University cancels SONNETS as "products of white Western culture"

Hello, sucker. Thought you were smart to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet? Think again!

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from the London Daily Mirror 15 May 2022

University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'

• University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
• Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment 
• Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’ 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022

University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment. 

Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.

Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10819139/University-cancels-sonnets-concerns-products-white-Western-culture.html

Sonnet 29

 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the product of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic.  Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. --  DL

Comments

[Bruno Anthony]

"Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope": the very meaning of Capitalism. Just choking, I mean joking. Sincerely, Joe King

[mitch sisskind]

Sonnet of course is any 14 line poem
as in Padgett's famous 14 lines of
"Nothing in this drawer." Stupidity
can be charming and even beautiful
but ignorance is different.

[jc]

Maybe the term should be "erasure" rather than "canceling." Canceling means stopping something, but erasure means wiping it from memory. All generations want to stop the previous generation, or aspects of it, but none has wanted to erase (or been able to erase) the previous from memory. Humans have always lived within the idea time is eternal; we've only had our own deaths to measure it. Now the coming "inevitable" changes loom ahead: the fading of "white culture" into our DNA (like every other culture), the changing topography of the earth, even the bounty of the earth itself, its scarcity and redistribution. Maybe we're facing the possibility that the idea of finite time has collided with a panic to erase our computer mind in order to free up enough gigabytes to face the future. Also, seen from space, one can observe that white males have brought us to the brink of annihilation, and male musings about their own limitations and redemption by love, however beautiful, are no longer compelling enough to charm the abyss staring back at us. (Sent with a heart emoji!)

[David Lehman]

Dear JC, Thanks for your witty and sagacious comment. Erasure is the right word, and one that Jock Derrida, the doyen of deconstruction, proposed: to put something "sous rature" -- under easure.

[Beth Tenny]

Terrance Hayes writes sonnets. Do you suppose he is a secret imperalist and colonizer?

[JC]

Beth, without a doubt! It's a real scandal.

[Leah Martinson]

At first I thought this was an April Fool's jest in May. But I looked it up. Sad but true.

[Denise Duhamel]

And what about Harryette Mullen's prose poem sonnets riffing on Shakespeare? Or Joan Larkin's "The Blackout Sonnets..."? Or or or...

[jim c]

Denise, that's it, poof, they're gone. The University of Salford has spoken ex catheter. They're coming for sestinas next. I suggest we get in touch with Tucker Carlson and see if he has a "replacement theory" for poems we can use instead. He's a blood-and-nightsoil guy; he'll figure something out.

[Peter Frank]

You wanna eliminate vestiges of colonialism, stop teaching in English

[David Lehman]

Richard Howard might point out that "colony" is related to "colon," a punctuation mark / in the dark / of the base of your being.

[Suzanne Lummis]

Damn. I'm so fed up with those people's dreary, oppressive, self-serving, sanctimonious, Mao-style attacks on literature, art and... Let's see, what else? Oh yes--life. F those people.

[John M. Holmes]

Pea-brains everywhere will no doubt rejoice, congratulating themselves on being proudly “awake” to current enlightenment. What’s really happening is that the lamp of knowledge is casting a weaker light for us as we we are entering our very modern dark ages.