What's with the prevalence of the dead white males meme in literary academia...

What's with the prevalence of the dead white males meme in literary academia? I'd say a solid 50% of books anyone would study before university level are by women - and the majority of them are absolutely great. I get the whiteness thing but gender doesn't seem to have been much of a barrier in literature.

You'd be wrong

No? Scratch that question mark, no. I only recall being given two or three books by women to read out of up to 30 or so (and as far as I remember I didn't read them because they were shit, so: double no).

Honestly, I don't give a shit who wrote a book. As long as they're good. It's only natural that a society based on a various European cultures has plethora of white male authors that form the basis of its literature.

I purposely discard female and minority authors. I'm afraid women, even when good writers, will constantly write about “what is it to be a woman in [x] setting”, and same goes with the minorities and racism/colonialism. White males didn't have to care about how they're seen in the society so it let them speak on anything.

I dunno.
I grew up in California where I think this diversity shit originated so I grew up reading Hispanic, Asian, Negro women WAY more than white men. When I started reading on my own as a kid it was mostly that and the occasional whitey and the rare straight white man~

You're actually right, a lot of the books that people read that aren't university level are written by women. That's because women's best works are YA and books aimed at people in their teens and early twenties. Give me an example of a single female author or philosopher that wrote anything worthwhile or close to the level of the greatest writers.

Sappho
Jane Austen
Virginia Woolf
Mary Shelley
George Elliot
Emily Dickinson
Margaret Mitchell
Harper Lee
Toni Morrison
Joyce Carol Oates
Zadie Smith

These authors are pretty average, above average at best. That's the thing with women or racial authors, the best of them are mediocre if compared to white men, but are still praised just because they're women.

they still write about male issues though

still worthwhile. put those goalposts back

>close to the level of the greatest writers.

what does this even mean?

This is me too. I'll go out of my way to not read works by women specifically. I'll also skip forwards and introductions by women from academic works. I dunno...

>What's with the prevalence of the dead white males meme in literary academia?

When will people understand that this isn't down to some sort of 'patriarchy' conspiracy, but simply the fact that white males are better than anything else?

Well OP, have you considered that the reason more books are female-authored at your university is BECAUSE there's been this meme, where academia have been pushing to override this barrier?

In most universities this hasn't happened yet though. Certainly hasn't at mine.

This. Nothing was worse than Marion Faber's introductions to Nietzsche.

They're not worthwhile, they're average writers, which I can find hundreds, if not thousands, of.

What it means is that female authors (or blacks etc) are not even close on having works as great as white males, but often times these women or books get more recognition than much better authors or works just because it's a woman.

>Fucking white males?!
>In MY university?!
>Say it ain't so!
>Where are all the black transsexual historians?!

What is the point you're trying to make here?

The point is that your hatred of white males will be to your detriment. They write the best books, and achieve the best things.

>They're not worthwhile, they're average writers

something can be worthwhile even if it's average. art isn't autonomous. but that assumes that the authors are actually average which is hard to tell since you won't qualify 'greatness' with anything

>close on having works as great as white males

you just said the same thing again. what do you actually mean? are you talking out of your ass?

I wonder who I should listen to.

>/pol/
>virgin no-lifer NEETs without an education, who still get their mothers to do everything for them, and who doesn't really read or enjoy any culture besides anime, videogame-soundtracks and the latest hollywood blockbuster. doesn't leave the house.

>Academia
>well-educated stable individuals with lots of self-discipline who are worldly and experienced. has traveled and talked to lots of people equally educated. reads a lot, fiction as well as non-fiction. has actually read philosophy and been trained in critical thinking, logic and reason. forms opinion from research, not internet memes.

It's a tough one.

>Acadamia
>well-educated stable individuals with lots of self-discipline who are worldly and experienced. has traveled and talked to lots of people equally educated. reads a lot, fiction as well as non-fiction. has actually read philosophy and been trained in critical thinking, logic and reason. forms opinion from research, not internet memes.

Where do you buy your rose-tinted glasses? Good god, I want a pair.

Acadamia are among the most ideologically blinded bunch of hacks going, outside of STEM that is.

spoken like a true ideologue

And where did you buy your fedora? That's a rhetorical question, because I really aren't looking to get one myself.

