Hi, I recently read this WSJ opinion article:
Since WSJ requires a subscription, many of you likely cannot read that specific article, but the facts are available in many places online. Briefly, it's a sympathetic article about a young adult author, Jessica Cluess, who was cancelled as "racist" for challenging the (woke) #DisruptTexts movement in a series of Tweets. The article also discusses #DisruptTexts more broadly, in a hostile fashion.
#DisruptTexts argues that classic authors like Shakespeare should either not be taught at all or, if they are taught, should be taught in a "disrupted" fashion. I'm not sure what the latter option means exactly, but it is fair to assume that it involves spending significant time highlighting the racist and sexist biases of the texts. You can see an explanation of their approach in their blog post on Shakespeare, from their website:
disrupttexts.org
The WSJ article, as I said, is more sympathetic to Cluess than to #DisruptTexts. The New York Post leans the other way:
nypost.com
And the Daily Mail apparently managed to capture all of the relevant Tweets before they were deleted:
www.dailymail.co.uk
Thoughts?
Since WSJ requires a subscription, many of you likely cannot read that specific article, but the facts are available in many places online. Briefly, it's a sympathetic article about a young adult author, Jessica Cluess, who was cancelled as "racist" for challenging the (woke) #DisruptTexts movement in a series of Tweets. The article also discusses #DisruptTexts more broadly, in a hostile fashion.
#DisruptTexts argues that classic authors like Shakespeare should either not be taught at all or, if they are taught, should be taught in a "disrupted" fashion. I'm not sure what the latter option means exactly, but it is fair to assume that it involves spending significant time highlighting the racist and sexist biases of the texts. You can see an explanation of their approach in their blog post on Shakespeare, from their website:
Disrupting Shakespeare
Fellow, disrupters, We disrupted Shakespeare the week of 9/10th. Here are the summary and Twitter moment for the #DisruptTexts Shakespeare chat. Comment below! We knew that suggesting educators …
disrupttexts.org
The WSJ article, as I said, is more sympathetic to Cluess than to #DisruptTexts. The New York Post leans the other way:
Author canceled after defending literary classics, ‘attacking’ educator
Jessica Cluess, the author of the popular “Kingdom of Fire” series (among others) picked a fight with an anti-racist and anti-bias educator Lorena Germán who founded the #DisruptTexts movement.…
nypost.com
And the Daily Mail apparently managed to capture all of the relevant Tweets before they were deleted:
Author is DROPPED by agent after defending writer of Scarlet Letter
Young adult author Jessica Cluess has been 'canceled' after she defended the writers of The Scarlett Letter and other classic novels on Twitter against Lorena Germán.
Thoughts?
