University sidelines sonnets as 'products of white western culture' | Hacker News Reader

University sidelines sonnets as 'products of white western culture'

telegraph.co.uk

25 pointscar_analogy26 comments

> “It is hugely patronising to assume non-White students would be put off by Western poetic forms. Will we sideline Shakespeare next as white drama? Even the English language?”

There's a better term for this: infantilization. It's one thing to try to foster diversity or inclusion. But this is the opposite - you are treating other cultures like they are inferior or dumb and in need of our wise protection.

It's ironic because this has more in common with actual colonialist ideals rather than poetry or whatever.

I agree with what they’re doing, but the messaging around it is odd.

What they’re trying to do is diversify their curriculum from western-dominant culture to include other, lesser-mentioned cultures. That’s fine and honestly a refreshing take from higher education.

The messaging is inflammatory and ridiculous though. The problem is not white or colonizer culture. The problem is Western-centric education excluding other interesting literary movements around the globe.

As usual, this sounds like a reasonable move branded terribly by the woke mob (or a media outlet trying to find their next outrage piece).

I don’t find it patronizing at all — what I do find patronizing is the interpretation by the quoted author on the article.

What you need to understand is that the towering achievements of (historical) European culture are simply a constant thorn in the sides of the woke. The more they think about it, the more it drives them insane.

Citations?

Absolutely. This is a single requirement in a single curricula at a private hoity toity college. And if the professor had done the exact same thing but simply said "this is old fashioned and we want to be more inclusive" there would be no story here.

That said, I think there's some value in pointing out the specific wrongness with this train of thought rather than leave it as a vague "wokeness run amok!".

It's not though, it's a university wide effort to "decolonize" not a lone professor with funny ideas.

Fair enough. I guess writing the sonnet was just the one cited example.

Well, at least now I get to know what kind of stuff the bloated administrative staff at my college was working on that whole time.

Perhaps a contentious question, but why shouldn't an English university teach a western-dominated curriculum? I'm English, and that's my culture. I want to learn about it. I also want to learn about other cultures, but I see no issue with my culture being centered in the nation from which it originated. I don't imagine Chinese or Pakistani universities are terribly concerned about decentering their respective cultures.

That’s not a problem! There’s nothing wrong with it.

Perhaps you can switch professors or course. There are usually alternatives in these universities for going deeper in a topic.

I’d expect a general literature course to give me a good overview of world literature, and to go deeper I’d choose a more specific class on the subject. There’s only so much time during the semester, and exposing the student to a breadth of information is the point.

There are classes in Elizabethan English literature. A broad creative writing class should be expected to cover more forms. It would be like learning the discoveries of only English chemists in chemistry class.

The problem here is the wording the professor used to justify the change, but triggering outrage from the usual suspects by using the ancient "trolling" creative writing form and then "leaking" that justification seems like this could just be a kind of performance art.

And it does cover more forms. But, until now, it focused on (not excluded all others, just focused on) traditional English forms. I.e. teaching young writers the styles of their culture, just as a university in Japan might require of their students proficiency in haikus. That does not mean they are not taught anything other than haikus, and I'm not sure where you got that impression.

From the article: "Students of poetry no longer have to write traditional forms as part of their assessment.... Examples of such traditional forms given in the slideshow include sonnets and “sestinas” - a complex verse form used by figures like the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sindey."

I don't care enough about creative writing to have read a lot of modern creative writing, but I have never seen a sestina. I have seen plenty of haikus. Again, the change itself seems perfectly reasonable. The "products of white western culture" wording of the slideshow seems suspiciously flame-baity (or taken out of context), triggering the War on Christmas outrage culture fanatics.

I swear, modern day white people who have nothing to do with colonialism seem to be far more obsessed with it than those who experienced it (it's 70 years in the past and we can no longer blame our problems on it).

I don't think this nonsense behaviour should be tolerated. A white person should not be any more ashamed of their culture than an Indian or Chinese person.

I don’t understand — having the option to write a sestina or a haiku is nonsense behavior?

You’re just looking for something to be mad at.

We should be more vocal about this messaging. It's gotten too far and we need to push back that colonisation is a part of life. If you are in a western country, you should not have to be indoctrinated and debased into caring about the cultures that lost.

oof. Somewhere in here they missed the point of adding additional inclusivity, rather than becoming exclusionary themselves.

These concepts and their implementations are not very sophisticated right now, and clumsy implementations do a lot to cause harm, rather than to help.

Not teaching the history of slavery does not erase the historical consequences of slavery. Not teaching sonnets will similarly not erase historical colonialism. Treating not teaching sonnets as if it is a step toward inclusivity is puzzling and certainly requires an intellectual step I am not sure I follow.

This headline, the article, and most of the comments here seem to be going out of their way to present this as a way bigger change than it is. As is clear even from the preview, this is a change to the curriculum of ONE CREATIVE WRITING where second-year students now won't be required to write sonnets as part of the curriculum for that ONE CLASS. It's not about courses where students learn about poetry forms, or all the classes in the department, or even about what the students learn in the overall curriculum. The full article makes it clear that first year students will still learn about and be required to write sonnets.

Even if you feel like Hacker News bandwidth is well spent on topics like creative writing curriculum design (and I clicked the link so I'm not saying it's not), I'd hope the specificity of that interest in the topic would yield a comment section with some thoughtful analysis from folks who read the link and spent some time thinking about the topic at hand.

This may be one small change to a single curriculum, but is an example of what we may expect from the "decolonization" that already one fifth of all UK universities have promised: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/11/only-fifth-o...

One more raindrop for the flood.

I would of course understand this move if done by e.g. the University of Beijing - why should China focus on white western culture? But coming from a university in England, it's a bit more puzzling. If they won't focus on their own culture, then who?

The English elites appear to hate the English.

It's not English elites.

It's bored young American suburbanites searching for meaning and how to do right in the world finding it in making their own heritage an evil and putting it on themselves to elevate other cultures (a form of colonization, taking on others' problems and treating them like they aren't able to do it themselves).

In other words, white American middle class suburban young women don't really have anything to struggle against and feel strongly that they need to, so they're taking other people's problems, making them their own, and creating monsters along the way.

This is fucking ridiculous.

Woke gone mad.

And what it will actually achieve is more far right sentiment and we have enough of that already.

This is so absurdly trying to make a contentious issue out of a minor change. They are removing the required sonnet writing in an assessment and changing it to an assessment based on a thematic criteria. This is all in a class for creative writing and is giving more freedom. They are not sidelining sonnets all together, they are giving students in a creative writing course the flexibility to be creative.

Whatever is going on, it is not going to end well.

Many of us are going to feel progressively more lost as the extremes of thought both grow in domination with an obsession in a culture war over race, sexuality, or other identity issues with a shrinking middle afraid to speak out that we don't really find a person's skin tone or sexuality to be particularly interesting in the grand scheme of things.

England being "decolonised" lol. Shameless people

Is that, like, expelling the Normans? Do we have a rightful heir of Harold Godwinson somewhere to reinstate?

...

Actually, Queen Elizabeth II can claim to be part of that line, so, mission accomplished, maybe?

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