I think it was considered to be controversial--the thinking, at least in publishing, was colored by textbooks being published by this conglomerate in Texas at the time. So there was this sense of tiptoeing around certain subjects, and of course texts were definitely still cram packed with patriotism and whites only stuff at that time.
But that's me talking, not the prof. There was this odd atmosphere beginning around the mid-sixties and going on through the mid-seventies when I was in high school wherein teachers/profs would take on this tone that their words were daring, or shocking, or that the Religious Police were going to leap out of the woodwork and force them into remedial Sunday school for their astounding words. . . except they *all* talked that way. I remember being seventeen or so, and thinking in my literature class, oh here comes the big lecture on existentialism again and tuning out.
By the time I got to grad school in the early/mid seventies, some of us were using Marxism as a way around the "yet again" hammer. It was the only other acceptable approach. In fact, I fell in with a bunch of Marxists (who incidentally were the most materialistic people I ever knew) because of this. (I also remember that American Marxism was not nearly as crazy-eyed fervent as German Marxism, as I experienced in Germany and Austria, the young people my age in a reactionary swing of the pendulum from their parents, who grew up during WW II, but that I guess is a whole nother ball of wax)
Oh yeah, the Marxists didn't want me talking abut fantasy at all, and I even had to keep my fantasy and sf in the bedroom, whereas it was okay to have history and German Lit books out for all to see. It was like I had to hide my horrible, degrading habit.
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Date: 2021-04-20 01:06 am (UTC)But that's me talking, not the prof. There was this odd atmosphere beginning around the mid-sixties and going on through the mid-seventies when I was in high school wherein teachers/profs would take on this tone that their words were daring, or shocking, or that the Religious Police were going to leap out of the woodwork and force them into remedial Sunday school for their astounding words. . . except they *all* talked that way. I remember being seventeen or so, and thinking in my literature class, oh here comes the big lecture on existentialism again and tuning out.
By the time I got to grad school in the early/mid seventies, some of us were using Marxism as a way around the "yet again" hammer. It was the only other acceptable approach. In fact, I fell in with a bunch of Marxists (who incidentally were the most materialistic people I ever knew) because of this. (I also remember that American Marxism was not nearly as crazy-eyed fervent as German Marxism, as I experienced in Germany and Austria, the young people my age in a reactionary swing of the pendulum from their parents, who grew up during WW II, but that I guess is a whole nother ball of wax)
Oh yeah, the Marxists didn't want me talking abut fantasy at all, and I even had to keep my fantasy and sf in the bedroom, whereas it was okay to have history and German Lit books out for all to see. It was like I had to hide my horrible, degrading habit.