Culture Wars: The Banished Classics Stage A Counter Attack

Just when you thought those Dead White European Males were packed off for good, they come sneaking in the back door... The arguments for what was wrong with the canon were summed up in the phrase Dean White European Males, which translates into sexist, racist, Eurocentric, and no longer relevant to the contemporary world... The traditionalists continue to point to the miraculous accomplishments of the Greeks: democratic government, the foundations of philosophy, history, science, and medicine; influential styles of art and architecture... Barbara K. Gold, a classicist at Hamilton College, disagrees. She says feminist scholars such as herself, and other theorists, have enlivened the field. "We pay more attention to the females, the slaves, the marginal characters," she says. Gold says non-traditional approaches to the classics- involving psychoanalytic theory, deconstructionism, and issues of sexuality and exploitation- have attracted more students.