The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor. Regnery, 2006. 278 pp. $19.95.
I stumbled upon Elizabeth Kantor’s handbook to English literature by accident, and I cannot recommend it too highly. Simultaneously an introduction to the subject and a skewering of the way English is taught in today’s universities, it is witty, illuminating, and, as the title indicates, politically incorrect. Kantor shows open contempt for feminist, Marxist, and “queer” theories of interpretation, but once she has swept those away, she reveals that English literature is full of beauty and insight.
If you follow the link above to Amazon and read the one-star reviews, you will see that she has rustled some feathers: Many of the reviews are by the English professors Kantor contemns, and they go on at some length. Although a few offer insightful criticisms, most betray exactly the intellectual snobbery Kantor is attacking, calling her uneducated or claiming—with some slight self-contradiction—that only illiterate people could enjoy her book (one of the reviewers even calls her “essentialist,” a term Kantor repeatedly mocks).
One reviewer sneers at her for being a woman (as feminists often will when a female breaks ranks), suggesting that the editors of the P.I.G. series selected her for her vagina so she would be immune to criticism—missing the fact that Kantor is herself an editor of the series and probably selected herself.
Most of these attacks miss their mark: Kantor has a Ph.D. in English and knows her subject. Perhaps her book could be more in-depth if it were twice as long, but for a slim volume meant to introduce rather than exhaustively cover its topic, The PIG Guide to English and American Literature is masterful.
Summary
One common theme in the criticisms of Kantor’s work is that her analysis is shallow because she reads English literature in a straightforward way—but that is a feature, not a bug. Kantor claims that the theorizing of English professors obfuscates rather than illuminates the literature. This is clearest in Kantor’s discussion of Jane Austen (her specialty), in which she mocks Virginia Woolf for devoting “her essay on Jane Austen to an exploration, not of the six novels she actually wrote, but instead of the six very different—but wholly imaginary—novels that Jane Austen ‘might have written had she lived to be sixty.'”
Woolf’s imaginative critique of Austen, which attempts to recast Austen as a feminist, is in Kantor’s view a microcosm of today’s university English departments, which ignore or “deconstruct” literature to make it fit the ideals of the professors. As Kantor argues, good literature has the power to shape the people who read it, so today’s professors work hard to instead reshape the literature.
What makes this book so good, and such an obvious thorn in the side of the literary professors who’ve taken offense at it, is that Kantor can do much more than complain. Many others have written about the wholesale destruction of higher education (Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind is a perennial favorite on that topic), but Kantor doesn’t simply insult the eminently insultable professors; she also delivers real insights through a survey of major works of the canon before ending her handbook with a practical discussion of what and how to read to educate yourself on this topic. Particularly practical is her explanation of close reading—though her example (a couplet from Paradise Lost) makes it apparent that anyone without knowledge of Latin and Anglo-Saxon would have a hard time actually doing it.
Examples and Themes
This book is full of lucid passages, which should be unsurprising for an author who has closely read the classics. Kantor opens her survey with an introduction to Beowulf and closes with a discussion of American literature, ending with Flannery O’Connor. After that comes a sarcastic essay (her weakest) on the deficiencies of modern English departments. Although the dripping sarcasm and lack of substance in that section is disappointing, she follows it with superb chapters offering practical advice—memorize poems, practice close reading, discuss novels, and read, read, read.
Kantor is at pains to point out that the beliefs of the writers she surveys are often very different from the assumptions of moderns. One of my favorite quotes is this:
Unferth attacks Beowulf with words for almost exactly the same reason that Grendel attacks the Danes with his murderous claws. He hates a good that’s beyond him. Or uintellectuals tend to ask why our soldiers’ lives are spent in vain, or who benefits from the glorification of the military hero. The Beowulf poet was interested in a different question: What’s wrong with the man who won’t give the hero the glory he’s earned?
What comes across repeatedly throughout the book is that Christianity has shaped not only the literary canon but civilization as a whole, and Kantor strongly hints that this is the primary reason so many English professors are at pains to destroy rather than to read. In her introduction, she gives a concrete example—which also, it so happens, destroys one of the claims of her critics, that the problems she sees in today’s universities aren’t really there. She describes a real student, Megan Basham, who studied English at Arizona State.
Allow me to quote again:
For the Malory paper, she made the mistake of actually reading the literature, and the sources behind it. She then made the further mistake (at least, from the point of view of PC English professors) of taking those texts seriously, instead of dismissing it all as so much unenlightened “self-denial and recrimination” from our misogynist past. She discovered that the story of Lancelot’s guilty relationship with Guinevere offered some insight into the lives she and her peers were living. Like Lancelot, they had at their command opportunities beyond most people’s dreams. And like him, they were infected by a certain “sickness of soul.” “An encounter with Christ’s sacred chalice changed Lancelot’s heart,” explains Megan Basham. “An encounter with Lancelot changed mine.”
Criticism
Of the criticisms I have read of this book, the only one that has any merit is that Kantor ignores writers who do not fit the message she is conveying—that the canon is, by and large, deeply Christian.
This criticism is partly true; for example, she mentions men like Byron and Joyce only in passing, pointing out that they wrote in a Christian milieu even if they rejected its precepts (though Ulysses makes it to her list of essential reading). She also ignores Virginia Woolf except when describing her cattiness. She does, however, take space to discuss Christopher Marlowe, who, despite his atheism and pederasty, wrote profoundly moral works in which his self-insert characters suffer for their hubris (reminiscent of the closer-to-contemporary Oscar Wilde). She also discusses Shelley and explains how he make a wreck of his life by following his ideals of rebellion and libertinism. Her critics call this ad hominem, but it in fact affirms one of her central themes—that immorality is the path to misery. Her entire point, after all, is that literature can change your life: This is a book of moral criticism, so it is not off-topic to discuss the consequences of immorality when authors live immoral lives and are thereby hoist on their own petard.
Contemporaneity
The problems Kantor describes stretch outside the English department to encompass all of Western culture. If you have wondered, for example, why today’s superhero comics are anti-heroic, why Funimation inserts political commentary into its translations of Japanese cartoons, why video games are being censored, or why Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy sought to destroy the Star Wars franchise, this is why: Because of a specifically anti-Western and anti-Christian ideology that suffers nothing besides itself, and because the damage it is willing to do reaches even outside Christianity and the West.
This is why, for example, the new Disney Star Wars contains a scene of Jedi sacred texts burned in a fire—a scene feminists celebrated on social media. The scene is a symbol of what Rian Johnson and his ilk want to do to Star Wars and works like it: Star Wars may not be equal to Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales, but it contains simple and profound messages nonetheless; it features a farm boy who becomes a knight, a rogue who learns virtue, and a princess who exhibits strength through rather than in opposition to her femininity. It is not above criticism (we could start with the clunky dialogue or Yoda’s flaky spiritualism), but it is in spirit closer to the works Kantor discusses than it is to the mindsets of English professors—which is why the same people want to destroy it.
Conclusion
Read this book. If you are not already familiar with the canon of English literature, this will inspire you to read it. If you are, this will serve as an entertaining refresher and may offer some food for thought or new insights.
I quote again:
The one lesson that you can’t learn from great English and American literature is the politically correct point of view: the idea that the culture of the West is nothing but a source of injustice, and that only perpetual vigilance against all its “ism”s and “phobia”s can protect us against the return of oppression and misery. If you could learn from our great literature to despise and fear Western civilization, the PC professors wouldn’t have quit teaching it.
