No Culture, No Creed
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Culture, No Creed Carol Iannone
Published online: 27 August 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Years ago, long before cable and streaming, a film from Hollywood’s golden age starring the sublime Leslie Howard, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), frequently aired on television. At a moment of high danger, facing death, the elegant Sir Percy Blakeney finds strength in reciting poetry. Since he’s engaged in courageous opposition to what the Revolution at its bloodiest is doing to France, what comes to mind is Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which John of Gaunt memorably describes England as This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in a silver sea. . . . This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. I don’t remember what tender age I was when I first took in that moment in the film but I recall being enchanted. It was an early lesson in the inspirational power of art and culture as an intrinsic part of one’s being, one’s spiritual makeup, one’s emotional constitution. (As it turns out, Sir Percy escapes death, but the lesson remained.)
Carol Iannone is editor-at-large of Academic Questions, 420 Madison Avenue, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10017; [email protected].
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C. Iannone
When I started stumbling into what used to be called “the life of the mind,” literature, art, music, and culture were considered central both to personal development and to understanding the world. Lionel Trilling, F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and other major critics had written about fiction and poetry with larger implications for both the individual and society (to use one of the categories common to freshman readers back in the day). Kenneth Clark’s monumental, groundbreaking television series, “Civilisation” (1969), illustrated the great aesthetic achievements of the West and in the process showed how they were foundational to our shared culture and way of life. It was not surprising, then, that when countercultural radicalism began to invade the academy, around the late 1970s, it aimed its fire first at literature. The result was the “canon wars,” as they were named, over the body of great works that until that point had loosely and generally constituted the college curriculum. What should be taught about the other arts also became contentious, since they too had their lion’s share of “dead white male” achievements. The canon did succumb to incorporating lesser works by so called underrepresented authors from underrepresented groups, and the other arts fields followed suit, which measure turned out to be the first step in largely extinguishing the tradition and the idea of excellence altogether in the curriculum, but that gets a little ahead of the story. One day, it seemed, there had been a shift in response to the radical countercultural assaults. The baton had passed from the English departments to Political Science, it seemed. The thing that bound us was not
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