>>11398668Probably more so than STEM anons as I studied a humanities degree. Everything is politicised and I only managed to go against the grain because of my charisma and good looks. A lot of head-nodding, and people refusing to disagree with orthodoxy.
It started by bashing origin myths (Genesis, etc.) with feminist theory, then on to criticising the Odyssey for it's representation or women, then looking at Gulliver's Travels through a post-imperialist lens, etc. For theory, we spend 2 weeks on Marxism, 3 weeks on race and orientalism, 4 weeks on feminism and Queer Theory, 4 weeks (the only really good weeks) on structuralism, semiology, deconstructionism and postsctrucutralism, etc., just to name a few. Every single one of the theoreticians self-identified as politically left, and we were expected to employ their theory in our analyses of texts. So basically, it was a soft-core political ideology course. I mean, imagine trying to argue FOR an English canon when just about every theoretician you study in depth goes to great lengths to deconstruct it....? Naturally, I was market down in that paper, as I didn't borrow heavily enough form the taught theory.
Besides the curricular bias, the teachers themselves (most of them at least) had their own prejudices which they were kind of encouraged to flaunt. Big personalities and opinionated people tend to do quite well in humanities. I once had a seminar in which the seminar leader outright said "there is no room for science in literature", which I found very narrow-minded and irksome. I wanted to find out what made literature so compelling, and how we related to it, but less than 10% of the course focused on these elements, and that was if you selected for them in your course choices. Besides all this, the students themselves were overwhelmingly priggish and prejudiced against populist and conservative ideas. They really were little reactionaries and revolutionaries in training.
