Tea at Trianon: On the Academic Hostility to Great Literature

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 7, 2014

On the Academic Hostility to Great Literature

From Dr. Anthony Esolen:

When I attended Princeton, it was as Father C. J. McCloskey once described it to me, with a matter-of-fact smile. It was an evil place. But stupidity was still far away. The English department offered only real, solid courses, in genuinely great literature. And some of them were hugely popular. Freshman Shakespeare, the course most students took to fulfill their composition requirement (I placed out of that one), was thronged with hundreds of young people who adored the lecturer and actor, Daniel Seltzer. John Fleming’s Chaucer course had eighty or ninety students in it, many of them not English majors. Walton Litz’s course in the modernists Eliot, Pound, Frost, and Yeats had to be held in a large auditorium, with the master of ceremonies declaiming great poetry from the stage. Thomas Roche’s course in Spenser had about 35 students—Spenser!

And now I find that, this spring at Old Nassau, there are only three upper-level English courses with an enrollment of more than twenty. One is a course in Nabokov (30), cross-listed with Slavic Studies. One is Shakespeare (66). The third is a course in junky kid-lit (395). The department is stocked with people who teach literature as everything under the sun except for literature—gender this and class that. Even Princetonians seem bright enough to tune it out. The trash is piling up, and there’s hardly a warm body left to take it to the curb. (Read more.)

Stephanie A. Mann said...: So glad I earned my MA when and where I did, actually reading and trying to understand great literature, not tear it down! We studied literature as though there was an author and she had something to say--I think one influence on this was that the MA and MFA students mingled in classes and activities. When the faculty are teaching writers to write, they also teach readers to read.; April 8, 2014 at 7:19:00 AM EDT