side story, but still literary.

when i was in college, we read A Passage to India, which was a book dealing with british colonialism in India. There's a part of the book where one of the white women comes running into the compound completely freaked out, and won't tell anyone what happened. Because she was out with her Indian guide, they assumed that he had raped her.

So, I say to my full professor at the top public university in the country, "this is very similar to To Kill a Mockingbird where the town assumes that Jim has raped Mayella" and he says, Oh, I wouldn't know. I'VE NEVER READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD." there is a hush. then he says "why are you all looking at me like i just told you I killed my mother" I lost all respect for him after that.

Oh, I wouldn't know. I'VE NEVER READ TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

(speechless)

an ENGLISH LIT professor? From where - Mars?

From Theresa Nielsen Hayden's blog:

I have finished copies of Sethra Lavode and you don’t. Just thought I’d mention it.

Definitive proof that editors are evil, also gloaters.

What is Sethra Lavode? Why is it ringing a bell in the recesses of my mind somewhere?

I remember getting in trouble for reading some trashy Danielle Steel-type novel when I was 9 or 10, but I was also doing other things with my best friend that got us in trouble, so not sure it was just the novel. :) And I got a lot of frowns on the trashy romances I'd bring home from the library in high school. Mostly, I didn't flaunt them, and my mom didn't disapprove too vociferously.

I have never gotten in any trouble for anything I have ever read. My mother did ask me to let her read the lyrics on a Poison tape, but I think she was confusing them with Alice Cooper.

Sethra Lavode must be the new Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel.

In her excellent collection of essays, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman describes learning about sex as a child from reading Fanny Hill. I nearly choked -- I had the same experience. There is was, sitting on mom's bookshelf. Educational to say the least.

Ah! Steven Brust. I just started reading the Taltos things, and now I remember. Thanks!

Really? Seems like it would depend on how it's taught. Did they assume that the teacher would just say "And so, children, Shylock had to be punished for being Jewish."? I ask because the year I taught English, I taught that play for the play and "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the novel, and worked a lot with the parallels of trials of the assumed bad guys. MoV was always much trickier though, and I'm still not sure I got it right.

Pretty much, it was assumed (based a whole lot of previous experience with this teacher) that she wouldn't have the perspective to be able to teach it in a way that wouldn't be offensive to a significant portion of the class. She'd demonstrated on numerous occaisions that she just didn't get that people could approach issues from perspectives other than Catholic, and she was the sort of teacher who claimed that any interpretation of the text other than the one in the teachers manual was wrong. (I've never read Merchant of Venice, and only know the vaguest outline of the plot, so I can't really comment on specifics.)

That makes sense. Teaching sensitive materials is an art form, and it sounds like that particular teacher didn't have the finesse to handle it. Better for her to teach the bland rather than mis-teach the controversial.

FWIW, my best friend, a Jewish English teacher herself, started teaching Merchant in the way that was described upthread a few years back. She did it as part of a large unit on outsiders in society. She also did it, she tells me, because she wanted to overcome her own issues with the text. She ended up having a really positive experience that first time and now teaches it every year.

But again, it's all in the approach. When I teach Huck Finn, we spend more than a week preparing for it before they even touch the books. Discussion of the derogatory language and depiction of Jim, discussion of historical context, discussion of satire -- all of these have to happen before I will open that Pandora's Box. I personally believe that Finn is the first piece of American lit that really deals with the absurdity of racism, but it would be frighteningly easy to teach it without that context and end up alienating every African American kid in class.