The best essay I wrote in college argued that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was a proto-transgender text. I don’t mean that this essay was objectively more meritorious, better researched, or simply more unique than anything else I wrote for my English degree courses at Columbia University during my undergraduate years. Rather, I mean it was ‘the best’ because it received glowing praise from my Shakespeare professor, a younger, recently-tenured woman who put a progressive spin on every Shakespeare play we analysed; it also led to my only A+ that semester. My classmates were impressed, and my work momentarily inaugurated me among the ranks of the intellectual elite in my department — until, of course, the next essay that I wrote challenged predominant feminist scholarship around the poet Sylvia Plath and got me kicked out of my thesis program.
My aim in writing the Shakespeare essay was not to be facetious or to carry out a social experiment. Rather, by my junior year of college, I had identified certain themes and ideologies in the field of literary study that were guaranteed to lead to good grades. In order to succeed, a student must be sure to imbue every assignment with one or more of the ‘correct’ sets of ideas. Yet as my grades skyrocketed, my morale declined. Soon enough, it dawned on me that in rewarding ideological conformity, literature departments were no longer teaching literature, they were teaching ideology.
This was not unique to Columbia, but a phenomenon common to English departments across the world where literary study has become home to far-left ideologues who view literature through the narrow lens of 21st century identitarianism — the phenomenon whereby literature is evaluated not based on objective merit, but rather on its function as a tool for furthering the political interests of certain identity groups.
So how did the study of literature undergo such a significant transition? This particular method of literary study originated in the postmodern intellectual movement in France and the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School in Germany, both of which sought to eradicate traditional, morality-based interpretations of literature, which we might dub a ‘liberal arts’ or ‘classically liberal’ approach to literature. While literary scholars of the early 20th century like Irving Babbitt and T.S. Eliot believed that literature should be instrumental in the development of moral character and that tradition was important to understanding the literature of the times, postmodern critics such as Roland Barthes insisted