The politicization of literature? Your thoughts?

I think it will take a long time to end but it will. This time will be looked as almost a second Victorian era, but with secular, multicultural “ethics” taking the place of the Protestant middle class ethics that dominated that time. What I mean by this is that a lot of works will be seen as chastened and diminished in their merit by the prevailing mores, like the largely forgotten moralizing Bildungsromans of that era, while others that smartly transgressed these “values” and struggled as a result will gain greater acceptance.

It's absolutely true fren, we are fucked.
Maybe we will see a rise in the traditionalist and politics of the right near our last days but our sons and grandsons probably will enjoy a return to a more classical and higher quality literature.
As of now we can only keep trying to push back.
In my current year of uni all I've seen has been talks and readings of feminist/lgbt/minorities literature.

>implying
granted the data came later but it's still an optimal model for pre-utopic society

I think ok. We can only look at the past through the lens of the present, and if academics look back and see their taste has changed from that of their predecessors, that's just another part of the change. I'm not going to call it growth, or place a value on it, but I see no reason not to criticize works that have been uniformly praised for a long time, and to call attention to works that have been uniformly ignored. I don't think most literature can be evaluated in terms of objective quality.

What do you mean by "pre-utopic?" How is the nuclear family a logical step towards utopia?

It is in the interest of the billionaire class to reduce us all to an indistinct atomized mass of blue haired queers, utterly dependent on managerial-therapeutic power, constantly snitching on each other over imagined deviations from the liberal party line. The seeds of the end of the world were already there in 50s suburbia. Neoliberalism is just the logical continuation of the postwar suburban model, everything that stands in the way of total consumer mobilization and corpogovernamental control must be levelled. The nuclear family is relatively unintrusive vis a vis all the new mechanisms, legal social, propagandistic, that need to be introduced in order to facilitate liberal utopia.

I'm sure if you study literature in Saudi Arabia, it's not just a canon of old arab men, right? It's really multicultural with tons of jews and black authors and a lot of women too. Or if you study literature in China, their canon probably isn't just a bunch of dead Chinese men. It's probably really multicultural too. White europeans are the only ones who do this.

Most people in the US still arrange their families in the nuclear way, usually without planning to. I don't think the liberal party is trying to turn us all into queers, but I do think reducing the individual to an economic unit is insidious and I think one of the strikes against neoliberalism is its horrid corporate aesthetic vision for a functioning society.

"White" civilization is a nineteenth century meme. None of the great civilisations situation between Japan to Scotland considred themselves "white" before the advent of racial theories in the wake of the European colonization of Africa. The Greeks weren't "white", neither were the Romans, or for that matter the French, Italians, English and Germans until quite recently.

The term that describes what you're thinking of (to the extent that you're thinking, that is) is "Western civilization", although the term is still very debatable it at least isn't a complete historical nonsense.

>Hasn't history shown

History can hardly "show" anything in any scientific fashion, particularly given the tremendous incompleteness and biasedness of records.Some of the first and most important thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition are only known though fragments, despite said tradition having been intensely studied, and you want to make an assessment of faraway understudied civilizations from that state of affairs ? Talk about jarring epistemoogical hubris.

Basically . As someone said "the past is a foreign country", our exalted forefathers had in many respect more in common with the Persians and the Levantine than with the modern "whites" that supposedly descend from them.

Woke
Broke

The arabs were the first to translate Plato and the Quran is already originally derived from Christian and Semitic texts, so, in an academic setting, yeah it might be more than just Arab writers. It's already true in the US. We don't only read American authors, and everyone reads Plato and Homer.

Getting acquainted with the much more retined and mature Vedic philosophy for instance.

>tfw been spending the last 1.5 years in premodern academia

If "white civilization" really is that good, why would it need favoritism?

>Art has always been political

True

>in that it is reactionary

Only true in a vague sense that is disconnected from the political meaning of "reactionary". Many artists were explcitly progressive (yes, even before the twentieth century), a lot could be said to be visionary. Not to mention the reactionary/progessive division is rather modern.

Is Dante reactionary or progressive ? A close look at his works will lead you to conclude the question doesn't make sense.

>It's mostly just an aesthetic preference for what people want or imagine their neighbors to look like.

It's also a consequence of a long historical development.

I think is essentially right in his assessment. I would even wager that posterity will be at first overly harsh and prone to caricaturizing our era.

