Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer

[mountaineer]

Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer
 â€œDe-colonizing” the curriculum to focus on race and “diversity.”
Fri Feb 12, 2021
Mark Tapson

Another week, another Dead White Male toppled off his perch in the classics canon by university administration milquetoasts pandering to the woke, anti-intellectual mob. This time the DWM in question is medieval literary giant Geoffrey Chaucer of The Canterbury Tales fame, courses on whom are being eliminated at the University of Leicester in England because the man often called the Father of English Literature doesn’t match the current “enthusiasms” of students there.

Last month, the University announced its intention to remove courses in The Canterbury Tales and replace them with courses centered on – what else? – sexuality, diversity, race, and ethnicity. “We want to offer courses that match our students’ own interests and enthusiasms, as reflected in their own choices and the feedback we have been hearing,” a university spokesperson explained to MailOnline. Students’ “interests and enthusiasms” apparently now are dominated by an obsession with the power dynamics of skin color and genitalia, and thus Chaucer is no longer relevant.

And not just Chaucer’s works, but anything written prior to the year 1500. Also potentially on the chopping block, reportedly, are courses on: Beowulf, the heroic epic considered to be the earliest work of English literature; John Milton’s magisterial Paradise Lost; the works of poet John Donne and playwright Christopher Marlowe; the chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the 15th-century chronicle of the legend of King Arthur. ...

... Materially impoverishing the Western canon, and ultimately Western civilization itself, is precisely the goal of the people behind this so-called “decolonization.”  ...

Full story at Front Page Mag

Since when is curriculum a matter of students' enthusiasms? I remember studying Faulkner's "Light in August" my senior year in high school and was about to jam sharpened pencils into my eyes, it was so stupifyingly boring. But it was required and I'm a more complete person for the experience. So if you find Chaucer or Beowulf boring, don't freakin' sign up for the course!  Declare a major in lesbian basket weaving or something.

[Wingnut]

Cancel Culture Comes for Chaucer
  Declare a major in lesbian basket weaving or something.

Do they weave those with the finest of frog hair or the coarser lesbian pubic hair.

[mountaineer]

@Gefn Would love your insights, as a student of literature.

[Gefn]

@Gefn Would love your insights, as a student of literature.

This is upsetting. I get sort of it. Chaucer is difficult to read. But if you take it out of the curriculum you won’t know that April is the time where all good pilgrims make their pilgrimages to Canterbury. You won’t understand the Black Plague. And that line won’t help you understand T.S. Eliot.

And you’ll deprive a whole generation and going forward of Old Lady Wishforit.

Cancelling Chaucer , Milton, Donne, Beowulf, King Arthur, this is breaking my heart. I think they are cancelling them because they ARE difficult to read and kids don’t want to read them anymore.

How can you cancel out the Middle  Agrs? You think with COVID today , you’d want to read more about the Black Plague and what not, instead of just Camus, right?

Or are they getting rid of these classics because they are religious in bent? Think about that. Milton, Donne, mention G-d.

If you cancel Marlowe you must cancel Shakespeare.

With the exception of Beowulf, and Mallory, and Chaucer, I didn’t encounter Milton or Donne until I was in Grad School. I suppose in England they might read them in HS so if that is the case, maybe take it out of that curriculum until college? But remove it altogether, so only masters and doctoral students will read this, or kids studying Latin?

This makes me sad. That is the gist of it. By 2040 these kids will have no idea whence they came from. And you can’t understand the history of your Kings and Queens without understanding the literature of the time as well. To think your history will start with the War of the Roses is kinda sad.

@mountaineer

[mountaineer]

Thanks.

[Gefn]

Thanks.

I didn’t mean to babble.

I guess in the end, it may just hurt them if they’re on Jeopardy. What do I know?

I had an English professor who said when she was a stay at home mom back in the 50s, (before her kids were grown and she could go back for advanced degrees), she would recite Shakespeare to herself while she was doing house chores.

Milton and Dante have helped me with theological questions. And John Donne’s life as a person inspired me when I was in my twenties and I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

I think all writers are important. If a book is well written you can always glean something out of it.

I just fear in 100 years it will be Fahrenheit 451 with all books (I do enjoy reading Bradbury)

[mountaineer]

Reading literature makes a person more well-rounded, in my opinion. Young people should be exposed to all the classics, even if written by those awful white men, to get a better idea where we've been and where we're going, at least.

[Fishrrman]

Gefn wrote:
"Cancelling Chaucer , Milton, Donne, Beowulf, King Arthur, this is breaking my heart. I think they are cancelling them because they ARE difficult to read and kids don’t want to read them anymore."

No.
Let's be honest here.
The reason they're "cancelling" these olde English writers and poets is because they were white men, writing about other whites.

Gefn continued:
"By 2040 these kids will have no idea whence they came from. And you can’t understand the history of your Kings and Queens without understanding the literature of the time as well."

(sigh).
That's exactly the point and intent.

Here's something written by another white Englishman, not so long ago (paraphrasing):
He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the past, controls the future.

THAT's what it's all about...