Putting an End to the Culture Wars, One Blog Post at a Time

Walk into any English department and you'll probably be able to distinguish two distinct groups. One quick way to determine them would be to shout out “Who is the greatest writer in the English language?” Whoever answers the question with a cool William Shakespeare, or even John Milton, is in the first group; whoever responds by disputing the racist, sexist, hegemonist biases of such question, is in the second group. It is the difference between upholding the sanctity of the Western canon, and seriously doubting it; the difference between being comfortable with pronunciations of “greatness” or preferring a more relative, culturally sensitive model. Both groups have shaped and conditioned the way I view literature and culture, to the point where choosing one has always felt impossible.

Well, to be more precise, what’s usually happened has looked more like a game of ping-pong. Sick and tired of one approach, I’ve sought refuge in the other, only to return back once again. In an apathetic high school context, I rallied to defend the “greats” of the Western canon, looking to classic books as a source of all kinds of values. I devoured trashy stuff as well, but I genuinely looked up to my teachers’ notions of the classics and had seemingly infinite patience for plugging away at endless Victorian novels that I now use to balance my bed-frame.

Remaining in traditional Orthodox environments for a bit too long however, this lofty notion of “the classics” began to sour, particularly as I saw Rabbis and YU professors championing a superficial engagement with a smattering of these texts as the height of “Torah U Madda.” In college I also began this infatuation with postmodernism, a one-woman crusade to abolish all mention of universalisms and absolutes within the halls of Stern College. Needless to say, my relativism crusade was not very successful and I decided I would leave Stern in favor of more secular environments where I could simply “be” my relativist, postmodern self. Then I, uh, actually entered those environments, and realized that the postmodernism that existed in my head had very little to do with the culture wars that surrounded me.

Coming from an environment where I felt beleaguered by other people’s notions of what was valuable, I left grad school feeling much more beleaguered by the notion that nothing was valuable at all. Where as in Stern all I wanted was to, like, get lost in the nuances of the world, in Columbia English classes I actually felt lost, in a bad way. I kind of got what contemporary literary studies were all about, but I didn’t get why they mattered. When professors would come into class complaining about the university’s constant humanities budget cuts I would secretly smile- serves you right for spending all this time talking about the performative, intertextual, Barthesian, Lacanian, qualities of who knows what, and not being a nice person to boot. My love for literature never wavered, if anything it grew stronger, but I found myself regressing to a kind of primitive, plain-talking, parochialism- this is a great book, I loved it, period. In a way, I was back to where I started out as a teenage reader, but it was different this time because I didn’t actually think I was right.

My adventures in higher-level literary criticism reinforced for me how many of our conceptions of greatness are culturally conditioned and narrow. Again and again, I realized that if we want to get a fuller picture of any given works we need to broaden our tools of cultural understanding to include all kinds of things-gender, class, economics etc…. But I also realized that I don’t always need to get a fuller picture. I like constructing hierarchies, I like looking for personal meaning, and I like believing in great literature. When I read things written by Harold Bloom or Allan Bloom I think “come on, are they actually being serious?” But I know very well that if I wrote a book I would sound a lot more like them than I would Edward Said or Judith Butler. It’s a strange kind of place to be in I guess. To want to write critical works full of principles and values and personal meaning without really wanting to read them. But I feel like the alternatives, on both ends of the “culture war,” are a lot stranger.