> optimal model

On what grounds and in what sense ?

"The data" itself generally doesn't tell much, what people use is interpretation of the data. And regardless of the system you would expect the traditional or status quo option to be safer than alternatives, simply because communities are prone to desincentivizing and even punishing those who choose sid alternatives.

Ah, yes, another thread about how “multiculturalists” are trying to destroy “the canon”. Very original, OP.

This. So if single parents and gay parents are consistently maligned by society, then we can't know if it's actually a better model for a family, because the data's been skewed by social bias.

Samuel Johnson's criteria for whether a work is great or not is if it remains popular long after anyone could derive any advantage from promoting it. Basically, long after the author and anyone who knows him or is related to him is dead. The whole reason the Canon exists is because it's made up of works exactly like this: works that have lasted.

So it's silly to try to add to the Canon. The Canon will add to itself, over time. Nobody can force things into the Canon.

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I would be more accepting of these peoples drive to include more minority authors if they weren't so explicitly anti-white. It's amazing how such loud racism is permitted by both teachers and students. They'll deride "old dead white authors" without the slightest bit of hesitation, and in doing so they've made it into a zero sum game. I have to defend white people and I have to fight against any attempt at including other races because if they had it their way, nobody would be reading those old white guys.

queer theory has effectively supplanted christianity as the state religion of the West. under the cover of questioning '' social bias'' you are actually claiming moral superiority and preemptibly justifying intrusive social engineering programs designed to stamp out said ''bias''.

A lot of those canonical authors, who are so influential they can sometimes be seen as unassailable, were explicitly racist. I read that impulse as a reciprocal defense mechanism. Hegel and Kant were both virulent racists, and teachers are still figuring out how to address that without purging these authors from the curriculum now that the world at large has decided that racism is bad.

>on what grounds
because children with one mother and one father vastly outperform other children in virtually all areas
>in what sense
in the sense that the equilibrium birth rate for each society is somewhere around 2.5 and unless you plan on dying out or importing foreigners to inherit your world your group is gonna need to pump out that many kids per 2 adults to continue existing

Basically this. Anything of genuine quality doesn't need these force multipliers to be appreciated. You can almost see it happening though we are too close to it to see it properly. Deep down everyone knows some woke BBC drama with underwritten characters and heavy handed politics is ephemeral.
Preface to Shakespeare is a work of genius.

This is an unrelated issue I think.
One thing I've noticed also in the vein of your comment is that many will be explicitly anti white and almost certainly post about it on Twitter, tumblr, reddit, and often will malign white people in general, but I'm a reasomably good looking outwardly conservative white guy and every one of them is super nice (even flirty) to my face. I'm at one of the most liberal schools in one of the most liberal cities in America.
No doubt theres shit talked.

There are good ethnic writers that should be included in the canon, Machado de Assis comes to mind, but they are often ignored because they didn't write their ethnic grievances in their literature and this is why multiculturalist authors value more than anything.

Hold on, you're saying that the material taught in political institutions is... political?

value*

*arbitrarily defined

How many of soi-disant canon-defenders in this thread have read at least half of the books from Bloom’s list?

this 'bias' is nebulous, invisible but somehow all pervasive and absolute moral certainty comes from countering 'bias'. does this sound like the politics of a self interested managerial priesthood caste? All criteria are thrown out because they are relative and biased, the only thing that's left for us is to be reduced to a single homogenous mass of blue haired queers, deconstructed into nothingness, no history no religion, no philosophy, just polyamorous beings existing in a flacid state of narcissism and complete 'equality'. What if I reject your end of history and choose struggle?

There's more of a paradox here than you're granting. Eliminating "bias" or "prejudice" is a project which would require everyone to admit the inherent value of everyone else's lifestyle. This would require people to trivialize their own values, but would also seem to cause more variety in lifestyle options. So it's a mixed bag and actually impossible to do.

>What if I reject your end of history and choose struggle?

Maybe you should rather choose to stop being a mouthbreather who imagines himself as a noble defender of Western culture while posting on a Malaysian basket-weaving forum?

listen, i'm going to report you if you quote my post but don't actually reply to what it says

The canon has been added to deliberately, though. Shakespeare and Homer, most notably, were canonized thanks to the efforts of the romanticists. Other writers are canonical thanks to the deliberately conservative classicism or schooling that forces entire generations of people to read them.

