Tag Archives: literature

Subtle Elitism Embedded in Van Peer’s Argument

Posted on October 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

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?

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How We Expand Horizons

Posted on October 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

Both Martha Nussbaum and Willie Van Peer offer valuable insights when they elaborate on the ways in which literature allows us as readers to view the world around us more complexly.  In Democratic Citizenship and the Narrative Imagination Nussbaum posits that a literary education from early childhood onward provides a reader with the tools required to view the people around them as “spacious and deep, with qualitative differences from oneself as well as hidden places worthy of respect”.  In a similar vein, Van Peer, in Literature, Imagination and Human Rights asserts that literature creates societal change on a much larger scale, prompting greater discussion about what it means to be human and thereby encouraging encapsulated cultures, that is, people groups with firmly defined and exclusive boundaries, to extend the definition of “human” to peoples they previously excluded.

Both argue that literature prompts people to expand their horizons.  Nussbaum even goes so far as to suggest that literature, among not only the arts but also a great many other disciplines, uniquely shapes minds and broadens thought.  As an avid reader myself, my first inclination is to agree with them.

However, I struggle to simply accept the claim that literature is the most basic, essential eye-opener.  I have two objections to this claim.  First, that the language of literature is, in and of itself, a factor in creating and preserving encapsulation.  Second, that the open-mindedness purveyed through literature cannot find its solitary source in literature, leaving open the question as to where the writer of a book received the idea that their definition of “human” was limited.

Language, particularly written language, has a limited, though ever increasing, sphere of influence.  (I know that language is used by all humans, but the words we use are in and of themselves exclusive).  Language itself is a huge factor in encapsulation.  The language of literature is exclusive to those who are literate, and often, in the case of the authoritative cannon that Van Peer centers his argument around, exclusive to those with an advanced degree of literacy and access to books.

One of my favourite books is A Room With A View by E.M. Forster.  When it comes to whether or not the man was sexist or truly open minded, all bets are off, but he had a lot to say about viewing women as complex individuals at a time when they were not typically seen in so advanced a light.  In one of my favourite scenes in the novel, one character is forced, not by literature, but by the words of his fiance as she breaks off their engagement to acknowledge that she is not, perhaps, as different from him as he’d imagined.

“But to Cecil, now that he was about to lose her, she seemed each moment more desirable. He looked at her, instead of through her, for the first time since they were engaged. From a Leonardo she had become a living woman, with mysteries and forces of her own, with qualities that even eluded art.”

So how and where did Cecil recieve the wisdom that encouraged him to see Lucy as a human as much as himself?  And more interestingly, where did Forster find this notion?  Although, by 1908 the idea that women were as human and complex as men was a fairly common concept, it’s source could not exclusively be literature.  Something had to have prompted the first writer of a book on the subject to put pen to paper, something that wasn’t simply another book.

I would argue, that literature does not instill in readers the notion that our concept of humanity is limited, but rather that it is one of many things that may awaken us to the knowledge of this limitation, a knowledge which is innate in all of us.  Literature, though an effective tool for expanding our horizons, and an enjoyable one at that, is by no means the only method or the best.

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Getting Down To Business

Posted on September 10, 2013 | 2 comments

The first real adult book I read (that wasn’t a classic) was Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.  Up until that point my mother had strictly limited my reading material to the children’s section of the library and anything nominated a classic by whatever absurd and obscure metre determines what is worthwhile, enduring and exemplary of good taste in its literary genre.  I think she hoped to save me from my reckless reading habits, which, had they been left unbridled, might have landed me in some rather embarrassing adult reading situations.  So my until that point innocent and unaware eight year-old self plunged headlong into Shakespeare, and learned about the mysteries of life and love and mice and men and women from him.  I still feel that something more along the lines of Fifty Shades of Grey might have made for a less shocking introduction to romance and sex, but the past is the past and the future can do nothing to touch it.

Late Nights on Air, despite being my first big-girl book, was fairly tame in comparison to the bard.  Though desire was one of the many major themes it dealt with, sex was always shuffled modestly to the background.  It glossed over the things about adulthood that were already beginning to worry my young teenaged mind while still dealing in a well-phrased but simple honesty.  It didn’t have too happy an ending.  People died unfortunate, untimely deaths without any great fanfare or too many tears shed.  No one triumphed over any significant hurdles and most of the characters ended the book in worse shape than they had been in on the first page.  Some of the characters grew, matured or changed as the story wore on, and some did not.  There was no main character.  No protagonist, no antagonist.  The climax was understated, the resolution quiet.  It was life- real life, captured and put into print.  I was enthralled.  This, I thought, this is what good modern story-telling looks like.

But more than I loved Late Nights on Air for its honesty and simplicity, for its genuine, real-as-can-be, boring and normal characters and its realism, I loved the novel’s romantic air.  Hay spun a story about average, plain-Jane and Joe people doing average things in a humdrum place and somehow made it compelling.  It was set in Yellowknife for Chrissake!  A Yellowknife radio station in the seventies- what could be less exciting, less romantic?  Yet the novel captured me soundly, whisked me off my feet in such a smooth and simple sweep I barely saw or felt it coming.  I fell into that book; for a week it consumed me.  I sat in classes thinking and dreaming about Hay’s prose, about her characters and their hopes and dreams and fears.  They were more real to me than the people I was surrounded by, their concerns were more pressing, their lives more compelling.  And in the same lazy way I fell in love with the notion of old radio.  At twelve years old I fell in love with the idea of classic Canadian radio and never have I once looked back.

I suppose I have Hay to thank for this enduring love-affair.  I still read her book- once a year I fit it into my busy reading and rereading schedule, but the ideas and loves it sparked in me have proven much larger and infinitely more valuable- radio is one, certainly the largest, but there are many more.

I still listen to AM radio whenever I can.  I bought a vintage radio-clock just to hear the crackle of the CBC first thing in the morning.  I don’t listen for the news- I read that on my iPhone.  Nor do I listen for the music- I can play that for myself.  Instead I listen for the sheer joy of it, for the romance of turning the dial and listening to a familiar but still unfamiliar voice drift over the airwaves and into my bedroom.  For the thrill of feeling that I’m a part of something bigger than myself, of a network that transcends space and physical boundaries, shared in the privacy of others homes and cars and linking us with each other, with the rich heritage of public radio which stretches back to a time before I was born, and with all people like us who have been inspired and enthralled by radio enough to take the time to pause and listen over the years.

If I could host my own radio show, it would be called Business As Usual.  I don’t know when I got this idea, but it’s been kicking around my head for a while.  I’d talk politics and sports, music and books.  It would be brusque and simple but wildly entertaining.  The whole point would be to get people to look at things in a light they hadn’t before.  To put a different spin on things, in a lighthearted but (hopefully? maybe?) still poignant way.  It will probably never happen, but if I ever had the chance, I’d jump at it, just for the chance to hear my own voice drift over the airwaves, and the hope that someone might stop and listen, entranced as I was and am by the poetry of radio.

 

 

On another note- that was a ramble.  Next time I won’t talk for so long or write something so tangential.  Anyways… this is what writing at night does to your brain kids.  Not healthy, not healthy at all.

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