I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).

Well, that’s where I’m suspicious, as I indicated in my last comment.

I know nothing about the NSW curriculum, and thank you for for the info, but if students were doing Patrick White instead of, say, Thomas Hardy (who I read in Senior), why is it necessarily the case that the same brainstretching and consciousness of temporality doesn’t occur? Hardy’s texts are to put it bluntly more straightforward to read even though they’re older, and it actually doesn’t take a lot of historical acuity to understand them. In a way, I suspect Frank Hardy would be harder to read in this sense than rural novels - because his urban Australia really is stranger than the typical 19th century novel - which (and here’s the problem with the high/low distinction again) in any case we all have a template for reading derived from costume drama - cf. a lot of the recent debate about contemporary appreciation of Austen.

I also think, as usual, this comment over-estimates how far you actually can stretch a high school mind. I used to get the English prize every year (Oh noes! I sound like JG!) and I was well taught from what in the mid 80s was a pretty traditional curriculum. I don’t think I really understood anything much about motivations, mores, practices, et, in Elizabethan England until much later in life. I was translating Shakespeare into a modernist frame, if you like.

I think it would be an exceptional, really rare English teacher who could teach even bright students the way you’d like.

In any case, usually calls for teaching the canon are dehistoricising and decontextualising. There’s a big difference between Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare and a formalist Shakespeare who speaks to eternal verities or “pathos” or whatever.

In NSW, the highest level of Year 12 English is Extension 2, which takes up four units (or up to 40% of your total study in all subjects). You can get do all four units without doing a single canonical or pre-20th century.

What’s scarier is that you can also get a 3 year degree in English literature without doing any. You just pick the “hollywood or bust!” units.

I don’t buy the snobby distinction between high and low culture. However, some texts just require more brainsmarts than others. Shakespeare, Camus and Joyce pose complex reflexive questions, demand abstract reasoning, juggle concepts, play complex language games AND/OR require historical insight to an extent that Big Brother doesn’t. I’m deliberately using opposite extremes, but it makes heuristic sense as an explanation of a continuum (actually, that’s still a simplification: many continuums of multiple cognitive requirements).

Why do current reading lists have such a fixation with the present? We already have the cultural coding to understand most Western contemporary popular texts, at least on the basic level. But for texts from another historical period, we need to learn a whole new conceptual scheme. This is hard work, but it helps stretch the imagination and promotes a critical, reflexive attitude conscious of it’s own temporality.

BTW - Bourdieu found that tastes correlate with socio-economic positions, and that cultural production is wound up with power. However, he did NOT think all texts are equally good or challenging.

I defy you to find somebody asserting this:
“these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.�

See my point about hyperbole.

Of course, JG’s comments are valuable in one way because the absurdity of the false dichotomy really does show through because it’s so exaggerated.

Ie - if the kiddies aren’t learning Plato, they must be learning how to wash plates.

I defy you to find somebody asserting this:
“these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.�

Even better, how Wagner’s early operas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and/or Mozart’s treatment of these issues might help us understand Princess Diana’s celluloid mythography.

For that matter, what’s the relevance of any of this to Diana? Just that there is pathos? Though I don’t know what’s meant by “Mozart’s treatment of these issues”. What issues? Issues raised by Plato? Which ones? Please cite or explain.

Diana as postmodern Antigone

Have you read or seen Antigone? Where’s the parallel?

over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy

What influence?

I am sure Andreas Huyssens - Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univeristy - 1984 article “Mapping the post-modern� in that rag - New German Critique - to which only illiterates and philistines contribute, will be crushed that he “knows nothing of Barthes!� Given Professor Huyssens’ fluency in six languages - including French - should I forward him your contact details so you might give him a tutorial?

I note your previous comment that to recite a list of qualifications and titles is an argument from authority and no reliable indicator of the strength of an argument, with which I (but not you, it seems) agree.

The comment that no one can understand Derrida without knowledge of “Attic Greek” is nonsense. And the Septaguint (but not “The Bible”) was written in Koine Greek. You’ve made similar arguments before and they’re still wrong. It may be better to read Derrida in French but you don’t need to be a polymath to understand him. Just intelligent.

