The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature

There are several very good reasons to purchase, read, and share this book. Perhaps you realize you didn't pay as much attention or read all you should have in school. Perhaps you have children in school now and are concerned about what they aren't being taught that they should hear and what is being pushed on them in its place. Maybe you are home schooling and would like to get a handle on the old values versus the new post-modern deconstruction muti-culturalist nonsense. Just maybe you are a student and are confused and / or disgusted by what is going on in your classroom. Each of these reasons and many others justify purchasing this quite useful book. Elizabeth Kantor lays out the problem very well in her introduction to the book. The twelve chapters are grouped into three parts. In Part I, Kantor takes us through historical periods in the old and new world and the literature from each and WHY it should still be taught: Old English (Beowulf, etc.), Medieval (Canterbury Tales versus Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale), Renaissance (Marlowe, Shakespeare), Seventeenth Century (Donne, Milton), Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, etc.), Nineteenth Century (Wordsworth, Austen, Keats, Dickens, and many others), Twentieth Century, and American Literature and Our Neglected Canon. Part II discusses how politically correct professors and teachers are suppressing English Literature by not teaching and substituting far inferior (but politically acceptable) material. Kantor than offers a fine chapter on what literature is actually for. Part III is particularly useful because she shows the reader how to teach oneself the literature that is seldom taught nowadays. She talks about close reading, how to appreciate poetry, and much more. In the last chapter she encourages learning by living. Memorize poems, go act in plays, read them out loud with friends, and making literature a topic of everyday conversation among your friends. There are lots of fine marginal notes and suggestions with the always fun and irreverent PIG boxes about what "they" don't want you to read and so forth. A very enjoyable and worthwhile book. Enjoy!

Just when it looked as though dead white males were done for, Elizabeth Kantor calls in the cavalry with The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. Thus, as a dead white male in training, I am pleased -- beyond the capacity of even the greatest of dead languages to express - that Dr. Kantor has taken a claymore whack at the post-modern downward spiral of silliness within the teaching of literature before the subject gurgles away into some final absurdity. Politically it is absolutely correct to say that Elizabeth Kantor's book is powerful common ground for cultural bipartisanship. Anyone on either side of any aisle, who cares about academic quality, will love The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature. The sea of truth and knowledge takes us far and wide: Dr. Kantor reminds us of its depth.

Kantor shows us what we loved in the classics but didn't know why. This book is readable with a capital R, witty, inspiring and full of tidbits we wish we had known earlier. It's a delight to dip into. (You don't have to start from the beginning, but don't skip the preface. It's is worth the price of the book.) Pick your favorite (or least favorite) author and get the reasons why you need him (or her.) This PIG is an engrossing read and would make a good Christmas present for your favorite college student or any literary fan. Kantor is especially good in her terse, provocative insets referring to current academic hoaxes. Don't miss her pages on Jane Austin, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Faulkner, and learn how to have fun with them.

Remember when Ernie on "My Three Sons" had to memorize the beginning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in Middle English? It was a fairly common English assignment for kids not too long ago, and Elizabeth Kantor shows why such projects should never have been abandoned. Kantor's enthusiasm for literature is infectious. Beginning with Beowulf (which turns out to be a lot more interesting than I recall) and carrying through to T.S. Eliot, Kantor shows the value that great English and American Literature adds to our lives, and shows how the PC nonsense that has infected our universities is but confusion worse confounded. In fact, the sidebars, which include side-splittingly (though unintentionally) funny quotations from professors and grad students, are half the fun of the book. Whether you wish to broaden your own horizons or your children's, this guide is an excellent guide on what to read and why.

In The Politically Incorrect Guide to English Literature, Elizabeth Kantor has great fun skewering silly English literature professors, a broad and easy target, but the real point of the book is the joy of reading great literature because it is good and true. The book includes a chronological survey of the greatest hits of English literature and gives fresh insights into why these really are the greatest hits. Read Chaucer for a rich, multi-layered tapestry of life invigorated, not oppressed, by chivalry, authority, and Christianity. Read Shakespeare for the most amazing heartbreaking and real characters, who show that there really is such a thing as human nature, that some choices are inherently destructive, and that love and sex are serious things. Read Jane Austen because she is funny. After reading this book, I wanted to click off the television, put down the newspaper and pick up books off my shelf I haven't looked at since college, not because they're good for me, but because they're just plain good. Any high school senior would benefit from this book, as a sort of inoculation against the silly stuff that passes for English literature study in many colleges. Those of us who were high school seniors many years ago will be reminded how much fun it is to read plays out loud, memorize poetry, and gossip about the characters of great novels. Definitely five stars.