Dead White European Males
Just when you thought those Dead White European Males were packed off for good, they come sneaking in the back door.
First it was Shakespeare. Then the Greeks. Now, all the rest of them – Dante, Milton, Keats, Tolstoy – that whole “Great Books” crowd.
For about two decades now, they’ve been banished from the core requirements of just about every major university. Students have been able to get through four years at an Ivy League school without reading a single one of them.
No longer did being an educated person mean having at least a nodding acquaintance with these thinkers, whose works are known collectively as the Western canon.
The arguments for what was wrong with the canon were summed up in the phrase Dead White European Males, which translates into sexist, racist, Eurocentric, and no longer relevant to the contemporary world.
There were other arguments, some stemming from French philosophies such as post-structuralism and deconstructionism, that, depending on your point of view, were either exquisitely subtle or completely obscure.
Despite all this, those Dead White European Males, or DWEMS, have proved remarkably resilient. They keep popping up where you least expect them.
Consider Shakespeare.
Students may have escaped him in the classroom, but he caught up with them in the movie theaters.
For the past five or six years, Hollywood has been cranking out Shakespeare movies with reckless abandon. Some are semi-faithful to the originals, some loose adaptations with offbeat settings, but all recognizable as Shakespeare.
We’ve seen Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo, Mel Gibson as Hamlet, Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Calista Flockhart and Michelle Pfeiffer in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Even Anthony Hopkins in the gruesome “Titus Andronicus,” a play that even most graduate students don’t read.
Hollywood as the savior of high culture? Not quite. Some of these movies have been pretty awful. But they have preserved much of the language and, more important, some sense of the life and vitality of these plays.
And the whole thing is just so…ironic. While academics probe Shakespeare’s plays for signs of sexism or aristocratic biases, or spin theories that Juliet was having a lesbian relationship with her nurse or that “The Tempest” is a text on colonialism, Hollywood makes “Shakespeare in Love” and turns the biggest DWEM of them all into a heartthrob.
***
Then there are the Greeks.
Although they lived 2,500 years ago, they are central to today’s culture wars.
“They are seen as the originators of the entire Western tradition, so that if you believe in that tradition, you point to them as shining examples of what is great about it,” says Peter Collier, publisher of Encounter Books in California and a critic of higher education.
“But if you don’t believe in the tradition, if you want to discredit it, then you must find fault with the Greeks, to show that they are not so great, after all.”
And so it has gone, for more than 15 years now, longer than the Trojan War.
The traditionalists continue to point to the miraculous accomplishments of the Greeks: democratic government, the foundations of philosophy, history, science, and medicine; influential styles of art and architecture.
From the opposite side comes the argument that the Greeks had slaves and denied some rights to women, that they were warlike and that they oppressed and exploited weaker societies around them. Even their sexual practices came under close scrutiny.
Other revisionist scholars have argued that the “Greek Miracle” is actually a myth or, at the least, an exaggeration. Linguist Martin Bernal, in his controversial trilogy “Black Athena,” the first installment of which came out in 1987, argued that the true roots of Western Culture were in ancient Egyptian and Phoenician cultures, and that the Egyptians were in fact a race of black Africans. This view was embraced by Afrocentrists, who went on to claim that Socrates and Cleopatra were black.
All these disputes have politicized formerly staid classics departments.
In “Who Killed Homer?,” professors Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath argue that politics and postmodernist theorizing have made havoc of their field.
“Ancient texts don’t exist just so that someone can round up all the victims and decide who was oppressed and who wasn’t,” complains Hanson.
Barbara K. Gold, a classicist at Hamilton College, disagrees. She says feminist scholars such as herself, and other theorists, have enlivened the field.
“We pay more attention to the females, the slaves, the marginal characters,” she says. Gold says non-traditional approaches to the classics – involving psychoanalytic theory, deconstructionism, and issues of sexuality and exploitation – have attracted more students.
Hanson thinks the opposite: “How will students learn to love the classics when their professors write incomprehensibly about a world they hold responsible for all the neuroses of present-day society?”
As with Shakespeare, however, the academic arguments seem to run on one track and the popular culture on another.
While Hanson and Heath lamented the death of Homer, and scholars such as Gold deconstructed him, NBC made “The Odyssey,” a 1997 miniseries that attracted millions of viewers. Disney got into the act with the animated “Hercules,” and, most recently, PBS did a three-part documentary, “The Greeks, Crucible of Civilization.”
Series producer Anthony Geffen, who is British, says one of his reasons for doing the series was to counter the bad rap the Greeks were getting in American colleges.
“The Greeks are not so popular in the schools and colleges here today,” he says. “I hope the series teaches about a society that in 200 years gave us what is the foundation of our lives today.”
Combined with a companion book, an extensive Web site, and suggested study assignments, “The Greeks” is practically a college course in itself, but a very upbeat one, with none of the conflicted feelings found in academia.
“Sure, the Greeks had flaws,” says Geffen. “These people lived 2,500 years ago, and some of the things they did were barbaric.
“But let’s get real. Plenty of other societies have done barbaric things, some of them pretty recently, and those societies didn’t produce Socrates or the Parthenon.”
***
So far, no television series is underway on the “Great Books,” although with “Don Quixote” and “Gulliver’s Travels” turned into miniseries, can “Paradise Lost” be far behind?
A more interesting development, however, is in academia.
Reports have begun to surface recently about the resurgence of “Great Books” courses – not at top colleges, but at community institutions such as Wilbur Wright College in Chicago or the Milwaukee branch of the University of Wisconsin.
The courses have proved very popular at these two schools, both of which cater to working-class students, many of whom have jobs and families, and who have come back to school to better their lot. What’s more, they are mostly minorities, the ones on whose behalf such courses were eliminated 20 years ago.
This is very much the case at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where Philip Lerman, an associate professor of humanities, recently directed an ensemble of students and former students in performances of Euripides’ “Electra” and Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Prior to that, the group had done several Shakespeare plays.
“Many of my students are of Latino or other minority backgrounds,” says Lerman. “They are the ones who are supposed to be hostile to these works because it’s not their culture. But that’s not what I’ve found at all. They’re very excited by it.”
“In fact,” he added, “if you suggest to them that they might prefer something more contemporary or Latino, they’re insulted. They think you’re condescending to them.”
Heidi Arauz of Bergenfield, who starred in “Electra” this past winter, says she didn’t care about the ethnicity, sex of the author, or how long he’d been dead. In fact, she found it more interesting that the play was 25 centuries old.
“The stories are about things in human nature that don’t change,” she says. “You could switch some of these plots to the White House, and they would work just as well.”
Why are these small community colleges in the forefront of the fledgling revival of “Great Books” and classical culture?
“Smaller schools have to try harder,” says Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars, a Princeton-based group that works to restore core requirements and strengthen standards at American colleges. “Because the classics were tossed out by the elite schools, they see a niche for themselves in offering them.”
“At the same time, I think the path is easier in the smaller schools because the humanities departments are not so ideologically driven. There’s less resistance if someone wants to do “Great Books.” At an Ivy League school, everyone would have something to say about the list.”
And so it is that we have arrived at this strange moment in our cultural history, a moment when the idea that students should read “Great Books” is fraught with controversy, a moment when the biggest champion of Greek culture is a television producer, a moment when Shakespeare is celebrated in Hollywood but considered suspect in the nation’s top universities.
So go the culture wars.