Eh, I'd say that's bullshit, because neither of those philosophers' racism really mattered in their work. It can be ignored or noted in passing.

>I have to defend white people and I have to fight against any attempt at including other races because if they had it their way, nobody would be reading those old white guys.
Calm down with the megalomania

I don't even care about 'western culture', it was 'western culture' that got us into this mess. Shitlibs are just the continuation of the universalist dialectic of christian slave morality. I don't want to go back to the good ol days of classical liberalism, let alone christianity. I choose to break out of history through a pure assertion of will. That's what I like the term 'cultural marxism' because it pisses all the right people off.

You're just a little shit aren't you.

I was completely with you until the fascism part. I'd go with a sort of decentralized state with a court of sorts to produce high culture with only soft power

>Calm down with the megalomania
What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Not him, but you have seemingly taken up the mantle of defending dead white guys from being purged from the canon. These dead white guys are receiving different kinds of criticism, and, in some cases, are receiving negative criticism for the first time in academia, but none of them are being purged from the canon. Part of this is that just because something is deemed "problematic" does not make it "forbidden" or "low-quality." It's also because academic study is largely about analyzing the kinds of work certain texts are meant to be doing in and out of context, not necessarily about qualitative evaluation of the texts.

Short answer, those white guys are not under attack in the way that you think they are, and you personally, as an individual, do not need to defend them.

It means that you could/should stop imagining yourself as the sole Alamo-like defender of the glorious white culture against the hordes of illiterate book-burning niggers.

>The canon has been added to deliberately, though. Shakespeare and Homer, most notably, were canonized thanks to the efforts of the romanticists.

Bullshit, Johnson's whole idea comes from the preface he wrote to his edition of Shakespeare, which came out in 1765. Shakespeare was already considered part of the "canon," at least in the English language, by that point.

That's what I hate the most about shitlibs. Their worldview is christian-like, but lacks the sense of redemption. No tragedy either. They can't do irony because they deny even the possibility of truth. So the only thing that's left to them is hollow 'snark' an expression of ressentiment. They regress to childhood, to harry potter and schoolyard formulas repeated over and over, for they are children who can't deal with death, can't deal with Truth and the neccessary correlation with conflict and enmity.

it's book burning queers and managerial shitlibs. If they could get to know you better, working class blacks would hate you as much as we do.

I'm I didn't think the post was really worth responding to. After all the handwringing about "they're gonna make me a blue-haired queer" the guy talks about his own real beliefs and they amount to "I don't believe in anything, my aim is to transcend history in order to trigger libs."

I'm actually pretty jaded with liberalism, but this is just fucking stupid.

> if it remains popular long after anyone could derive any advantage from promoting it

But many people derive profit from promoting Shakespeare, some people even make a living from it. Heck a good deal of the Shakespeare shilling by the French romantics was so that they would have a historical precedent to oppose to classicism.

The point I was making is that because they make diversity into a zero sum game, I'm forced to act tribal when I would otherwise accept minority authors. I'm not making myself out to be some defender of civilization and that's a ridiculous interpretation that can only come from reading the sentences I wrote in isolation from each other.

All hail user.

>under the cover of questioning '' social bias'' you are actually claiming moral superiority

I am not claiming any moral superiority, I'm actually as depraved as your own mother. Still social bias must be questionned, including the ones prevalent in circles that claim to denounce mainstream social bias.

>preemptibly justifying

I' not justifying anything I'd rather argue that universities studies of literature, including in progressive departments, are mostly unjustified and have been for decades.

Literary brilliance and audacity have never been the exclusive property of academia.

what did you think of Sargon's new video?

>all of my political views are rooted in fear of people who dye their hair

>I live in fear of blue-haired queers

I used to be a pretty standard marxist and only got into Far Right politics after reading up on Situationism, Baudrillard, Lasch on the culture of narcissism, Paul Gottfried(Paleoconservative, richard b spencer's old mentor, a fan of both Lasch and Hegel), Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres on the War-Exchange dichotomy. In short, conflict is the nature of politics, struggle is the nature of life, to be a fascist is to take like seriously. Liberalism annihilates the human. I support all enemies of the current order (the counted few of them) and respect islamic jihadists way more than I do American conservatives.

>because children with one mother and one father vastly outperform other children in virtually all areas

But what are the alternatives ? People raised by single parents ? If your argument is "nuclear family is da best because they outperform failed nuclear families" I'm afraid your reasoning is flawed. We need a broader basis for comparisons.

