What a tiresome thing it is to read, some 50 years after the cultural left’s initial paroxysm and nearly 30 after it dealt a final insult to Stanford’s humanities core curriculum, so reckless an attack on Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, et al. as that made in The Daily last week. The script is by now shopworn — loosely-drawn claims of oppression and prejudice are made against canonized writers; then come angry demands for their erasure from syllabi — but it is still read to us, as on this unhappy occasion, with all the indignance of those who chanted in 1987 “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.” The administration capitulated then and left us with the feeble core curriculum in the humanities we have now: Few students would disagree that Thinking Matters in name only.  

But this is not enough, we are told, if we are committed to the “big project” of realizing “a dream for equal opportunity” and “a better world” in which “white supremacy” is “destroyed” — by any reasonable lights a worthy project! We must now make the extraordinary demand of English teachers that they excise Shakespeare, Austen and Joyce from their curricula, and teach Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Aimé Césaire instead. Never mind that at Stanford and most universities there exist several departments concerned to study just those authors, and that Cisneros and Morrison are in fact already widely-read by high school and college students — the first book I was assigned in high school was “The House on Mango Street” — there is work yet to be done, and that is the wholesale extirpation of the Western tradition’s dearest novelists and playwrights from our syllabi. This is an astonishing and very irresponsible thing to write.

What is there to say to the gleeful antinomian? A level head might first take issue with the calumnies visited on our hoary white men and women of letters and, indeed, urge upon the plaintiff the wisdom of actually reading the works so summarily and invidiously dismissed or, if this is too burdensome, at least avoid tossing about “Shakespeare” and “Austen” as metonyms for all that is objectionable in civil society. A level head might then consider the case of Elizabeth Bennett, the heroine of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” She is hardly a cipher. Elizabeth finds her suitor’s supercilious manner ridiculous and looks on the whole business of marriage with an insouciance uncommon to ladies of the gentry. It is Mr. Darcy that begs for her hand, not her for his, and when they do marry, it is by the recognition of a mutual love. For all the contempt shown for it, there is much in Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to inspire the feminist. So too does Shakespeare reveal himself to hold more than his caricaturer would have us believe. “The Merchant of Venice,” too often called antisemitic, is a measured treatment of alterity, remarkable for the sympathy it shows for the Jewish money-lender Shylock (“hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”) and for the ugliness we are meant to see in the Christian Lorenzo. Portia, the heroine, is the smartest, and funniest, of the whole ensemble. Rosalind in the great comedy “As You Like It” dresses in men’s clothing. Lady Macbeth calls for the spirits to “unsex her,” or maybe I just read that in Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble?”

This is not to expunge from Shakespeare or Austen all that might be disagreeable to modern readers — Césaire’s “Une Tempệte” reminds us of what is rotten in “The Tempest” — but to say that we should not make them into the stooges of some putative scheme of oppression and so heavy-handedly dismiss the beauty, intelligence and humanity of what they wrote. It is simply adolescent to say that “there aren’t any universal themes of human existence.” Even the obscure French postmodernists from which sentiments of this sort surely descend can’t have endorsed so preposterous an idea as that — and what a dangerous atomism it suggests! It is to countervail just this idea, that I cannot recognize myself in you or any other, that Shakespeare and Austen require our careful attention.

The author is at least correct in realizing that there is much at stake in what and how literature is read. So it is with this in mind that we guard against provincialism and prejudice of all forms, not only against that which preoccupies today’s cultural left, but also against that which insists on perverting the most precious records we have of ourselves: Shakespeare, Austen; Cesaire, Morrison; we can have them all, and needn’t obloquy the former if we mean to praise the latter. The last thing the humanities at Stanford need is less Shakespeare.

Contact Bruno Babij at bbabij ‘at’ stanford.edu.