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 […]