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.
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