A Broken Vessel: Identity Theory and the Fragmentation of Poetry
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A Broken Vessel: Identity Theory and the Fragmentation of Poetry Jane Clark Scharl
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
In February, Oxford University announced that the Classics faculty is considering dropping Homer and Virgil from the required reading list. Part of the reasoning given for the proposed change is a “very troubling” gap in grades between men and women.1 While 38 percent of men achieved top marks in the course that currently requires Homer and Virgil, only 19.3 percent of women achieved the same marks. 2 In other words, Oxford University is considering removing two of the pillars of world literature from their required reading list because women are not doing as well as men. The decision implies that Oxford, like preeminent schools throughout the West, has been infected by identity theory. Rather than using objective standards of excellence to determine which texts students ought to read, more and more universities are structuring their curricula around this ideology, which demands that texts be chosen—and rejected—based on certain characteristics of the authors, such as race and sex. The attack on “dead white males” like Homer and Virgil is more than merely an academic manifestation of a political fad. It is a revolt against the concept of poetry itself. Identity theory insists on the irreconcilable separateness of various human experiences. Therefore, it denies that poetry, in plumbing the depths of human nature, can draw up something we all hold in common, something shared Yaamir Badhe, “Classics Faculty Proposes Removal Of Homer And Virgil From Mods Syllabus.” The Oxford Student, February 17, 2020.
1
Camilla Turner, Fin Kavanaugh, “Oxford University's Classics degree to be overhauled in bid to boost number of female students getting Firsts,” The Telegraph, February 9, 2019.
2
Jane Clark Scharl graduated from The King's College in New York City with a bachelor's degree in politics, philosophy, and economics in 2012; [email protected]. She is a contributing editor to Crisis magazine and her work has appeared in National Review Online, Intercollegiate Review, and Comment magazine.
J.C. Scharl
and knowable. By rejecting poetry’s capacity to transcend the particular by way of the particular, and to bring a single, discrete experience or image into a new relationship with the whole of the human experience, identity theory strips poetry of its greatest power: bringing unity and meaning to fragmented, seemingly senseless experiences.
Institutionalized Disunity In his book Poetry as Persuasion, poet and critic Carl Dennis critiques what he calls “the restrictive formulation of multiculturalism,” in which “the appeal of any work is limited by the essential disunity of human experience, by its being made up of a multitude of separate, irreconcilable perspectives, each defined and determined primarily by inherited membership in a particular group, whether gender, race, tribe, nationality, or social class.” 3 What Dennis in 2001 identified as the “restrictive formu
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