>in the sense that the equilibrium birth rate for each society is somewhere around 2.5

What does "equiibrium birth rate" means here ? If you're talking about the minimal birth rate necessary for sustained population renewal it's closer to 2.1 but most importantly what does it have to do with the nuclear family ? Societies in which children were communally raised actually had higher birth rate than the mostly "nuclear family" West of today.

> that many kids per 2 adults

It's actually a per women number. For demographic purposes it matters little that your mom had 13 children from a variety of men in the neighborhood rather than 13 children from your father.

>I'm a reasomably good looking outwardly conservative white guy and every one of them is super nice (even flirty) to my face

I expected as much t.b.h. I've seen antisemitic girls flirt outrageously with handomse jewish students. People gonna be people and a lot of ideologies are merely taken as hobbies. Give them that conservative d user.

A lot of well-read authors weren't aware of most people is this list. Canon-fetichizing is cringe, you just have to show appreciation for the great things youv' been lucky to read.

Also this .

>Shakespeare was already considered part of the "canon," at least in the English language, by that point.

What else was considered part of the English canon at that point, and how much of it is still well-regarded to this day ?

Walter Scott was highly praised by people from France to Italy to Germany in his time, including by Goethe who ranked him on par with Shakespeare (this was also the time when Shakeseare started getting a lot of hype outside of England).

People who did this mostly didn't derive any benefit from it, most were even too removed from Scott (let alone Shakespeare) to even have a personal involvement in his success. Yet he was "canonized", until he mostly fell out of relevance, and now only Shakespeare remains as one of the canonical godheas.

From that example you see Johnson's argument describes only a small part of the picture.

I tend to be of the view that politics are defined by a dichotomy between conflict and co-operation. Everybody has a group vying for power, but, at the same time, people live together in societies largely out of a sense that it can be mutually beneficial for those involved. I'm kind of in-between ideologies right now, but my sympathies skew left. Haven't read enough political writing, and I can't stand neoliberalism.

If you are not into political theory just listen to neofolk and noise music until you get it
youtube.com/watch?v=a04yy3Mv6BY

The example of Scott exactly proves Johnson's point. You can't force a meme for centuries

Nobody cares about what people considered themselves. Nobody considered themselves "homo sapiens" until modern taxonomy and evolutionary theory was developed. That doesn't mean that we weren't a population of a particular kind of biological species.

I hate pseud deconstructionist arguments trying to deny basic facts of reality. Face it, Mozart wasn't black, Newton wasn't black, Shakespeare wasn't black, and Africa contributed little to intellectual achievement. It doesn't make you a demon to recognize that truth.

>Nobody cares about what people considered themselves
Yeah, but you clearly care about linking your cultural heritage with that of Mozart, and placing it in competition with African culture, as though these were actually two competing entities. You don't have to hate or derogate African culture to like, appreciate or promote Mozart. Participating in this kind of cultural dick-measuring is reductionist and counter-productive.

I don't hate them, I pity them and don't want to be like them. I am not afraid of the queers per se, I am afraid of the system that is making us all into queers. Now I understand why William Burroughs was a republican and an NRA member. Criminal immigrant youth are as close as you can get to the homeric ideal of fully integrated life and manly virtue within the confines of this feminized and bureacratic society. shitlibs are not 'postmodernists' they are enlightenment freaks, who think they can regulate Being into non existence.

I think you're strawmanning here. I don't think the "shit-libs" and the blue-haired queers" are even the same people. I'd say that shit-libs want tacit approval from queer people, and that queer people are so alienated from the right-wing that they're somewhat willing to give that tacit approval, even though they actually can't stand libs. None of those blue-haired queers turned out to vote for Clinton for instance, because she was so obviously disingenuous even in her watered down, feel-good feminism.

>you clearly care about linking your cultural heritage with that of Mozart
Not particularly. I'm not a white nationalist, nor do I believe in any other meme-like ideologies. Try assuming less.
>You don't have to hate or derogate African culture to like, appreciate or promote Mozart.
I don't hate African culture. There are nuggets here and there to appreciate. The University of Sankore here, some interesting post-colonial literature there, and a wealth of anthropological case studies that have yet to be fully tapped. But would I want the wholesale replacement of Western culture with African culture because some derelict feels immense hatred towards his own people? No, because that would objectively lead to a degradation of society.

