Serious Heterosexual Guys Literature 101

Okay, I'm not even sure that I'm offended by this article really. I think one of the commenters said it best by saying, "What is this fuckery?!"

I'm more just feeling like O.o.

The professor said, and I'm paraphrasing (and making part of this shit up) Um, I don't particularly like Canadian writers. Or Chinese. Or women. So I can't possibly teach them. In fact I also don't like left handed writers. Or writers with 'm's' in their name. Or writers born on Thursdays. Or writers with clubbed feet. Or writers who named their child Charlie, or writers pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman...(Can you tell which ones I made up?).

But you see how ridiculous that sounds?

If the class were named as the title of today's blog, Serious Heterosexual Guys Literature 101, fine, teach your Proust and your Chekhov and your FItzgerald and whoever, leave off Wolf and Plath and all those Canadians and Chinese you don't love.

But if your courses are called things like, Love, Sex and Death in Short Fiction, don't you think it's your duty to give your students a well rounded taste of the kind of literature that encompasses that subject matter? Just sayin'?

hey look his favorite writer likes women writers!

Or maybe if the school is going to have a guy like that teaching there,  they should
offer a women's lit class. (Do they? Maybe? I didn't go so far as check, there are only so many hours in my day.)

I love my men, I do. I love my King, and my Lehane, my Miller (Arthur, not Henry), my Shakespeare and my Hawthorne, my Keats, Whitman and cummings, but I'm not sure my literary experience would be the same without having read Wollstonecraft Shelley, Atwood, Erdrich, Morrision, Lee, Plath, Rowling, Bronte, Dickinson, Angelou...and so many other women's words who have touched my life in profound and evocative ways.


If the history teacher only taught us about the U.S., we'd know nothing of the world.

If the science teacher taught only the earth, we'd know nothing of the stars.