Subject: Re: Reference to JDS by Paul Thomas Anderson
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 14:29:59 EDT
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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