Fair Matter

Buckle Up: Literature and Politics in the Air

By Beth McCoy

I dread flying. I grumble about baggage fees and cramped quarters. When turbulence strikes, I fear to read flight attendants’ faces, those poems that tell me whether to drown my anxiety in a SkyMall catalog or just relax. I dislike security lines, not least because I slow them down by fumbling gracelessly with the electronic devices key to contemporary reading, writing, and teaching.

Above all, I dread the advent of a certain in-flight conversation. To be clear, I’ve had many lovely conversations onboard, ones through which I’ve learned about everything from midwifery to plastics (yes, plastics). 

But when some folks spot on the tray table a novel bursting with bookmarks or a pile of student papers, conversation too often follows a particular path. 

Are you a teacher? (Yes)

What do you teach? (English) 

Ooh, I’ll have to watch how I speak. ([If I say, “Don’t worry! I don’t speak standard English, nor does anyone else,” there’s a 50/50 chance that the conversation ends immediately])

What do you teach? (African American literature) 

Oh. Hey, I’ve always wanted to ask: why is African American literature so political?

This question is always about something else, really. I am hardly the only person asked to deal with it. 

In her keynote at Trinidad's Bocas Literature Festival, Jamaican poet and short story writer Olive Senior recently had to answer the question “Should literature be political?” She responded that the query had “the fussiness of Granny about it,” betraying anxiety that “that literary production is something precious and should be protected somehow from the unwashed hordes who are political animals because they foment revolutions and overturn thrones.” 

But in coach, at 35,000 feet, it isn’t easy to talk “literature and politics” in a way that a) puts a stop to the racist dog whistling that the question so often is and b) doesn’t attract the attention of a nearby air marshal. 

In the past, I’ve noted that by the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (especially its infamously racist Query XIV) already had asserted that politics and literary aesthetics were linked inextricably. In other words, that the slaveholder started it. 

Lately, returning to Plato provides another tool for the in-flight tool belt. In Republic Book II, Socrates tells Adeimantus and Glaucon that the right kind of poetry is so key to educating the guardians of the ideal city that any poet who gets too creative with stories about the gods should have his funding cut so that he can no longer produce plays. Of course, this is “the slaveholder started it" in a different register.

A Struggle to Read

By Misun Dokko

In my introductory American Literature II survey course, I emphasize hunkering down and isolating oneself within the walls of literary or critical narrative for an hour or more. Many of my English majors struggle with this task because reading requires long stretches of relative isolation and fixed attention on a singular text. Such isolation and fixation run counter to the ways we Facebook, tweet, text, Youtube, blog, and work, not apart from each other but as overlapping tasks. While studies have shown that such multitasking has benefits and limitations, engaging in those debates is not my concern here because the fact is my students are already technological savvy multitaskers.

In light of this, it is no wonder that my English majors in American Literature II read reluctantly. My immediate response consisted of instituting frequent reading quizzes that asked questions that online summaries neglect. Over the course of the semester, some students accepted the disciplinary nature of quizzes and relented, reading more diligently and beginning to read when they didn’t before. However, quizzes worked only to an extent. Some students began to read but inconsistently. Other students who appeared to have read, which they demonstrated through discussion, had difficulty receiving above a C on the quizzes. Most students also seemed to view quizzes as punitive, and this may have detracted from their engagement with the course.

Teaching With Tolerance: A Response to "Ditching Dante"

By William Porter

If I had my way, about half of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno wouldn’t be there. Virgil would have a comfortable spot up in Paradiso, and Cacciaguida the pious crusader would be in for a long fall. All in all, I have very little in common with Dante when it comes to personal moral belief. Yet I return to the Commedia again and again, and I likely will for a long time to come. It speaks to me not because I am in tune with Dante’s vision, but rather, in a sense, because I am not.

It can be argued, as Teodolinda Barolini has, that Dante treats behaviors (including sexual ones) with greater complexity and depth, often with greater tolerance, than one would expect. He is often quite radical. Dante does in fact save sodomites in Purgatorio 26; thus Barolini asserts that, to Dante, “limited and moderated homosexual behavior is not sinful, just as limited and moderated heterosexual practice is not sinful” (185). Brunetto Latini’s presence, then, in a circle of Hell reserved for sodomites, remains rather a mystery.

One thing seems clear: we should not ignore that mystery. We shouldn’t, on the one hand, labor to preserve the integrity of the work as unimpeachably, transcendently great. Nor should we stop reading and teaching the Commedia because its fourteenth-century author was not prescient enough to anticipate identity categories used by many Americans 700 years later. We can’t expect all authors to be our contemporaries, nor should we want them to.

The New Alphabet That Never Was

By Beth McCoy

On Christmas eve 1976, I found J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit on a cinder-block bookshelf in my Aunt Francie’s apartment. Feigning repeated bathroom trips as an excuse to leave the dinner table, I sped through the book. By the time I was caught by dismayed parents who knew that a golden box containing both The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy awaited me in the morning, I had already finished the book, despite an over-long stop in Rivendell.

The surprise wasn’t ruined, though. Indeed, I found the trilogy to be hypnotic. Too young to understand the racism driving the books’ vision, I was half in love with Strider by the time Frodo left Bree. And the end of The Return of the King yielded even greater love: appendices explaining Elvish languages and alphabets that Tolkien conjured seemingly from the air. 

I was eleven and audacious. If Tolkien could make up new alphabets, I could, too. So I grabbed crayons and paper and threw myself upon an avocado-green rug amid walls teeming with yellow and orange flowers. I set upon my quest.

When I tell this story in the classroom, it’s at this point that students begin to smile. They realize suddenly what’s coming.

At the Crossroads of Politics, History, & Literature: Turks & Jews Since 1492

By Beyazit Akman

One of the most underrated terms of our times is “Abrahamic” religions (as opposed to “Judeo-Christianity”). In the post-9/11 era, it may be difficult for many to see the roots linking the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It may be even more difficult to see the rich history of Judeo-Islamic alliance.

This history perhaps is most visible in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jewish people from central Europe and the Ottoman Empire’s Sultan Bayezid II rescued more than 100,000 of those expelled. Known as one of the most devout Muslim rulers in history (his title “Sofu” means “the Pious” in Turkish), Sultan Bayezid invited Sephardic Jews to the center of his empire at a time when Jewish discrimination and expulsion were instituted in such European metropolises as Amsterdam, Paris, and Venice. While the ships of Columbus were initiating the transatlantic slavery route to be used for centuries by major European colonial powers, the Ottoman navy was carrying victims of Christian oppression to Muslim lands.

Why did an Ottoman sultan help the Sephardim? For those of us who have a myopic understanding of historical events and who evaluate Judeo-Islamic relations in the restricted context of Israel-Palestinian conflict, the fact of the help may seem surprising, even unbelievable.