I really like and admire this essay, although I’d add that we’ve imposed a guilt tax even on reading white canonical writers. People will emerge from Moby-Dick with an eight-point list of ways it’s sexist and seemingly nothing else https://thepointmag.com/criticism/beyond-the-guilt-tax/

The guilt tax is on reading, period, at this point

I wrote some thing on here during one of the YA Twitter “the great books aren’t so great if u think about it” controversies and a schoolteacher replied that she was very proud when her students told her that canonical books shouldn’t be perpetuated bc they contain outdated views

And I just thought, one, this sounds like a case of telling the teacher what you can sense they want to hear, but moreover, two, how sad is it that these students only know how to relate to novels as things that “contain“ “views“?

And who taught them that?

And I think what’s really at the heart of this problem, more even than certain forms of leftism that are basically anhedonic, is that the American university is scared of trying to teach squishy subjective girl stuff like “pleasure” that can’t be totally instrumentalized.

Remembering one intro to pedagogy class, taught by a person who intended to be the next DGS in our program, spending a *whole evening* on the fact that we *absolutely shouldn’t* seek to help our students fall in love with literature. Too subjective! Can’t measure it! Not real!

What can be instrumentalized/measured/taught is “critical thinking,” AKA learning to make the same few basic moves in response to any argument about anything at all, a Marxishism that leaves you too depressed to leave the chair

Study dead things like they’re dead things, and living things like they’re living things