#exposing ''it's all old dusty white men'' as the disingenuous critique it often is

[pleuvoire]

ok back to what i was going to say before i got distracted with shakespeareposting. on the one hand. "booo the classics are all old dusty white men and we've moved past that, surely there is nothing of value to be found in a bunch of books by old dusty white men, i am allowing my annoyance at high school english class to inform my opinions on the value of literature" very annoying!!! very reductive!!! always worth pushing back against!!! but many people respond to this by just... defensively refusing to interrogate the merit of the western literary canon as a concept/category unto itself, or the idea of having a group of works elevated above all others such that they function as a mark of sophistication and intellectual rigor unto themselves, or the idea of evaluating people's knowledge of books and literature or even their intellectual worth off of how many of these they have read and successfully understood. just "you think classics are bad? well actually, classics are good and you're STUPID." and it's such a LAZY LAZY way of pushing back against people being annoying about books online