It’s also quite wrong to say this:

His whole shtick against logocentrism is rooted in his anti-Christianity.

In any case, I’m not discussing Derrida but rather asking a perfectly reasonable question about why it matters that politicians or citizens don’t have shared references from the Bible. In any case, the point of the quotation presumably refers to biblical allusions, not decades of study of Biblical hermeneutics or exegesis.

Your comments about philosophers would have more credibility if they demonstrated that you understood argument. Derrida was sometimes (wrongly) criticised for privileging rhetoric over logic. If that’s to be a postmodern luvvie, it seems to me that you stand self-accused.

Someone raised the question earlier on, of whether or not there was a good (and reasonably ‘objective’) example in music of the transcendent, qua transcendent, independent of pathos.

I reckon the King’s College Boy’s Choir in the Rolling Stones’ Can’t Always Get What You Want must come close! J But why the antipathy towards pathos? If only CultiStudies tutorials trilled with passionate debate over the influence on The New Testament of pathos in fifth century Athenian tragedy, particularly in light of Plato’s criticisms - Book X, The Republic - Aristotle’s thumbs up in Poetics and Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy. Even better, how Wagner’s early operas, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and/or Mozart’s treatment of these issues might help us understand Princess Diana’s celluloid mythography. Diana as postmodern Antigone, per chance?

j_p_z

I’m working with what is primarily an aesthetic-philosophical (viz., mainly aesthetic, but derived from the philosophical) idea of the transcendent, but also perhaps an idiosyncratic one, as it also derives from my personal experiences with same; there’d be more to say on all this, but I’m trying to keep it brief.

Far from idiosyncratic. It is precisely this Einfuhlung that is at the centre of Bourdieu’s analysis of bourgeois HC as “elective distance from the necessities of the natural and social world.â€? Indeed Bordieu would see your rejection of the transcendent in favour of the philosophical and formalist as ‘taking the bourgeois denial of the social world to its limit.’ As you suggest, we could spend an eternity debating this, but I am going to stick to my original claim that transcendence is ultimately rooted in religion. Until recently, I thought I wanted to go into Neuroscience. The two areas I was obsessed with were memory loss and trying to identify neural pathways for religion. But I am sure this is an area you have thought about a thousand times more deeply and knowledgably than I have. But we can still have a cracking discussion even with that difference sin-binned for now.;)

Personally I think pathos, or other appeals to human feeling, is a perfectly useful tool for an artist working legitimately in these avenues (Hamlet, ‘Don Giovanni’ and indeed most of Mozart, Schubert and Wagner come to mind), but it’s useful to exclude these things here because they bring up issues of subjectivity and personal taste.

But then you also must ignore artistic intent and again, to use Bourdieu, the processes by which you, yourself, have been initiated into Hamlet and Mozart, which you can never hermetically seal from affect, no matter how hard you try.

I think further helpful criteria are to exclude the specifically verbal (e.g. opera), as well as work with a specific programmatic or subtextual purpose (say, religious music, triumphant music, or the explicitly lyrical).

These points are profound and are at the core of Nietzsche.

Klaus K

Yes, very amusing, John Greenfield, but said wag was a cheap point-scorer who knew nothing of Barthes

I am sure Andreas Huyssens - Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia Univeristy - 1984 article “Mapping the post-modern� in that rag - New German Critique - to which only illiterates and philistines contribute, will be crushed that he “knows nothing of Barthes!� Given Professor Huyssens’ fluency in six languages - including French - should I forward him your contact details so you might give him a tutorial?

According to the model put forward by glen

As I said, glen’s model is only accessible by the new bourgeois gatekeepers, to which you perhaps aspire? While they peer through their opera spectacles at the great unwashed burping, farting, and hooning before translating into Peppe Le Pew (though mediated through the English language gobbledegook of several Dawkins University types), the Great Unwashed must remain sequestered in their forums of burping, farting, and hooning. The Pepes nibble on nouvelle cuisine, while their subjects of vivisection woof down meat and potatoes.

