Minorities at Hillsdale?

jklein32
Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:12:37 +0000

@ dalealumnus,

I appreciate your point. But look at how many writers are covered by the department who did NOT write in English: Homer, the Biblical writers, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Dante, Cervantes, Machiavelli, Voltaire, Goethe, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka and Sartre. At Hillsdale English as an academic discipline, like everywhere else, is much more than British and American literature.

Yet consider the number of great writers who DID write in English but are not studied at Hillsdale: Morrison, Hughes, Hurston, Cullen, Ellison, Wright, etc-- all black writers. Americans and English-speaking, just not Anglo-Saxon.

It’s a question of who decides what is worth studying and why, which is invariably an exercise of power. When I was at Hillsdale I was frustrated by assumption that the only literature worth studying was that which fits into our neat Western Judeo-Christian narrative. Eventually many of us then start asking questions about the politics of the canon (and others become so frustrated that they go off and become a professor of African American literature of something crazy like that).