intro paragraph where I talked directly to you, but I cut it out, I've been trying to trim my posts down here. (I apparently need an editor.) And yeah, titles of talks where they want to attract the public are often unrelated to the seriousness of the issue.