Check out the editorial in [Tues 29 Sept] Australian.

It’s a typically blimpy fulmination about falling standards in education, a decline fostered — wouldn’t you know it! — by those pesky activists from the sixties and seventies. All the one-time revolutionaries have become, you see, schoolteachers, just so they can prevent impressionable students from reading real books (and thus, presumably, steer them down the path of Mao Tsetung).

The editorialist, working himself up into the requisite state of faux outrage, explains:

“…the days when Year 12 English in Victoria was deliberately demanding, requiring students to engage with half a dozen classic novels, plays and poets are long gone….”

Why is the Oz so keen on Great Books?

“…If students have to work hard to grasp the meaning of texts that come from a different time, they may realise that the whole world cannot be understood according to the conventions of TV, video games, or conform to fashionable political pieties…”

This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever. If the point is to force students to work hard to grasp the meaning of texts in order to challenge conventions, well, they’d be far better off studying novels from Nigeria than the dreary Leavisite canon.

But logic doesn’t matter as the article ticks one old fogey box after another on its way to the inevitable blustery conclusion.

“… Instead of a focus on understanding classic texts, there is now an emphasis on acquiring competencies, analysing websites and interpreting meaning in the media. The looser is literature…”

Um…that would be ‘loser‚Äô, guys. Back to the books, perhaps.

(Apologies to Amanda, the anti-pedant pedant.)

Is there a newspaper thingy? Ok bye

I would say that most people teaching literature in English in Australia actually teach very much broader ranges of writers, modes, and periods than the silly idea of Great Books which seems to animate people like Brendan Nelson. Those who do teach these writers generally do so in ways that certainly don’t suggest these texts possess some kind of medicinal powers. I find it impossible to teach Shakespeare, Melville, Henry James without acknowledging the queerness of their writings

Not while Family First has a senate seat.

You’re heading in the right direction there M’Lord.

“‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman‚Äô by Angela Carter”

I liked the book so much I wrote a song about it. Fuck, it was exhausting to perform it on stage though.

That’s not what I’m saying, yer lawdship. That’s not what anyone says, as far as I can tell.

I’m saying that many people seek out representation as one of the keys to enjoying literature and it is significantly easier for white men to find that representation in the canon than it is for women, non-white people, gays and lesbians, etc.

That doesn’t mean one doesn’t read wonderful literature by people who are not like you. It just means that all of us seek resonance in the art we enjoy, whether it’s pop music or opera. Women’s desire to read books by other women, about other women, comes from that. It’s not about exclusion it’s about inclusion.

‘Martha Quest’ by Doris Lessing.
‘Alias Grace’ by Margaret Atwood
‘The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman’ by Angela Carter
‘Horace Sippog and the Siren’s Song’ by Su Walton.

All women.

Smugly virtuous me, just like Malvolio. (Now there’s a play - Twelfth Night - that you couldn’t say is ‘difficult’.)

You’re right about Shaw. Shame. St Joan is fabulous. Never was that big on Pygmalion, though (maybe My Fair Lady put me off it).

Amis’ “The Green Man” is a better read than “Lucky Jim” IMHO.

Kate, Kingsley Amis (in his own inimitable way) said that when it came to reading he considered himself homosexual. I think many people feel the same way. I’d rather read Lucky Jim again than the Bell Jar. But I would also feel myself impoverished if I hadn’t read the female-authored classics and much else besides.