Customer Reviews

The Politically Incorrect Guide to English And American Literature (Politically Incorrect Guides)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to English Literature, Elizabeth Kantor has great fun skewering silly English literature professors, a broad and easy target, but the real point of the book is the joy of reading great literature because it is good and true. The book includes a chronological survey of the greatest hits of English literature and gives fresh insights into why these really are the greatest hits. Read Chaucer for a rich, multi-layered tapestry of life invigorated, not oppressed, by chivalry, authority, and Christianity. Read Shakespeare for the most amazing heartbreaking and real characters, who show that there really is such a thing as human nature, that some choices are inherently destructive, and that love and sex are serious things. Read Jane Austen because she is funny.

After reading this book, I wanted to click off the television, put down the newspaper and pick up books off my shelf I haven't looked at since college, not because they're good for me, but because they're just plain good. Any high school senior would benefit from this book, as a sort of inoculation against the silly stuff that passes for English literature study in many colleges. Those of us who were high school seniors many years ago will be reminded how much fun it is to read plays out loud, memorize poetry, and gossip about the characters of great novels. Definitely five stars.

Remember when Ernie on "My Three Sons" had to memorize the beginning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English? It was a fairly common English assignment for kids not too long ago, and Elizabeth Kantor shows why such projects should never have been abandoned.
Kantor's enthusiasm for literature is infectious. Beginning with Beowulf (which turns out to be a lot more interesting than I recall) and carrying through to T.S. Eliot, Kantor shows the value that great English and American Literature adds to our lives, and shows how the PC nonsense that has infected our universities is but confusion worse confounded. In fact, the sidebars, which include side-splittingly (though unintentionally) funny quotations from professors and grad students, are half the fun of the book.
Whether you wish to broaden your own horizons or your children's, this guide is an excellent guide on what to read and why.

This popular level book is 90% positive and 10% negative. The positive components are much stronger and brighter than the negatives.

The positive side is a brisk walk through of some of the great books of English Literature. This guide whets your appetite to read many of the great books and gives the author's take on the key insights readers can learn from these great, and long considered great, books. And what she highlights is not what today we'd call "politically correct".

Elizabeth Kantor delivers us an easy to read, tour guide book, accesible to the general non-specialist adult reader, that outlines some 'lessons to be learned' from Beowulf (the value of heroism), Chaucer (the vibrancy of medieval Christendom and it's culture), Shakespeare (his keen insight into human nature), Milton (contrary to modern conventional wisdom, liberty and religious faith are not opposites), Jane Austen (how patriarchal values benefit women). This section is humorous, interesting, thought provoking and enlightening. Even when you don't agree with her. It's a shame this wonderful overview was limited to a mere 90% of the book.

It's also a shame it's not a bigger book. I would love to see Kantor tackle more books, including Homer. That's not English Literature of course, but it would be a great addition. After all the study of Homer dominated traditional academic teaching for centuries. Perhaps we will see future sequels.

The negative side, about 10% all told, is the author's critique of the way "post-modernists" and "political correctness" have distorted and undermined academic study of English Literature. This section is weaker and somewhat repetitive, although that repetition in some way reflects the echo chamber nature of academic post-modernism. I haven't studied English Literature at college level, so I'm just not in a position to confirm or deny whether the state of English Lit teaching is quite as bad as the Elizabeth Kantor contends. I hope not, otherwise we are really in an era of book burning as bad as anything from the inquisition or Cromwellian puritanism.

But somehow I don't think everything is as bad as that. To a certain extent formal english teaching at the undergraduate level is a less important part of education than it ever has been before. English studies is increasingly just an option and an option fewer and fewer are taking up or treating as a serious subject. In previous generations English was the core of the curriculum. Not so today. So maybe the po-mos are putting themselves out of business. Let's hope so. Today, more than ever, there are ways and means to access the great books without having to engage with an academic priesthood. Elizabeth Kantor encourages her readers to study for themselves and make up their own mind. This is always sound advice.

They once used to say "...teach a parrot to say supply and demand and you have an economist". This joke is probably better re-tooled. "Teach a parrot to say racism and sexism and have a post-modernist." Maybe this is the real criticism of post-modernism. Despite it's pretentions, it is really narrow-minded, repetitive and intolerant. It fails to reflect the 'diversity' and 'toleration' it purports to defend and it enthrones itself and it's flock of parrots on a haughty platform for self righteousness. In short it hardly reflects any improvement upon the various historical academic regimes that preceded it. Indeed those previous regimes seem to have contributed much more to the common stock of wisdom than the current flock. Unfortunately the author, despite repeated (and presumably well deserved) pot shots at the po-mos, fails to hit the target dead on.

