Lit-Crit 101

Most of my memories from my undergraduate literary theory class revolve around the professor. She had that academic-pretty look – ear-length blunt-cut curly hair, thin arms, big woolen sweaters (this was 1992; it was a good look for her). She had an English accent, a frighteningly deep knowledge of French feminism, and a gift for humour that made it worthwhile rolling out of bed on those cold winter mornings to make it to her 8:30 classes on Plato, Derrida, and Althusser.

I remember less about the subject-matter of that course than I do about the professor’s personal life: there was a story that had us all in stitches about her three-year-old daughter sticking a pea up her nose, and there were stories, too, about her two sisters still living in Britain on public assistance. These anecdotes gave her an intriguingly Cinderella-like aura: her sisters were neither mean nor ugly nor step-, but there was a fairy-tale starkness about their diverging fates: those two older sisters on the dole vs. the one rising academic star being paid to write books about the Brontë sisters and appearing on TV programs about writers and writing.

Hero-worship aside, I did manage to absorb a few basic principles of literary criticism. I learned that we weren’t allowed to call Shakespeare a genius anymore, and that it was both asking for trouble and personally embarrassing to pass judgment on the quality of Wuthering Heights (especially if you refer to the author as "Emily" or, worse, "Emily Jane"). Perhaps the lesson I absorbed best from that class was that the key to successful scholarship in the humanities is to take an apparently self-evident principle and prove the opposite. (That is a trick I still use as a teacher. This summer a student came to me with the following thesis statement: "In this essay it will be argued that children need a loving home in order to grow and thrive." After struggling for several minutes to coerce this nightmare of a thesis into a form that wouldn’t make me scream and pull my hair out when forced to read the final product, I finally hit on the solution: "Why not argue the opposite?" The student ended up submitting a fascinating essay on the ways in which Anne Shirley and Harry Potter benefit from the neglect and abuse they suffer in early childhood.)

As a group, my fellow students and I adored the professor, grappled with the often baffling readings, and occasionally dug in our heels and rose up against ideas that were so counter-intuitive as to be offensive and disturbing. One of the most cherished ideas the professor worked to pry from our tightly gripped humanist fists was the notion of a universal human family. So-called universal ideals, she explained, were simply projections of class, racial, and gender privilege, where the norm is defined as middle-class, white, and male, and anything that departs from that is relegated to special-interest-group status. (Everyone is universal, it would seem, but some are more universal than others.) When we think we recognize a sense of kinship with another culture, she suggested, what we’re really doing is projecting our own values, a fundamentally aggressive act of cultural imperialism.

There is much that is persuasive about this argument. In some ways it’s also a shockingly optimistic stance, one that supposes we can treat others humanely without recognizing ourselves in them. It’s the difference between true religious tolerance, for instance, and the faux-tolerance that insists that everybody subscribe to a shared Doctrine of Blandness so that, having eliminated all differences of belief, we can all live in peace and harmony (John Lennon’s "Imagine" with a few crystals and spiritual feelings thrown in). It’s an argument that sees greater value in the challenging, culturally specific writings of African writer Chinua Achebe than in Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (a series I love because it makes Botswana seem so much like England).

Increasingly, however, I have been coming across pleas for a return to the universal, assertions that the only way out of the "clash of civilizations" in which we find ourselves is the recognition that people are fundamentally alike. And these are not naïve or unexamined clichés; they come from people who have been around the post-modern block a time or two but feel, nonetheless, that the baby of transcendence has been thrown out with the bath-water of cultural imperialism. The goal of cultural diversity may not, after all, be best served by the kind of thinking my Lit-Crit prof was selling in those early-morning classes. Because if we have no basic shared humanity, no common ground to walk on, then what reason do we have to communicate with those who are so hopelessly different from ourselves? "Help us, universal human family," we seem to be saying, "you’re our only hope."

And this is where Lit-Crit 101 overlaps with blogging. One of my favourite movie lines is from the C.S. Lewis biopic Shadowlands: "We read to know we’re not alone." And that goes double for blogging. As Wordgirl put it recently, "We blog, we comment, we seek out people whom we assume are just like us because they make us feel comfortable and safe and liked." This is not necessarily a bad thing – it is enormously comforting, life-saving even, to find our fears, our guilt, and our shortcomings reflected in another woman’s experience. It’s even more intoxicating to see in someone else our own idiosyncratic quirks and tastes, to discover that there’s another person who also devoured the Keeping Days series as a child and secretly wanted to be Tish Sterling (okay, I haven’t found anybody yet who picked up on that reference a few days ago, but I thought I’d throw it out there again and see if I get a nibble).

The Internet enables us to surround ourselves with the like-minded, to create ever more homogenous circles of those with whom we share an instant rapport, who respond to our rantings and musings with an instant and effortless "Me too!" When I read new blogs, I don’t look for people from whom I can learn about other cultures, religions, experiences, and personalities. I look for people just like me.

And yet. Maybe you’re one of those people whose words ring so true for me that I feel like I might have written them myself. Except that you’re an atheist. Or a lesbian. A "P" on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Or even an American. And that conjunction of similarity and difference gives me a glimpse of something deeper than our categories and labels, a glimpse of something that clearly is not a "universal humanity," but may be something like it, something to build on. It might not be enough to resolve the clash of civilizations and bring about world peace (I make no promises about that). But it’s a start.

*****

To everyone who commented on my last post: your words have made me smile, and laugh, and cry. Reading them makes me feel hopeful - and grateful. Thank you so much.