Subject: Re: Reference to JDS by Paul Thomas Anderson
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 21:16:04 EDT
Honestly, though, when designing a syllabus Salinger wouldn't be in
competition with Dostoevsky and Homer most of the time. He'd be in
competition with Updike, Cheever, Carver, etc. And realistically some
female authors too -- O'Connor, Mansfield, etc. I think it's sad he was
left off a late 20th cent. American syllabus...right where he belongs
and right where I'd expect to have him. So on the one hand we have
problems with Salinger because of what Will said -- if a white male late
20th century author is going to be selected, Salinger won't be first
pick. But they're not selected that often to begin with...
Jim
"L. Manning Vines" wrote:
>
> Jim said:
> << . . .one question I was asked on the radio was, "Why isn't
> Salinger more popular around academia?"
>
> I said, "Because he's a white male." >>
>
> I think that you and Will are both correct in identifying specific
> contributing causes. I think it's also significant, though, that there's a
> lot of competition in the "white male" category, if for no reason except
> that they've been writing literature for a very long time. People who
> criticize the prevalence of the white males usually use the phrase loosely
> enough to encompass all male contributors to Western civilization who have
> been neither Asian nor African. If we're using this meaning of "white
> males," Salinger has to compete with Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Melville,
> Doestoevski, etc.
>
> Now don't get me wrong, Salinger wrote some good stuff, but he's in a damn
> competitive category. At my school, for instance, we read a hell of a lot
> and are unrepentant that the curriculum is almost exclusively white males.
> We don't ever get to Salinger, or even Hemingway or Fitzgerald. There's no
> prejudice against them or against writers who are not white males (a few are
> on the Program). But we've only got four years, and a list that begins with
> Homer is long and Great.
>
> If you figure that the white males have been writing Western literature for
> 2500+ years, and that non-whitemales have only been doing so for a couple of
> hundred, the tilt in the balance is much less surprising. And books written
> in the last century have a pretty imposing list to try to match. If a
> teacher or an institution has no pretenses of trying to expose students only
> to the Greatest that ever was, they can try to increase the population of
> non-whitemales to level the balance, and have a much smaller corpus to
> choose from. So it can turn out that a lot or even most of the attention to
> the literature of the past few hundred years will go to writers neither
> white nor male, while the pre-1800 list is quite exclusive.
>
> -robbie
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