As an English major, I picked electives that introduced me to many multi-cultural works. Yet my required classes instead embraced the “white, heterosexual males,” Norman Fruman opined in Kersten’s column that colleges were rejecting. I was given the works of Robert Browning while we skipped over his wife, Elizabeth, or even stranger, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was better known as a painter, over his sister, Christina. Complaints regarding the complete rejection of women writers for study in that class convinced our professor to give us a handout of “A Room of One’s Own” and the declaration that we can go “have a study group with it, or something.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
One simple explanation for this “disparity”; if one is teaching a required survey of Western Literature, Robert Browning and Dante Rossetti are both vastly more important figures <\/em>than Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. They matter more.<\/em><\/p>\nFor someone who’s majoring in literature – toss ’em all in there! But if you’re talking about a survey to show people where Western Lit has been and what it’s done? There’s no excuse for ignoring important authors (whiteness and maleness and straightitude notwithanding) in preference to usually-trivial female authors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Jed, having been a lit major, has strong opinions about these things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got an email from my evil twin brother Jed: I read Robin Marty’s evasive, straw-addled non-review of Indoctrinate U, and had to comment when I read this bit here: As an English major, I picked electives that introduced me to many multi-cultural works. Yet my required classes instead embraced the “white, heterosexual males,” Norman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitchs-evil-twin-jed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1525"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1525\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}