The Left’s long march through literature
by Dr Kevin Donnelly, The Conservative Woman:
THERE’S no doubt that the cultural-Left’s cancel culture and political correctness movement is rampant in the West’s schools and universities intent on indoctrinating students with its neo-Marxist inspired ideology, especially when it comes to identity politics involving the new trinity of race, gender and sexuality.
The way the literary canon and literature in general has been subverted and destroyed over the last 20 to 30 years provides a clear example. Instead of literature being valued for its moral and aesthetic character and whether it has stood the test of time, the definition has been exploded to include graffiti, SMS messaging, students’ own writing, movie posters, video games and multi-model and digital texts.
As argued by Frank Kermode in An Appetite for Poetry, such has been the impact of cultural-Left ‘theory’ that literature has been relegated ‘to a position of one among an inexhaustible and indiscriminate array of other texts: in short, to save it is to destroy it’.
Particular literary texts, instead of being valued as examples of their art, are deconstructed and critiqued in terms of power relationships and politically correct ideology.
A recent Australian example involves an evaluation of texts set for senior school English by the University of Melbourne’s Alex Bacalja and Lauren Bliss titled What counts? Inclusion and diversity in the senior English curriculum. After analysing set texts over a ten-year period, the academics conclude that they are guilty of promoting ‘white consciousness’ and of being ‘heteronormative’.
For those who are not woke, ‘white consciousness’ promotes racism and prejudice against ‘people of colour’. Being heteronormative is also a crime as it describes the overwhelming majority of women and men who are happy with their birth sex.
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