Lest this give an edge to sordid, abnormal heterosexual love, the department offers "Fictions of Identity" for sexual victims of Western culture. The professor asks: "How can we reconcile psychoanalytic and postmodern conceptions of the fragmented subject with the urgency of identity politics for people of color, women, lesbians, and gay men?" As Elizabeth Barrett Browning might have said (before the professor put her to sleep): "Let me count the ways."
Wellesley College, one of the once revered "Seven Sisters," requires English majors to take one Shakespeare course. But the politically correct literature major should not expect to get it as Shakespeare wrote it. Young ladies of Wellesley can satisfy the requirement with a class that focuses on themes of "gender relations and identities to national self-consciousness." Imagine "Romeo and Juliet" as an example in gender relations.
We might study it in relation to high-tech, too. If Friar Lawrence had had a cell phone, Romeo and Juliet would have lived happily ever after. Talk about a "theatre of the absurd." (The friar would probably have got a busy signal, since Juliet would have been on her phone describing her groovy date to one of her teenage friends.)
The Independent Women's forum asks whether the liberal arts are dead. Well, maybe not dead, but on many campuses they're surely on life support. In a global society, the best and the brightest won't understand, let alone convey, the best and the brightest in the literary canon.
Young people are under great stress to absorb tons of information in our high tech society. College should be one of the last preserves for liberal education, for studying the great books to develop the critical mind and the lively imagination. The young shouldn't have to waste time sorting through gobbledygook dreamed up by no-talent poseurs.
This is the season for high school seniors to bite fingernails to the quick, to consume gallons of midnight coffee as they polish the applications and essays that determine which college or university will make a place for them.
Parents have homework assignments, too. They should check out the big print in the catalogues before they mortgage the home place to pay the tuition at a high status university where true learning has been hijacked by cheap politics.
Puck got it right: "What fools these mortals be." But who the devil was Puck?