No, first an example can't prove a general rule, only disprove it, second it would only abide by Johnson's rule if Scott's fade had fade after anyone had any vested interest in promoting him, which wasn't the case. So while Johnson had insight, (his remark applies in part to Shakespeare and many other great) there are still lot of situations he didn"t cover.

>You can't force a meme for centuries

Very debatable, I remember one of my literature prof (who was well-versed in greek literature) argue that Sade was merely a meme, heck there is one contemporary philosopher who like to argue Hume was just a sophist. These kind of opinion are minoritary but far from fringe or negligible.

And still that doesn't account for the influence of institutions in promoting writers (would Virgil be that important if he hadn't written the political etiology of the Roman Empire, and if copist monks hadn't mistaken one of his works for a announcement of Christ's birth ?).

Nor does it account for why some greats have wavering popularity for decades after their death before being canonized, or sometimes are canonized then left out for decades then canonized again.

So you want to efface all particularity? Maybe that's why your ideology meshes so well with corporate interests. You are not a relativist skeptic like those of the 18th century but a militant absolutist hiding behind relativism.

>anyone had any vested interest in promoting him
This isn't what Johnson says at all. Just read the Preface, as he addresses exactly the points you raise. I know this is Yea Forums and we don't actually read what we discuss, but ffs it's short.
>Whatever advantages he might once derive from personal allusions, local customs, or temporary opinions, have for many years been lost; and every topick of merriment or motive of sorrow, which the modes of artificial life afforded him, now only obscure the scenes which they once illuminated. The effects of favour and competition are at an end; the tradition of his friendships and his enmities has perished; his works support no opinion with arguments, nor supply any faction with invectives; they can neither indulge vanity nor gratify malignity, but are read without any other reason than the desire of pleasure, and are therefore praised only as pleasure is obtained; yet, thus unassisted by interest or passion, they have past through variations of taste and changes of manners, and, as they devolved from one generation to another, have received new honours at every transmission
Also De Sade is a meme who is little read, again supporting Johnson's position

You're right that I made an assumption, but you make a lot of them. I don't think the institutions promoting "diversity" are seeking to replace "Western culture" with African culture. The most exposure the average Westerner has to Africa is in the Lion King and they wouldn't even be able to tell you what region it's located in. Most of the "diversity" literature in the US is by black American writers or occasionally by Latin or Latino Americans. I don't know of anyone, liberal or leftist, who actually advocates for the wholesale replacement of Western culture with African, at least outside of edgy tweets, which are mostly written by undergrads.

>Sade is little read
But he is still canon, and he still comes up a lot in academia. Being kind of obscure is not the same as being out of the canon.

its worse, shitlibs want to replace all cultures with fake puppet cultures that are actually just shitlibbery with superficial ethnic signifiers attached.

I don't think "shitlibs" honestly care about that. Anybody actually participating in liberal culture has this erroneous idea that all cultures are equally beneficial because they are all essentially the same. If all cultures are beneficial, it ought to be based on differences, and what those differences outline. Really, the shitlibs just want to confirm their already held prejudice that all people are the same, and all people have the same capacity to function as self-contained economic units, and their cultural views have to reflect this. It's a garbage ideology, but its not the ideology of modern academia, or at least of all the academics themselves.

>I don't think the institutions promoting "diversity" are seeking to replace "Western culture" with African culture
lol. have you been living under a rock over the past 30 years? that + what mentioned is exactly what's going on.

I've been in liberal institutions promoting diversity my whole life and I can barely name 2 African authors off the top of my head, and even fewer Africans who aren't authors. Are you proposing that the plan is just going terribly, because neither public schools nor private universities are really taking to this kind of indoctrination your describing.

Dude, do you think there is like an official canon to which writers are elected in perpetuity? Like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or something? When we say a writer is canonical all we mean is that we believe him to be canonical.

The opposite. I'm saying the criteria that he presented, that Sade is little read, is unfounded and unverifiable. Sade is canon because academics still talk about him a fair amount, and he's certainly more recognizable than Scott, or plenty of other relatively forgotten English authors.

>Nobody cares about what people considered themselves

Why would you not care, since this is part of how historical categories are made ? Sure you can't take ancient identification at face value, but the fact they had nothing close to the category you call "white" despite having closely analyzed their own culture for centuries should give you a hint that something is wrong.

