Laudator Temporis Acti

Howard Jacobson, Whatever It Is, I Don't Like It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 266-267:

A teacher of French literature was telling me how the mother of one of his pupils had objected to his teaching her daughter French drama of the seventeenth century. The girl was uneasy reading these plays. They felt old and foreign to her. (Corneille and Molière — foreign!) Her mother agreed. How were these works, she wanted to know, 'validating her child's experience'? Because he was a charming man, the French teacher didn't tell her that the daughter's experience, if it was anything like the mother's, was the thing least worth validating in the entire universe. If her daughter felt at sea, so much the better. Study is meant to make you feel at sea. The self is not a precious entity that must be soothed and eased at every turn. Sometimes, the self is something you must learn to lose. Validation of the self, madame — again this is me speaking, not him — is what you might get from a finishing school, but not from a humane education.

I say something very similar to those pupils at a Jewish girls' school in London who recently refused to answer questions on Shakespeare in a national curriculum test as a way of protesting against the character of Shylock. Given the opportunity for some close textual analysis, I have no doubt I could persuade the girls that Shakespeare was not an anti-Semite, whatever that means in an Elizabethan context. But that's beside the point. Reading Shakespeare is not conditional on his loving Jews. The study of literature becomes no study at all if you read only writers whose attitudes chime with your own and with whom you therefore feel at ease. Encountering what is not you, indeed what might well be inimical to you, is one of the first reasons for reading anything.