I would like to agree with you that the greatest writers were personally experimental and/or progressive, and I would like even more to agree that their experimental and progressive tendencies are what made their works great. But I’m afraid the truth is probably that I am personally a liberal, and so tend to remember and emphasize the liberal or proto-liberal tendencies in writers whose works I love. *My* Dickens is a progressive social reformer, which is true enough. But I(automatically, unconsciously) neglect the other aspects of Dickens that I find less congenial. I can focus, without trying in the least, on the single issue in the universe on which Yeats and I can agree (Irish independence), and filter out his superstitious fascist-sympathizer nitwittery. Everybody does this, more or less. It’s part of our response to literature. The cultural authority of great writers is so compelling, that we naturally want to recruit them to our own cause.

This is what the whole “Death of the Author” thing in literary studies is about, on one level: the attempt to break up a little of that Great Writer authority, and to make them seem less oracular.

What the right wing is really so upset about, I think, is that we’re NOT using English class to indoctrinate students with *conservative* ideas. What they would like is for us to talk about the Great Authors and their Values, in ways that uphold the conservative worldview. And in fact, university English classes used to do just that, in living memory. The conservatives are upset that we don’t do more of it.

But still: it is a curious fact that most of our most revered writers in the canon today were expermental in the way they chose to live their lives, and/or progressive in the ideas that they wove into their most famous novels and essays.

Part of this might be because I teach figures from an earlier era, whose imagine the terms of political debate very differently. (Is Milton a liberal? A conservative? A radical? Yeah.) But you know “Hawthorne was a democrat” means “Hawthorne was a close friend and supporter of Franklin Pierce,” which necessarily akin to supporting Obama. And Hemingway might be considered a “conservative” on the basis of his racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia, if one considers those things as the core elements of conservatism, but I’d prefer not to. Certainly, supporting the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War was not a big conservative move.

I did recently teach Stowe to undergraduates. And certainly, Stowe doesn’t fit easily into our current categories about politics and race. In fact, I was teaching her precisely because she is hard to fit into our current terms of debate. The racial politics of Uncle Tom’s Cabin really are their own thing, not ours.

Those few who DO matriculate.

It’s all about the money. It always is.

Speaking from experience.

This whole thing reminds me of when Dr. Laura Schlessinger both insisted that her bare nekkid pRony pictures weren’t her while simultaneously demanding that the internets give her pictures back to her. All of them.

But that was back in the 1990s, which gives her more of an excuse I think than George Tierney of Greenville, South Carolina.