Eric Kaufmann
Trigger Warning Happy
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
By Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt
Allen Lane 338pp £20
The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars
By Bradley Campbell & Jason Manning
Palgrave Macmillan 278pp £24.99
‘You should not sleep at night!’ a student screamed at Yale professor Nicholas Christakis in 2015. ‘You are disgusting!’ Students surrounded him, yelling obscenities and threatening him while he tried in vain to reason with them. The abuse stemmed from the fact that Christakis’s wife, Erika, had questioned whether it was Yale’s business to email students on Halloween instructing them not to dress in costumes that might be deemed ‘culturally unaware or insensitive’. The video of the mob went viral, exposing a wider audience to a strain of radical cultural intolerance that has been pulsating with increasing ferocity on university campuses since the early 2010s. A new lexicon of terms – ‘trigger warning’, ‘microaggression’, ‘safe space’ – has entered the American vocabulary. Alongside open letters denouncing deviant academics, events or speakers (I recently had the experience of being targeted), social media has been used to destroy reputations, cause professors to lose their jobs and prompt journal articles to be retracted.
Two important new books raise the curtain on the epidemic of unreason sweeping through prestigious American universities. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind can be read as a revised version of Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind, a critique of
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
@StephenSmithWDS asks if Gauguin is still worth looking at.
Stephen Smith - Art of Rebellion
Stephen Smith: Art of Rebellion - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
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‘I have fond memories of discussing Lorca and the state of Andalusian theatre with Antonio Banderas as Lauren Bacall sat on the dressing-room couch.’
@henryhitchings on Simon Russell Beale.
Henry Hitchings - The Play’s the Thing
Henry Hitchings: The Play’s the Thing - A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare & Other Stories by Simon Russell Beale
literaryreview.co.uk
We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
Terry Eagleton - Supermarket of the Mind
Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
literaryreview.co.uk