>Nobody considered themselves "homo sapiens" until modern taxonomy and evolutionary theory was developed.

Homo sapiens is just a modern biological term for "human". It really doesn't introduce a distinction that wasn't widely used before, except if you consider the distinction between say sapiens and neanderthal, which is moot since the existence of neanderthal was also ignored before the rise of modern taxonomy.

"White" cuts populations and civilization around supposed race lines that weren't part of intellectual discourse until a couple centuries ago and most importantly don't reflect how cultures exchanged and worked in the past. It's entirely a terminological sleight of hand, trying to claim centuries of histories and cultural achievements for a category that wasn't relevant or even defined until it way after the majority of said achievements were consolidated.

The fact that the center of "white civilization" is Northern Europe and that the pinnacle of "whiteness" is held to be German (or sometimes Nordic) peoples, despite most of the cultural trends associated with "whites" having started in the Mediterraneans, by people (the Greeks) who were closer to the Egyptians and the Persians than the German in pretty much all respect shows how much that interpretation owes to silly revisionism.

Your argument is basically '"let's ignore the history of cultural exchange of creation that defined and allowed for the very things we admire, and instead let's look at a few skulls with nineteenth century medical tools and pretend this is how you do history".

>I hate pseud deconstructionist arguments trying to deny basic facts of reality.

And I hate pseud theorizers that can't even tell the difference between a half-baked concept and an observable fact.

The fact that you take my critcism as subservise deconstruction instead of a simple historical and methodological objection (the same kind objection that has been the bread of butter of serious historical investigation for centuries) shows enough of your inability to engage critically with theories.

>Face it, Mozart wasn't black, Newton wasn't black, Shakespeare wasn't black

What is that supposed to prove ? If you're aren't black you must be white ? There are no continents beside Western Europe and Africa ? If I pretend people who wear tweed are superior to people who don't and I give three exemples of great men who wore tweed I have proved that "tweedom" is the superior category ?

We're not dealing with a political controversy here. It's about the simple ability to grasp the logical implications of an argument.

Also before you try to meme me with a

>but white skin is observable

we all know it's not really about skin color (many Berbers and Uighurs have white skin, but they're not part of "white civilization" are they ? while many Greek, Roman or Italian positively look like Arabs).

Heck the American had their one-drop rule that made could make one technically black even if one had essentially white skin. Even though in South Africa the same person would be considered white.

The whole thing is a terminological shitfest that only really applies as a distinction between descendant of slaves and descendant of free men in Western Europe and the US. If you want to use the folk distinction of "this person has clear skin/dark skin/brown skin/yellow skin" then it's only useful for banter and has little to do with the whole civilizatio business.

Thank you good post

>So you want to efface all particularity?

No absolutely not, but I'd gladly efface people who can't read a simple Yea Forums post.

> Maybe that's why your ideology meshes so well with corporate interests.

My ideology regarding corporations is strive to get paid by them without giving them anything valuble in return. But it has nothing to do with the current debate. Reread my post perhaps ?

>This isn't what Johnson says at all.

I was obviously answering user's summary of Johnson. It was my mistake in keeping using his name when I should have made clear I was engaging with user quoting him.

>Also De Sade is a meme who is little read

Not so sure about that, after all the same could be said of Joyce and he's still very much part of the canon.

About Johnson's actual argument: it accounts for Scott's being praised and forgotten, but it doesn't apply that well to many canonical authors (including perhaps Shakespeare, so I'll have to take back my statement that the argument worked for him).

The main problem is it fails to recognize that even long-dead authors can be recuperated by fashion and ideologies, and that once an author has been propelled to sufficient fame for long enough he's liable to be recuperated again and again for various motives, or if he has been relegated to a secondary rank he's liable to be exalted once again (see Shakespeare for the first case, and Racine for the second).

And this also goes for political recuperation (see the interesting case of Cicero who was always famous but was at some point used as a stalwart against the Church by the French republicanists).

See also how Hugo became the official poet of French republicanism in his lifetime and never really ceased to be after that, perhaps because France has mainly been a Republic since his death, and also because he was taught in schools. Or, again, Virgil successive exaltation by Roman for political motives and Christian for religious motives.

TL;DR: My objection is that politics and fashion are always susceptible to matter in the destiny of a dead author, even if he died centuries ago, even if he was already canonical (if anything a guy being canonical makes him a better target for recuperation, and likewise for vilification). So Johnson's argument is insightfulnbut the idea that some innate liteary quality is all that's left to support a work past some point strikes me as idealistic.