The greats of the English Literature canon the author rightfully defends have been subject to similar attacks in the past by all manner of self-righteous moralizers. The authorities were always closing down the theatres in Shakespeare's day. So the canon will certainly survive the the assaults of the pipsqueaks who assail it today. The "positive" side of this book is thus a better aid to the defence than the negative. All told a worthwhile read.

Kudos to English Ph.D Elizabeth Kantor for this succint yet sagacious survey of English and American literature! Kantor is on target with her disdain for the way the "dead white men" greats of our English literature have been forced to be used by English profs to fit their political agenda
(such as Marxism, femininism, deconstructionism etc.)Kantor succinctly gives us the important of the classics from Beowulf to Shakespeare to Milton to the Victotians to such conservative authors as Evelyn Waugh. I found her discussion of Jane Austen to be especially enlightening. She believes Austen was a conservative Christian who wittily commented on the battle of the sexes and the need for morality in human affairs.
Her book should be required reading for students who like myself were English majors. As a Presbyterian pastor I was delighted to be reaffirmed in my belief that Christianity was crucial in the development of many of our literary geniuses from the medieval writers through the Anglican Thomas Stearns Elliot.
You do not have to be a politcal conservative to benefit from this fine work. I first saw Kantor on C-Span's Book TV lecturing on this book. I am glad I ordered it from Amazon. In a day when serious reading in our intellectualy challenged, dumbed down culture is on the wane this book is a wake-up call to us all.

There are several very good reasons to purchase, read, and share this book. Perhaps you realize you didn't pay as much attention or read all you should have in school. Perhaps you have children in school now and are concerned about what they aren't being taught that they should hear and what is being pushed on them in its place. Maybe you are home schooling and would like to get a handle on the old values versus the new post-modern deconstruction muti-culturalist nonsense. Just maybe you are a student and are confused and / or disgusted by what is going on in your classroom. Each of these reasons and many others justify purchasing this quite useful book.

Elizabeth Kantor lays out the problem very well in her introduction to the book. The twelve chapters are grouped into three parts. In Part I, Kantor takes us through historical periods in the old and new world and the literature from each and WHY it should still be taught: Old English (Beowulf, etc.), Medieval (Canterbury Tales versus Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale), Renaissance (Marlowe, Shakespeare), Seventeenth Century (Donne, Milton), Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, etc.), Nineteenth Century (Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, Dickens, and many others), Twentieth Century, and American Literature and Our Neglected Canon.

Part II discusses how politically correct professors and teachers are suppressing English Literature by not teaching and substituting far inferior (but politically acceptable) material. Kantor than offers a fine chapter on what literature is actually for.

Part III is particularly useful because she shows the reader how to teach oneself the literature that is seldom taught nowadays. She talks about close reading, how to appreciate poetry, and much more. In the last chapter she encourages learning by living. Memorize poems, go act in plays, read them out loud with friends, and making literature a topic of everyday conversation among your friends.

There are lots of fine marginal notes and suggestions with the always fun and irreverent PIG boxes about what "they" don't want you to read and so forth.

A very enjoyable and worthwhile book.

Enjoy!

Just when it looked as though dead white males were done for, Elizabeth Kantor calls in the cavalry with The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. Thus, as a dead white male in training, I am pleased -- beyond the capacity of even the greatest of dead languages to express - that Dr. Kantor has taken a claymore whack at the post-modern downward spiral of silliness within the teaching of literature before the subject gurgles away into some final absurdity.

Politically it is absolutely correct to say that Elizabeth Kantor's book is powerful common ground for cultural bipartisanship. Anyone on either side of any aisle, who cares about academic quality, will love The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. The sea of truth and knowledge takes us far and wide: Dr. Kantor reminds us of its depth.

Kantor shows us what we loved in the classics but didn't know why. This book is readable with a capital R, witty, inspiring and full of tidbits we wish we had known earlier. It's a delight to dip into. (You don't have to start from the beginning, but don't skip the preface. It's is worth the price of the book.) Pick your favorite (or least favorite) author and get the reasons why you need him (or her.) This PIG is an engrossing read and would make a good Christmas present for your favorite college student or any literary fan. Kantor is especially good in her terse, provocative insets referring to current academic hoaxes. Don't miss her pages on Jane Austin, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner, and learn how to have fun with them.

Any book that can actually get me interested in reading Beowulf for crying out loud is a great book. What's more, the book has made me understand as to some of the odd things I noticed about the way literature is taught today. Great art is great art... there should be no such thing as politically-incorrect art.

Read this book and then make an effort to enjoy some of the best literature ever written.

