Ella Whelan at The Telegraph argues that Janice Deul’s complaint that the original choice of translator for Amanda Gorman’s poetry amounts to a sin against literature as well as ride roughshod over the poet’s own judgment: Deul claimed that her concern wasn’t just Rijneveld’s skin colour, but the Booker-winner’s lack of experience in spoken-word poetry […]
Beware of Books!
Otis Houston at Persuasion explores the new moralism that aims to change what we read and how. Today’s censors from the political left join earlier ones from the right of politics – both are bad for literature and the imaginative freedom it needs: Does the canon of classics suffer from a lack of diversity? Absolutely. […]
Writer Zadie Smith Reflects On Pandemic, Black Lives Matter Movement in ‘Intimations’
Robin Young, at wbur, interviews the ever thoughtful and thought-provoking author, Zadie Smith. Smith, London-born, now lives in New York. Remembering her brother’s birthday garden party in England, and the mix of people socialising with ease, she writes: …that garden represented structures that have been put in place that allow people to live near each […]
The Universality of Literature- A Response to Calls to Decolonise It
Earlier this year, PGCE lecturer, Lesley Nelson-Addy, wrote in Britain’s leading professional publication for English teachers: The ‘new’ GCSE curriculum is Anglocentric and epistemically violent: it uses knowledge as a weapon. Not solely because of the removal of the Steinbeck classic, Of Mice and Men – a book most of us grew to enjoy […]
What Maya Angelou Means When She Says ‘Shakespeare Must Be A Black Girl’
Karen Swallow Prior at The Atlantic makes a compelling case that great literature can deal well with both what is unique and universal about the lives of us all as individuals – when it comes to art, we don’t need to ‘stay in our lanes’: In the women’s literature class I’m teaching this semester—in […]
We’ve Learned So Much From Dead White Men – Trying To Remove Them From History Is Madness
It’s often claimed that accepting or conforming to Western canonical standards necessarily means non-white people have to pay too high a cultural price and swap authentic ethnic identity for inauthentic something artificial and inauthentic. Lindsay Johns at ibtimes disagrees and argues the case for the universality of great literary works: To see books or bodies […]