>he thinks that literature is the only facet of culture
just because you weren't an English major doesn't mean the effects aren't all around you. Flip on the fucking TV. Turn on the fucking radio. Look at demographic trends. Stop being dense.

>Why would you not care
Because unless the context specifically calls for what people called themselves, it isn't particularly relevant in understanding the genealogy of ideas and cultural norms. The history of ideas, genetic distributions, etc. generally do not care about how you name one particular segment of the population or another.

>Homo sapiens is just a modern biological term for "human"
And "white" is just a modern cultural term for "of broadly European descent". Are the people on the left "white"?

>that weren't part of intellectual discourse until a couple centuries ago
Not relevant. Gravity wasn't a part of intellectual discourse until a few centuries ago, therefore it isn't real. That is how stupid your deconstructionist argument is.

>It's entirely a terminological sleight of hand
Just because you have a very hard time processing a chain of cause of effect does not mean it is a sleight of hand, any more than the a person's inability to solve a calculus problem is the fault of deceiving mathematicians.

>how much that interpretation owes to silly revisionism.
I don't care about how past ideologues classified populations based off of their own political beliefs instead of scientific fact. Do we now distrust astronomy because Tycho Brahe's geocentric model was promoted over Nicholas Copernicus's more correct model of heliocentrism?

>Your argument is basically
I'll cut you off right there. Your argument is basically "people in the past did not have the right answers to this particular issue, therefore the issue itself is the problem", which, if you applied to any field of inquiry, would mean that you would have to discard every single fact that we hold true. You don't understand the ramifications of your "methodological" attack, let alone understand the "history" that it supposedly is based on.

>And I hate pseud theorizers that can't even tell the difference between a half-baked concept and an observable fact.
And there is the demonstration of self-hatred that I mentioned earlier. Lazy deconstruction is a vapid pseud approach. I have no time for it.

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I am an English major you fucking idiot. My curriculum included Shakespeare, Chaucer and Beowuld. In high school we read Catcher in the Rye, Animal Farm, and The Great Gatsby. Rap music is on the radio, and it's not African and TV is mostly reality shows about rich MILFs, backwoods alligator hunters, and fat guys who own pawn shops. Most of my friends on the left are white. Most of the posts you're responding to in this post aren't me, so I'll ignore those.

Why do you quote and respond to individual sentences? It's such a fucking eyesore.

>My curriculum included Shakespeare, Chaucer and Beowuld.
Congratulations on going to one of the least compromised academic departments in the country then.

>Rap music is on the radio, and it's not African
lol

>TV is mostly reality shows about rich MILFs, backwoods alligator hunters, and fat guys who own pawn shops
do you only watch the History Channel

>Most of my friends on the left are white.
"I live in a cultural bubble so mainstream culture does not exist"

>t. butthurt that his argument is being destroyed point by point

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It's really not. English departments in colleges mostly teach authors who wrote IN ENGLISH. I have not been taught a single African author in my entire career as a student. Not even Chinua Achebe, no Somali epic poetry, not even fucking folktales. If you were just inundated with African writers in high school and college why don't you name some?

Rap music isn't African. Art by black US citizens is not African art, it's American, because those people are Americans. I maintain my original stance that the average Westerner (including black Americans) only knows Africa from charity commercials and the Lion King, and that should tell you all you need to know about Africa's influence on "our" culture.

>it’s another thread about politics disguised as a thread about literature

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Hmmm, people studying books written in the English language are mysteriously surprised to learn they tend to be written by mostly English people, who are, believe it or not, of English or Scotish or Irish ethnicity and not Chinese or Dutch or Nigerian. So strange!

They didn't invent much on their own, but they invaded far and wide. Sure they translated Greek texts....after destroying about 90% of them.

maybe if leftists irl didn't politicize aesthetics across a broad spectrum of mediums we wouldn't have this problem.

>The arabs were the first to translate Plato
This is a bullshit meme made up by the current powers that dominate academia. Read any history of the era, and you find out it was the Sassanids (Persians) that were the ones that kept the western tradition alive. They had a vast library, translation, and scholarship system that was tied up with the Persian elite education. The Arabs had nothing to do with any of it, apart from conquering the Sassanids and getting access to the libraries.