>outside of STEM that is
I mean, you're just a meme yourself at this point.

I'm not convinced you've ever been to a college/university if that's your opinion of modern day academia. If you did, it must have been a pretty outstanding institution to escape the progressive dogma that students and academia alike are expected to kowtow before.

See above.

you're still speaking like an ideologue. perhaps it's my academic training but it's very easy for me to tell when a statement is neutral or not

You didn't answer the question, but I can tell you've already kowtowed before the aforementioned progressive dogma - if you're the poster from earlier who praises academia for 'sticking it to the man' when it comes to white male authors/scholars. In their promotion of non-white males, that is.

It just depends on where you focus. If you've been in an acadamic environment that mostly promoted a certain kind of literature, that might make you believe that that is what has the biggest universal influence.

However, if you want literature from a different gender construct / another racial point of view / etc, if you just look for it you'll find aplenty.

It's all a matter of bias and being aware of one's own--for it does exist, whether one admits to it or not.

there wasn't a question to answer

>if you're the poster from earlier

no

And I'm not convinced you actually STUDIED at one.
It's time to leave Veeky Forums, user. Go out into the world.

I did not state what greatness is, since it's common knowledge that you can rate the quality of a book - even if not perfectly on a scale from 1-10 - through analyzing various parts of the book like prose, plot, message etc.

When comparing the best female writers to male writers, you can see that their work is nothing more than just above average, but nothing really worth noting. They do not compare to works written by the greatest of white male authors. It's obvious that if the works written by females were written by white males, they would get very little recognition,if not none at all.

If something is better than another thing, which we can clearly state, it is more worthwhile, as in it's more worth the time, to read it instead.

If something is worse than another thing, which we can clearly state, it is less worthwhile, as in it's less worth the time, to read it instead.

It is less worthwhile to read an average book than it is to read the masterpieces.

Since our time is limited and there are enough masterpieces and works close to being masterpieces out there, it is not worthwhile to read average books by the likes that you have stated.

What do I mean with when I say that works of the women are not even close to the works of males?

Well, it's quite simple and you wouldn't have to ask if you used common sense instead of asking dumb question to miserably try to prove your point; if you compare the best work of any woman to the best work of the likes of James Joyce, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy etc. you can see very clear differences of quality between these books and authors, the difference is so high that it's very difficult to even compare them.

>Nietzsche
comment field tier

>tell when a statement is neutral or not
>neutral is my marxist teachings
fuck off already

marxism is the real expression of material conditions, hence neutral

Ad hominem is not an argument.

damn...cant wait for communism so useless subhumans like you can be thrown in the GULAG

Ad hominem is not an argument.

Saying "if you'd investigate you'd reach the conclusion I agree with isn't an argument.

you've said nothing of substance in this entire post.

>it's common knowledge
>you can see
>It's obvious
>which we can clearly state
>which we can clearly state
>it's quite simple and you wouldn't have to ask if you used common sense instead of asking dumb question to miserably try to prove your point
>you can see

try making an argument instead of rewording your original point. you've done nothing to even indicate you've personally read any female authors. you haven't stated how one judges 'various parts of the book'. you just assume everyone should agree with you by default because you yourself were dumb enough to be convinced by your inadequate reasoning.

"they're great cos u just like know it" yeah ok, harold bloom watch out

>It is less worthwhile to read an average book than it is to read the masterpieces

but not 'not worthwhile'

>it is not worthwhile to read average books

so now it's "not worthwhile" just because you say so? and what is this:

>Since our time is limited and there are enough masterpieces and works close to being masterpieces out there

what a joke

>the difference is so high that it's very difficult to even compare them.

it's difficult to compare them because you haven't read any from either category. this is the only part of your argument that's actually relevant and it doesn't say a single thing. i can't believe you typed any of this up and thought it sufficiently aided your argument

I didn't think such a romanticised conception of academia would exist on Veeky Forums. I'd have thought we, of all places would know better.

This is a place of make-believe.

I reworded what I have written before to clarify what I meant with "close on having works as great as white males", since that's what he asked.

I don't think I need to thoroughly state how one can judge a book just to prove a point . My argument is not disproved by you stating that I expect people to have common knowledge about things like rating a book.