In the summer of 2007, I purchased The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. The book's thesis is that English departments at many universities are staffed by professors that suppress great English and American literature while promoting lesser works that conform to their personal beliefs. It specifically mentioned a book called The Handmaid's Tale:

"Among the many third-rate books that English professors waste their students' time on (when they could be teaching truly great English literature) is... The Handmaid's Tale. The Handmaid's Tale is the quintessential expression of our intellectuals' fears about what a truly Christian culture would look like."

Dr. Kantor's book was prescient. My daughter was beginning college in a few weeks and I soon discovered that The Handmaid's Tale was required reading for all incoming freshmen. I read The Handmaid's Tale: it was a waste of time. (A review of the book is posted.) I looked over the syllabi of the freshmen English classes and discovered that much of the reading appeared chosen more to advance the political agendas of the teachers than to expose the students to the great writers of literature in the English language. Dr. Kantor was right.

Here is a list of the books for one freshmen English class at my daughter's college:
HANDMAID'S TALE
Author: ATWOOD (feminism, oppressiveness of Christianity, published 1986)
INTUITIONIST
Author: WHITEHEAD (racism, class differences, published 1999)
BLESSING THE BOATS
Author: CLIFTON (racism and feminism, published 2000)
PILLOWMAN
Author: MCDONAGH (Playwright specializes in "in your face theatre," whose purpose is to "...present the audience with vulgar, shocking and confrontational material on stage..." published 2003)
COVERING
Author: YOSHINO (written by homosexual Yale law professor who litigates for gay civil rights published 2006)
SWEET LAND
Author: WEAVER (cohabiting couple ostracized by Lutherans in small town, published 2006)
KING LEAR
Author: SHAKESPEARE (The one classic work, published 1608)
HISTORY BOYS
Author: BENNETT (homosexual writer, story includes pederasty, published 2004)
RESURRECTION TRADE
Author: MILLER (a collection of poems regarding anatomical research on female corpses, published 2007)

Now, other than King Lear, does your heart leap at the thought of reading any of these? Do you sense an agenda? Would you pay to learn about them? Or would you prefer an introduction to the treasures of English literature instead?

This quote, from a 1988 New York Times Magazine article on "politically correct" professors, and cited in the book Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior, by E. Michael Jones, hits the bullseye:

"(For these scholars)... whose sensibilities were shaped by the intellectual trends that originated in the '60's: Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, a skepticism about the primacy of the west... the effort to widen the canon is an effort to define themselves, to validate their own identities."

Their efforts to "widen the canon" have been a disaster and a disservice to students.

In the so-called "dark ages" many great literary works were lost, only to be slowly re-discovered by the monks who carefully copied them and kept them in the monasteries. Perhaps we're in a "dark age" now as the great works of English and American literature lie neglected on university library shelves, and knowledge of them slips from our collective memory, because those entrusted with transmitting them have betrayed their trust.

Instead, many English professors prefer abusing "academic freedom" and requiring students to read books that indict Western (Christian) civilization as oppressive to minorities, homosexuals, workers, women, other cultures, etc. They have morphed their departments into political re-education camps. Of course they don't see it that way. In their minds, they are models of "tolerance" who welcome "diversity." They say they're just presenting "challenging literature" that stimulates "critical thinking." But you get the impression that "challenging literature" that might stimulate "critical thinking" about the English professor's leftist beliefs or sexual proclivities doesn't make the cut. Apparently, that includes most of the literature written prior to the 1950's, or as the example above shows, the 1980's.

But just as the student of music composition deserves exposure to great composers such as Palestrina, Monteverdi, Des pres, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin, etc., so too, the student of English literature deserves exposure to great writers. Since many English professors will not introduce students to these writers and the treasures of their literary heritage, students must, like the monks of old, rediscover these works, experience the work and joy of keeping learning alive, and pass on the literary inheritance.

Elizabeth Kantor lists a number of novels, poems, short stories, and plays, written in the English language, that have stood the test of time. The list is not complete, and her comments about many of the works mentioned are not extensive. This is as it should be, since her primary purpose is to name and briefly describe works from different time periods that have enriched her life and that she thinks the reader might enjoy too.

Dr. Kantor has done a great service in writing this book: to parents whose teenagers are going to college, so that they can avoid paying for the brainwashing of their sons or daughters; to college students, who with this book might be able to seek out the better English teachers in whatever school they're attending, and to those of us who want to learn what we should have, but didn't. Thank you, Elizabeth Kantor, for writing this book.

An outstanding work. It beautifully describes English and American literature, its history, many of its major authors, and the appalling abuse of this subject that occurs in U.S. colleges and universities today. I strongly recommend this book.