142 Materiality and the Modern Cosmopolitan Novel
is revealed in an earlier exchange with Delphine, whose straitjacketed
relativism clashes with Silk’s “old-fashioned” humanist approach.
After being confided in by another student, who complains about
Silk’s sexist teaching methods, the much younger Delphine rebukes
the latter for employing “fossilized pedagogy” (p. 193). She also
insists that he try to take into account the student’s own valid, “fem-
inist perspective” and not restrict students to “purely disinterested
literary” approaches (pp. 165–191). Given the nature of the texts
discussed—the ancient Greek plays Hippolytus and Alcestis —such
an argument is, for Silk, flatly incongruous, presumably because it
betrays the culture in which the works were produced and seeks to
wash away the stain of their original “impurities.” This assessment
appears to be justified by the sweeping contumely with which he
rebukes his students for being philistines.
Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and
away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walk-
ing up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the
eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they’re all
in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of deal-
ing with such students–and Miss Mitnick [the student complaining of
sexism] is merely typical—I can tell you that a feminist perspective on
Euripides is what they least need. (p. 192)Clearly, we can detect in this speech a sense of exasperation that
has been accumulating for some time. As mentioned, this is in large
part due to Silk’s frustration with institutionalized political correct-
ness, which he believes confines intellectual activity by overregu-
lating discursive procedures. However, Silk’s ardent response also
betrays another irrational psychological motive that adds unseen
emotional traction to the intellectual stance from which he professes
to approach the subject.
Indeed, Silk’s views toward political correctness could signify
symptoms of unresolved guilt for his escape from institutional rac-
ism. The “Jewish” identity he creates for himself, while not being
entirely free from racial stigma, is a far more comfortable, less bur-
densome one than the one he had inherited as a “negro.” In this
sense, Silk’s opprobrious response to the racism charges could have