Katz

But Paulus, no one talked much about canons etc until F. R. Leavis came along.

While this might be true, it does not mean that canons were only created with Leavis. In fact, canons have existed since at least fifth century BCE Greece and China. Plato spends much time advocating a change of canon suitable for his philosopher-ruled Republic. He specifically wanted to banish Homer and the tragic poets! In Republican Rome, during the first century BCE, all students were prescribed the same curriculum to be taught in the same order: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Attic Greek was at the centre. By the late fourth century CE this sort of education had declined. St. Augustine was one of the few who still received such an education.

Canons existed throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and of course the rediscovery of Attic (and Koine) Greek manuscripts changed the canon once more during the Renaissance. Shakespeare himself was schooled in Latin, rhetoric, and such. Edward Said wrote a whole book on the European canon - Orientalism - from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; a canon, Said himself, was exclusively educated in. Australia’s first university - Sydney - was established (1850s I think)with a fixed curriculum: Mathematics, Theology, Classics (Greek and Latin)

Mark

Until the early 1950s a politician could quote the Bible and expect people to know what he was alluding to. No longer.

And that’s a problem? Why?

Mark, Western Culture is incomprehensible without The Bible!. Try understanding Derrida without it! His whole shtick against logocentrism is rooted in his anti-Christianity. It is also the source of his gravest errors. I am still only nudging my way through him, but I think I have got his number already, and there is absolutely no way any person can competently read Derrida without knowledge of The Bible and Attic Greek. From what I have read of Derrida so far, throwing him at kids who have little exposure to challenging literature, particularly poetry, let alone absolutely no exposure to Greek, Latin, or French, psychology, philosophy, history, and so on is just a WOFTM. Why would an extremely challenging and slippery trickster like Derrida be dumped onto Australian undergraduate Humanities and Social Science students? Given their High School training, they simply are nowhere near being able to deal with it.

I have friends who did English Honours in the 1980s and they say they The Bible was compulsory. Nowadays, they are more likely to take courses in Creative Writing or How Bad Whitey Really Is as Discoursed by a Transgendered Subaltern.

It reminds me of the way that public school gentlemen used to chuck in untranslated tags from Horace to show they had a good classical education.

Reminds you? How long ago did you move in these circles? Are you sure that was their motivation? What about those who “chuck in un/translated tags� from Pepes Le Pew? Or bang on about “The Other?�

Thanks for your words of encouragement. However, I do not “ask for it.� One of the great - if unpleasant - insights I have got from LP and similar blogs is the cruel reality of what I call “discursive terrorism� typical of Leftist Culture Warriors. But that is a WHOLE different post. I am intrigued by this “ficto-critical� genre you mention. And who are these “post-Cultistudies� types? I’m now VERY intrigued. It has provoked me to write some more shit in that style. Even if only to make Pussy Feel Good Nabakov blow another gasket.
However, I want to address your points re the Arnoldian Project (shall we call it “AP� from now on? J

I also went to High School in the 1980s, before the barbarians descended. While you are correct to note the existence of ’literature as civilising’ trope, it was not necessary for a justification of that curriculum, which I argue can be justified on purely practical grounds. It did force one to read people who actually wrote beautifully constructed sentences, used powerful metaphors, and so on, that we ourselves might use or be inspired by in our everyday communication. I am particularly passionate about this for working-class and indeed all subaltern types, because it enfranchises one outside the rough and ready demands of survival on the margins. A breather from Ribald, Bawdy, and Rugby League Week if you will.

As I said above, much of my passionate objection to the postit Ghastlies is that they are constructing the Road to Barbarism; encouraging a return to medievalism, whereby the vast majority of cultural serfs will be locked out of HC - which will be transmitted by only the most elite private schools and universities - just like the Dark and Middle Ages.

For people in Macquarie Fields, Sunshine, etc to be taught the Romantic poets, be exposed to Hamlet’s anguish, and the felicitous locutions of Jane Austen’s observations on the - otherwise breathtakingly tedious - machinations of early 19th century English gentry can surely only be a bonus on top of what is being produced and reproduced outside the school gate.