If there are more worthwhile things to read instead and there are enough more worthwhile things to read to fill your entire lifetime up with reading these more worthwhile things, reading less worthwhile things is a waste of your time that you could spend on reading more worthwhile things, thus the less worthwhile things are not worth any while at all.

I have read the entire work of Sappho that isn't lost when I was studying the Greeks. I have read a few books of Mary Shelley and Harper Lee but not many since I'm not really interested in reading female literature.

You can't even tell me why these authors are good, you just tell me they're good. Spoiler, they're above average (Which doesn't mean much) at best. Stop crediting an author just because they have a hole between their legs.

get a blog and go cry about it there

>I have read the entire work of Sappho that isn't lost when I was studying the Greeks. I have read a few books of Mary Shelley and Harper Lee but not many since I'm not really interested in reading female literature.

what a surprise: out of all those authors you have read a whole three of them, yet all of them are supposedly average. you don't even judge their works objectively since 'greatness' is so tied up with being 'male' in your mind. it's no wonder you had to struggle so hard to come up with anything conclusive since you're just making it up as you go along

>less worthwhile things are not worth any while at all.

contradiction

stop discrediting an author just because they have a hole between their legs

where's the marx in my post? i can't identify it because i never learned marx

It's not a contradiction. Maybe take in consideration my entire point instead of just 1/4th of it.

so much win in this post, beyond epic!!!

Minorities' minorityness was a big part of their life, so it's only natural they wrote about it a lot.

>Woolf
>average
Ok kid.

>worthwhile things aren't worthwhile

yes it's a contradiction.

it also doesn't address points i've made previously: whether the authors are actually 'not worthwhile' just because they haven't written masterpieces because just reading a survey of 'masterpieces' as determined by others makes you a dilettante and doesn't give you any insight into what a masterpiece is (especially since they are written in different styles and as such have different literary concerns); or whether the authors actually are average, which you seem to determine by feeling -- as in 'you just know if it's good lol common knowledge' -- rather than any objective metric, which has become apparent by your admission that you haven't even read them.

and yes i have replied to your point holistically. but you demonstrate with every post just how little you know about both literature and argument

most notably white audiences expect minorities to write about minority life so it is those that mostly find publishing. it's still part of a narrative. but that doesn't mean that minority writers only write about minority issues. it's the same with women

also male writers still write about 'male issues' because most issues are seen as male, given their dominant position in society. they certainly don't write about female issues

haha thanks friend! i'm gonna screenshot this because i've never received a compliment on here before :)

Just gonna jump in here as a third party and comment on how women are more than men with "holes between their legs". Women are not men. Women are not a variety of men, women are not the second sex. Women are a sex on their own.
Read books by women not because they're as good despite their "holes", read books by women because their perspective is often very different, and it will be rewarding for you.
Think of it as reading the same author over and over versus reading a broad diversity of authors. Dostoyevski great, but if you keep reading his works over and over you'll never get to experience Tolstoy or even non-Russian perspectives. Read Camus as well and Proust too! And in the same spirit: read Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir!

>reading literature to "experience perspectives"

It's hard to be more pleb than this tbqh

I'd rather not waste my time with digressions you call perspectives. White males run shit and give the biggest picture of them all.

>White males run shit

not anymore.

male issues are universalist

This, unfortunately. We've ruined ourselves with excessive tolerance.

>well-educated stable individuals with lots of self-discipline
Hmmm....

I'd love to hear some of the authors that you think are fantastic. DWF, Gass and Pinecone? Get over this idea that there is such a thing as objectively 'good' art.

Funny how you mention Sappho when she basically did the whole "YA / stuff aimed at young teen girls" thing as her whole career. Literally the only shit she talks about when she's not talking about scissoring young choir girls and boys was pondering how the marriage between Hector and Andromache went

le ideology xdddd u need to behave like i said and be le empiricist

Academia is a non-entity.

If you look into the history of writing novels (John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists is a useful guide), you discover that just as many if not more women as men stand out as the early enduring names. This was also back before the word "novel" suggested some broody teenaged girl; they were read just as often by men. Of course, knowing this would require research, something that does not prioritize.

>These authors are pretty average, above average at best.

CASUAL DETECTED

dude have you ever read virginia woolf? read the waves. it's not at all about 'what it is to be a woman'. it's genuinely the greatest book i have ever read.