Counter Tourist
The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature
by Elizabeth
Kantor
Regnery Publishing, 2006
(298 pages, $19.95, paperback)
reviewed by R. V. Young
A book with such a title, by the editor of the Conservative Book Club, in a format reminiscent of the popular “For Dummies” series, is likely to evoke certain misgivings: Will this book be nothing more than a shallow, shrill, sarcastic screed? Will it be yet another recounting of horror stories about the postmodern professoriate? It takes only a few pages to disabuse the reader of these misconceptions.
This Politically Incorrect Guide is, to be sure, polemical, and Elizabeth Kantor bags her politically correct quarry with an inerrant aim and carves it up with an acute wit. She shows how numerous “English” courses either reduce literary works to “products” of the hegemonic power structure or ignore works of literature altogether in favor of film, fashion, feminist polemics, and other assorted preoccupations of popular culture, denying any sense that great works of literature provide an imaginative vision of the human condition.
Nevertheless, the principal business of her book is a joyous tour of the greatest monuments of literature in English, conducted not only with enthusiasm, but also with learning and critical insight.
Given the subject—all of English and American literature—and the length of the book—under 300 pages of rather large print with numerous sidebars—Kantor is necessarily selective; she is not, however, superficial. She wisely eschews any attempt to deal with every important author and instead highlights a few exemplary figures from each of the major periods.
Novice Appetites
Part I, comprising about two-thirds of the book, provides a sufficient overview of the traditional canon of English and American literature to help the novice reader put in context any work he has taken up and to whet his appetite for more. The novice reader, as Kantor points out, may very well be a recent college graduate who majored in English, because English majors are less and less likely to have even been offered the opportunity, much less required, to survey the entire field.
Part I also includes many sidebars, largely devoted to pointing out virtues and truths of the classic works of English and American literature that are distorted and suppressed by far too many professors of English.
The remaining third of the book explains first how the politically correct postmodern approach fails to engage the true nature of literature and to acknowledge literary greatness (Part II), and then gives advice on acquiring a literary education on one’s own or (better) with the help of friends (Part III).
The central discourse of Kantor’s book, however, focuses largely on the works themselves. The broad survey is complemented by detailed discussions of some of the major achievements of the most important authors.
R. V. Young is Professor of English Emeritus at North Carolina State University, a former editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, and the author of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization (Catholic University of America Press, 2022). He and his wife are parishioners at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church in Tarpon Springs, Florida. They have five grown children, fifteen grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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