Sutherland Triggered Literature

Triggered Literature: Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-78590-837-8
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Amid the flames of the culture wars, politicians have taken up arms over controls on literary culture, spurred on in part by universities 'triggering' canonical texts. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again. But is 'triggering' utter wokery or responsible pedagogic practice? Through dozens of case studies of triggered works, from Romeo and Juliet to Gender Queer, John Sutherland explores the recent phenomenon of triggering and its consequences for university English departments and literature itself. He maintains that what is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Franz Kafka says, powerful. In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty literary critic guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care.

Amid the flames of the culture wars, politicians have taken up arms over controls on literary culture, spurred on in part by universities 'triggering' canonical texts. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again. But is 'triggering' utter wokery or responsible pedagogic practice? Through dozens of case studies of triggered works, from Romeo and Juliet to Gender Queer, John Sutherland explores the recent phenomenon of triggering and its future consequences for university English departments and literature itself. He maintains that what is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Franz Kafka says, powerful. In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty literary critic guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care. John Sutherland is a British academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is currently Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. He has published more books than he cares to count, including Is Heathcliff a Murderer?Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction;The Boy Who Loved Books: A Memoir; and The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sutherland, John

Leseproben

Part One

Signs of the Times: A Calendar

All in a Day

The day was 31 January 2023. That morning the Daily Telegraph carried an editorial noting, with wry distaste, that the University of Greenwich – having the previous year triggered Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ on the grounds of ‘animal death’ and ‘supernatural possession’ – had triggered Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey on the grounds of ‘toxic relations and friendships’. On the same day, The Guardian carried a front-page story headlined ‘One in 10 children “have watched pornography by the time they are nine”’.

According to a report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, the figure had risen to a quarter of the cohort by the time they left primary school. And ‘four out of five of those surveyed have seen pornography involving violence by the age of 18 … Nearly half of the male 16- to 21-year-olds who took part in the survey assumed girls either “expect” or “enjoy” sex which involves physical aggression, such as airway restriction.’

‘Airway restriction’ means erotic strangulation.

On the same day, The Times reported the fact that ‘Kevin Anderson & Associates, a company that supplies sensitivity readers, says its “cultural accuracy editing” will “ensure your manuscript isn’t offensive, inaccurate or perpetuating harmful stereotypes”’.

Hamlet: The Andrew Tate Version*

On 15 April 2023, the Daily Mail warned its readers that a forthcoming BBC programme ‘has been commissioned to mark 400 years since the publication of the Bard’s First Folio’. Well and good. The Folio was being touted as the most important British book since the King James Bible. Anything but good was that an ‘Oxford professor’, the series presenter, would argue that ‘Hamlet is a misogynist like Andrew Tate’.

The ‘Oxford professor’ was Emma Smith. Her declared aim was to ‘reexamine the works of the Bard through a modern lens’. What that optic would reveal was that Hamlet is the embodiment of

‘toxic masculinity’ like the ‘alpha male’ influencer Andrew Tate, who is reportedly being sued by three women in the UK for rape and sexual assault … In the series, the host will challenge celebrity guests to look at the playwright’s work differently, speaking to the likes of Gordon Brown about Julius Caesar.

‘Alpha male’ is too flattering. As Shanti Das described him in The Guardian on 6 August 2022:

Andrew Tate says women belong in the home, can’t drive, and are a man’s property.

He also thinks rape victims must ‘bear responsibility’ for their attacks and dates women aged 18–19 because he can ‘make an imprint’ on them, according to videos posted online.

In other clips, the British-American kickboxer – who poses with fast cars, guns and portrays himself as a cigar-smoking playboy – talks about hitting and choking women, trashing their belongings and stopping them from going out.

‘It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,’ he says in one video.

Hard to square, perhaps, with Ophelia’s eulogy:

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!

The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers.

Only the last line fits Andrew Tate. He had 4.6 million ‘observers’, so to call them, on Instagram before being banned.

Professor Smith would use her programme, it was forecast, to persuade the witty contrarian Will Self of her case. As she put it: ‘Talking about toxic masculinity and Hamlet, we can see him as a young man radicalised, on a mission to clear things up, and turning against women’s sexuality in a very violent way, maybe like the guy who takes a gun to school … That was revelatory for me.’

Revelatory too for most critics before Professor Smith.

Seeing Hamlet as kin to an American school spree shooter is a very dark new lens. It is true, though, that Hamlet’s personal murder count in the course of the play – five or more – is high. And Professor Smith does make us ponder whether he is Shakespeare’s John Wick.†

Andrew Tate, who lives on TikTok (when not languishing in a Romanian prison on sex trafficking charges), has not commented, at the time of writing, on his being Hamletised.

Universal Darkness Covers All

On 23 January 2023, the Washington Post (motto ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’) reported:

Students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teachers’ bookshelves wrapped in paper – or entirely barren of books – after district officials launched a review of the texts’ appropriateness under a new state law [Florida House Bill 1467, which] … mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and ‘suited to student needs.’ Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.

The new law comes atop an older one that makes distributing ‘harmful materials’ to minors, including obscene and pornographic materials, a third-degree felony – meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, a spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday.

All Change

The London Evening Standard reported on 20 April 2023 that

a leading London private school has overhauled its English curriculum to introduce a diverse range of authors and challenge ‘white-centric, patriarchal and cis-gender ideologies’.

Pupils at the £25,000-a-year Alleyn’s School in Dulwich now discuss Macbeth’s toxic masculinity and read The Tempest through the lens of colonialism. Sixth formers study ‘queer readings’ of A-level texts such as Dracula, and the first text by a non-binary author has been included in the A-level curriculum. Half of the books read by students in years seven, eight and nine are by female authors, which ‘helps in some way to counteract the lack of equality in the set texts for GCSE’.

A-level students must also choose one coursework text by a writer of colour ‘in an effort to tackle the lack of diversity in the A-level syllabus’.

An educational ‘all change’? Or overdue reform?

Alex Smith, head of English studies at Alleyn’s, complained that the same old texts – Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird for example – have been ‘wheeled out time and time again’ for decades, propping up a ‘pale, male and stale’ reading list. No more geriatric books in wheelchairs for the school’s coeducational classes.

Writing on the school blog, Smith stated its mission:

For the last five years, the Alleyn’s English department have been committed to a thorough and ongoing overhaul and genuine diversification of our English curriculum in the hope that every child will come to see themselves, and the rich and varied world around them, represented in the texts they study and that, by doing so, they will be equipped with the empathy and confidence to challenge and dismantle sexism, racism, homophobia – indeed, discrimination of any kind – when they encounter it.

She announced that the school has changed the way pupils would henceforth study canonical texts by ‘white, cis-male authors’ to challenge ‘white-centric, patriarchal, and cisgender ideologies’. Colonialism was high on the list. ‘We are also committed’, said Smith, ‘to representing alternative versions of masculinity to those harmful tropes so often seen perpetuated in popular culture and by the media. The toxicity of Macbeth’s masculinity – and, crucially, its consequences – is central to our study of that text at GCSE.’

Smith’s statistical foundation was a report by the campaign group ‘End Sexism in Schools’, which had found that 77 per cent of novels studied by pupils in years seven, eight and nine are written by men, and 82 per cent of them have male protagonists. The group said that 99 per cent...