There is something overrated about To Kill a Mockingbird. It is good. It is very good. But it is not great. Something about is just not quite in the league that people who loved it at school think that it is.
Even in terms of the reason why it is so widely taught, it is very much a bourgeois white liberal's book, challenging something that is now as self-evidently wicked as it is conveniently in the past; the past, moreover, of a foreign country.
In that country today, they realise that, whatever its achievements, bourgeois white liberalism is now at least as much the thing to be challenged as it is the challenge itself. Sometimes, it can withstand, and indeed benefit from, that challenge. But that challenge certainly has to advanced.
No, the really striking thing in this debate kicked off by, of all people, Michael Gove, is that 90 per cent of candidates for GCSE English Literature, which is compulsory and which marks the end of most people's formal education in the discipline, answer on Of Mice and Men.
Nine out of 10.
It has become a kind of national epic, if something of that length can be an epic. A whole generation will be able to quote it in conversation at opportune, and at inopportune, moments.
But it is not about Britain. It is not about any predecessor-state of this one, or any imaginary version of this or of any such predecessor. It is very, very, very much about America. It faithfully depicts a highly specific, hugely formative period in the American story.
Gove's attitude is a little odd, though, given his strong neoconservative opinions, such that he does in fact regard the United Kingdom as an economic, political and military satellite and dependency of the United States. That is only possible by also being a cultural satellite and dependency of the United States.
His neglect of Scotland is also surprising. Mind you, he would not want teenagers reading Sunset Song, would he?
Gove's rationale was also correct. It really has nothing to do with whether To Kill a Mockingbird is or is not a great book-the obvious point is that British school children should learn British literature, not least so that they are properly conversant with their own ancestors.
ReplyDeleteI instantly saw Leftists on Twitter boring us all with the claim that this is "jingoistic" (cry me a river, dears).
We had to endure the same brain dead Left wing reaction to Gove's perfectly correct proposal to remove Mary Seacole from the curriculum- (a woman who was literally invented by the Left for the Left, and whom no Crimean War historian thinks had any historical significance whatsoever).
They, unfortunately, are the loons who have run our English lessons and especially our history lessons, for the last 30 years.
Everything and anything Gove can do to annoy these people is more than worth it.
I can't find your web page on the Durham Uni site. Where is it?
ReplyDeleteI don't have one. Why would I have? It would just link here, anyway. Actually, I might do that over the summer. If I can be bothered.
ReplyDeleteGive it up. You are very, very silly.
And based on one of your rejected comments, you listen to Oliver Kamm, who I am starting to think believes his own tweets, such that he ought to be committed.
I used to think that he was just a liar. But he is beyond that now. He is mentally ill.
Kamm belongs in the funny farm, we all know that. But the University without David Lindsay? You are the University!
ReplyDeleteI reckon you know somebody important's dark and terrible secret, that is why nobody has ever managed to get rid of you. People who will be retired or dead in 10 or 20 years haven't a chance. Who asked them?
ReplyDeleteTerrible things have been done to anyone who crossed you, visits from the rozzers ordered from your hospital operating table and such like. Underneath it all you sure know how to put the frighteners on people.
I am closing this thread.
ReplyDeleteGood night.