As much as I hate to be the keener with an extra post on her ASTU blog, it looks like that’s the way things are going to pan out- because I’m hoping the post for the next deadline will be about Obasan, so this one isn’t going to be it. On the other hand I still have one last point to flush out about Van Peer.
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I’ve really enjoyed reading Van Peer. As a reader, I find his assertion of the importance of literature as an agent of social change and progress very compelling, and so academically I found it very easy to jump on the Van Peer bandwagon. But after some closer reading and consideration of the in-class discussion on the stance he takes opposing romanticism, I began to notice a more sinister logic embedded in his arguments.
Although I wrote my summary on, in part, the danger of seeing literature as an entertainer and not an educator (a challenge to educational literature being, in van Peer’s vein of logic, a challenge to social progress and the advancement of human rights) I still strongly feel that van Peer is, in spite of his focus on enlightening encapsulated cultures, an elitist at heart. Politically, he is for disencapsulation. Socially, he supports encapsulation to a nearly archaic degree. The canon van Peer holds so dear is exclusive and socially stratifying, undemocratic at the core and therefore, in opposition of the advancement of true equality.
I draw my claims about van Peer’s elitism from two main aspects of his argument. First, his protest against Romanticism. While the romantic movement in some ways diluted the educational impact of art, it was also a democratizing force in the art world, suggesting that art and its appreciation wasn’t something exclusive to the upper classes. While van Peer might be right to question its effect on some of the effects it had on the quality of art, that doesn’t mean its effects on society itself were negligible. Second, van Peer’s argument for the creation of social change through literature depends on the members of the encapsulated culture being the ones to read literature and shape change. His argument completely ignores and undermines the valuable impact of the lower, or excluded classes and cultures as shapers and creators of social change. Even when he addresses other publications outside of the category of fiction that shape society (like The Communist Manifesto) he isn’t adressing other, unwritten factors in cultural progress.
In short, van Peer isn’t writing from an inclusive perspective of society, but an exclusive one. He isn’t writing a narrative from the perspective of the excluded as well as the encapsulated members of a society, but one from a strictly elitist perspective. His words claim social progress, but it’s a progress that exists in legislation alone, not in thought or culture, and the bias of his argument shows that. In van Peer’s article, there is no mention of the revolution of the masses and its impact on society after the industrial revolution. There is no mention of the suffragettes or the Civil Rights Movement. Van Peer spins a pretty narrative about Hard Times and how literature shaped the thoughts of the upper classes and says absolutely nothing about the lower classes. The lower classes are as voiceless in van Peer as they are in the encapsulated worlds he writes of. And that’s not really indicative of progress, is it?