Right-Wing Scold: 'Overly-Emotional Women Are Ruining Literature!'

Posted by Mister Leonard Pierce, Sadly, No! at 2:07 PM on July 13, 2008.

Apparently, America is not producing enough domestic scolds and has had to start importing them from Slovenia. Yes, Mary Grabar, everyone’s favorite humorless right-wing academic, is back, and her granny-panties are, as always, in a twist.

“University classrooms are starting to look a lot like Oprah,” she says to our confusion. Does she mean black? Expensively dressed? Constantly fluctuating in size? No, she means that they’re filled with “emotive, postmodern bunkum”.

Let’s skip my usual rant about how the only thing these people seem to actually know about postmodernism is that they hate it, and head straight for the buffet.

I suppose I should not have been surprised that Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address at Stanford University.

When you’re a professional outrage manufacturer, you’re not surprised at anything, especially unsurprising things like a famous person giving a commencement speech at a prominent school. Your job is not to be surprised, but to be offended.

My college classroom, if I follow the dominant pedagogical directives, should resemble Oprah's emotive coffee klatches.

Mary, of course, is a professor of literature, and as we all know, emotion has nothing to do with art.

And it's something that I sense my students have come to expect, already versed as they are in the mantra of "I feel" and "that's your opinion."

It is unacceptable in Grabardemia to feel something about literature, or to claim that someone else’s opinion might not necessarily be valid, but it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations based on what you “sense” your students have come to expect.

The hands are quick to pop up when I pose a question like "Did you like the poem?" or "What did you think of the Misfit?" But when it comes time to closely interpret a couple of lines from Paradise Lost, most of the students (those who have brought the book) do not deign even to look at the page. Few bother to note my clarifications or explications.

In other words, when Mary asks her students what they thought of something, they answer readily. But when she tells them what they are supposed to think about something, they don’t pay much attention. What a great teacher she must be!

Course offerings on Oprah appear in college catalogs, while those on Milton disappear.

“Prove”, a good teacher might write in the margins of a paper containing this claim.

I blame it on women

Well of course you do.

specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate "ways of knowing."

The sorry state of academia is the fault of women who have dared to suggest that traditionally marginalized groups might have something to teach us, instead of following the previously preferred route to academic success, which involves being a man.

In the matriarchal upheaval in the academy, the great works of the canon that draw from our Western tradition, like Milton's majestic Paradise Lost

Again with Milton. I don’t know how to break it to Mary, but it is entirely possible to study the works of John Milton at a major university. In fact, a quick Amazon search yields several dozen books about Milton published in 2008 alone, many of which appear to be by academics. So it seems like they’re learning about the guy somewhere; maybe in Slovenia, I dunno.

are replaced by crudely rendered emotive investigations into oppression, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper,"

Ah, yes, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written in the emotive postmodernist year of 1892. “I shiver over it as much as I did when I first read it in manuscript,” wrote effeminate Marxist William Dean Howells; “too terribly good to be printed,” raved genocidal Communist Horace Scudder; “a small literary masterpiece that deserves the widest possible audience”, wrote terrorist-abetting non-man Elaine Hedges. It was left until 2008 for a clear-eyed objective scholar named Mary Grabar to deliver the final verdict: “crudely rendered emotive investigation into oppression”. So saith the author of Dancing with Derrida (unpublished as of this writing).

or any of the "multicultural" offerings in the latest anthology.

There is no need to quote from them, or even name them, because they are all just so terrible.

In addition to eviscerating the canon to add women's writing, of whatever dubious value (personal letters, diary entries, popular books)

Obviously, personal letters, diary entries and popular books are only to be allowed in the canon when they are written by people like Peter Abelard, Samuel Pepys, and Charles Dickens. You know: men.

the academic feminists' project was to attack the base of our way of thinking, which they correctly traced back to the notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe with an order based on reason

Well, there you have it, folks: shut down the philosophy departments, shutter the theology classrooms, and convert all the science labs into foosball lounges. Mary Grabar (who was invited to read a chapter of her as-yet-unpublished novel Dancing with Derrida at the 2005 Art and Soul Festival at Baylor University, where the theme was humor) has explained it all for you: our way of thinking is traceable to the (correct!) notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe based on reason. Q.E.D.!

Repeatedly, in the literature and in instructor orientations, I have been enjoined to encourage students in "group work," to use the classroom to promote a more equitable society, to refrain from telling a student her answer is "wrong," and to encourage the exploration of feelings through assignments.

There will be no working together in groups, promoting equity, or expressing one’s emotions through literature as long as Mary Grabar is alive. The purpose of education is to promote one dominant group’s interpretation of what art and literature means. That’s a lesson easily learned by someone who grew up in Slovenia under Soviet rule, and simply transferred to a new set of masters.

At departmental meetings as a temporary assistant professor at one of the low-rung state universities in Georgia, I felt smothered by the preponderance of women, all feminist, in attendance.

And that’s why I now teach at the highly prestigious Pajamas University.

The fact that I was served cookies by the department head did not ease the pain of watching an older gentlemanly "man of letters," a Shakespeare scholar, steamrollered over with the ideas of these women as they assertively proposed and incorporated such nonsense as the study of ladies' undergarments and rap lyrics into the curriculum.

Not only were they being insufficiently deferential to a man in the room, but they were proposing that the college teach poetry written by NEGROES! Can you imagine? NEGROES!

It makes me wonder if women as a group are simply not as suited to the academic or intellectual life.

I’ll go you one further, Mary old bean: it makes me wonder if women as a group are simply not suited to leaving the home at all, and instead should be shuttered in the kitchen and garret areas where they can alternately make me dinner and pine away until it is time to fulfill their intimate marital duties, as our monotheistic reason-based God intended.

Only a couple of my fifteen students last semester recognized the reference to "judge not that we be not judged" in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: "It's somewhere in the Bible, isn't it?" they asked.

What? That’s the right answer, isn’t it? Is she mad that all of them didn’t know it, or that the ones who did know it didn’t stand up straight-backed and holler “MATTHEW 7:1, SIR!”? Mary seems a lot more worried that her students know where “Judge not, that ye be not judged” comes from than she does that they know what it means; it’s certainly not a piece of Jesus’ advice that she has taken to heart.

Need we say more to demonstrate how far our educational system has deteriorated in the hands of women and weak men?

Oh, Mary, you know how it gets me hot when you use the royal ‘we’. Please say more about how dames and homos have destroyed academia. Please.

Tagged as: wing-nuts

Mister Leonard Pierce blogs for Sadly, No!