It is a crime to argue, “these people should be taught more ’relevant’ things to their day to day lives, such as bus-tickets and the ethics of turkey-slapping. It will give them self-esteem.� What patronising onanistic nonsense. Even on a political level AP is justified as it develops critical skills and in the argot that will bring a smile to the Luvvie, the chance to see “Self in Other.�
The culture-war heat over the last few years about English curricula, at seconday and tertiary levels, seems to turn on a sense of lost literary value, and as a consequence, lost contact with the best that has been thought and said (Arnold’s project).

I think you are right here, but it is a justifiable lament.

On the one hand the stakes are about gatekeeping positions: who gets to decide what has cultural value; which producers-authors are authorised to produce valuable culture.

Again, you are right that there are some forces threatened their gatekeeper role might be usurped, but again, we can still support AP without necessarily supporting the gatekeepers. I think if we looked at High School English syllabuses from 1950 to 1990, we would find a HUGE number of texts being offered, far too wide to support a ’gatekeeper’ hegemony.

But the values themselves are important

No they are not. I agree with Oscar Wilde, “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.� And there would be few more thoroughly drenched in AP than Wilde!

In my field of OzLit a novel like Grenville’s ‘The Secret River’ can be evaluated against Alexis Wright’s ‘Carpentaria’. Both are concerned with frontier conflict and the possibilities of reconciliation.

If these books are about pop slogans like “Reconciliation� they have no place on the school syllabus. Kids deserve a break from contemporary pamphleteering, most of which will end up in history’s trash can. Much better books would be Katharine Sussanah Pritchard’s Coonardoo, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocking Bird each of which I read in high school. Of course, the first great “Self in Other� work of literature was Homer’s The Iliad, but I digress.

If you want kids to deal explicitly with contemporary debates, save it for Civics, or deal with it if it comes up incidentally through novels, plays, and poems. Do not start the curriculum with a desired political outcome and then cherry pick texts that will serve that political agenda. Better than Grenville is the study of actual, you know, er, History! You should read the diabolical Nazism in current English curricula. VERY scary!

I have ardent interest in all of you as your “Virtual Embodiments”, speaking in this forum in both academic and conversation realms.

Regards,
Walter Benjamin

As I expected Kim,you have nothing except insults,and like Dan I wont play your mind games

I think it’s impossible to read what Kim wrote in any fair minded sense as an insult.

I’m getting fed up, as should have been evident over the past few days, with people who flagrantly disregard moderation requests in order to make some idiosyncratic point about their own beliefs or views. This is the last warning to stay on topic. The comments policy was posted very deliberately the other day and it specifically says:

Certain commenting behaviours are considered unacceptable (see below)…

# Consistently repeated and aggressively stated opinions which fail to engage with others is regarded as a form of trolling.
# Comments which are designed to derail threads.

It also says:

While we realise that anyone can slip into an ill-judged remark at times, repeated unacceptable comments will be regarded as a form of trolling and summarily deleted. Repeat offenders may have their IP address placed in moderation or be IP-banned from the site.

Commenters may also be limited to a certain number of comments within a specified timeframe until they give evidence that their behaviour conforms to the site’s policies. Commenters may also be explicitly required to agree to abide by the comments policy.

Individual thread authors have a wide discretion on the interpretation of these guidelines.

Please take note. This is the last warning and I won’t enter into any discussion about this.

But your last point is half right. I do in fact have a very good education, all from a Group of Eight university, and you paid for half of it and heavily subsidised the rest.

And this is on topic is it? Look my friend I have you sussed easy,your another would be if you could be.The the little education you probably do have, like most on this blog,I probably paid for it.

Somehow I had got it into my mind that your credentials were as “a world citizen (born in Australia), a pragmatic peace activist, an amiable atheist, a folksy farmer and a seeker of truth with a background in education, psychology and journalism who has authored several books and short stories.”

Still even if those were your credentials what could I say? I guess you’d say “Nothing special!”