Class News

Stephen Greenblatt ’64 weighs in on #cancelculture

September 1, 2020

Stephen Greenblatt is back at Harvard teaching his courses online. Here is a trailer he sent to students about his course.

After he read the column by Michael Lewis about Yale’s Art History Course, he emailed:

This is interesting and worth having a long, nuanced conversation about — something other, I think, than talk of ‘suicide.’ I’m in the midst of the issues in the Humanities course that Luke Menand and I created more than a decade ago. This fall we (actually, I) decided not to teach Mme. de Lafayette’s Princesse de Cleves, but to teach Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative; in the spring, to make room for W. E. B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, we dropped Montaigne (in part because we are also teaching Marguerite de Navarre from the same period in France). Each of these decisions could feature in an article such as the one about Yale’s Art History course — and I personally happen to love Montaigne. But Equiano and DuBois, neither of whom figured in our curriculum at Yale, make a serious, urgent claim upon us at this moment, alongside all of the other texts that we teach, and I resist the whole rhetoric of Culture Wars and Cancel Culture.

Here's something I published in June — about grappling with works that make you uncomfortable — so you’ll see more broadly where I am coming from.