Something from the Comments

In a comment on this post, an anonymous person asks: "Have you ever read a book by someone who is NOT a white European man?? (just wondering). "

I answered that comment, but I think it's a good enough question that I should answer it as a real blog post.

My formal education has certainly been disproportionately heavy on the white European (or North American) male writers. One part explanation of this is that I study English literature, (not world literature) which has all been written in English—which accounts for the mostly European and North American part of that. But that really isn't any excuse. Plenty has been written in English in India and throughout Africa and the Carribean, and there are notable examples in Asia and South America. And there there are translations. And I've studied some of it, but only some.

I'm taking a course this year on Hybridity in Literary Imagination designed to partly fill the gaps in my formal education, but it is a pretty thin start. My English prof from CMU once told me that when he finished his Master's degree he felt like his education in literature had just begun. He felt like his BA and his MA were both just the necessary groundwork for actual study. I'm getting something of the same feeling, but not only has my education so far not been deep enough, it hasn't been broad enough either.

And maybe one defense is that I can't study everything. The choice between depth and breadth (in literature studies) is an excruciatingly difficult one. I could spend the next 50 years reading nothing but Beowulf and I would still miss something. Or I could spend the next 50 years and never re-read anything I've read already—and still only read white European men who are worth reading. Or I could spend the next 50 years and never read anything by another white person or another European or another man.

Fortunately, I don't have to choose between those options. But I am sure that in my life—no matter how long it ends up being—I will miss out on great literature that I either didn't read, didn't understand, or didn't give a fair chance to because I was too busy with something I already knew and loved. I'm sure it's happened already.

Outside of school I have read and enjoyed a handful of non-Europeans (incidentally, does Russian literature count as European? Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoyovsky seem to have thought of themselves as European), a handful of non-white writers (Maya Angelou, Booker T. Washington and Sojourner Truth are three who come to mind), and definitely more than a handful of woman writers (Connie Willis, J.K. Rowling, The Brontes, Jane Austin, Mary Shelley, Mary Wolstonecraft, Virginia Wolfe, H.D., Edith Warton being the first few that come to my head).

I would ask for suggestions to broaden my horizons, but honestly I won't read them at least until the summer—unless they happen to be assigned texts for one of my classes.