The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature (Politically Incorrect Guides) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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.