This fall, I spent two months trying to cram the entire white male literary canon into my militant women’s studies-trained brain. I was studying for the GRE Subject Test in English Literature, a deeply dreaded admission requirement for most English Literature PhD programs which is I guess supposed to measure your knowledge of what is widely accepted as the English literary canon. To have to learn the entire canon in a matter of months to prepare for a multiple-choice test felt like utter madness, and was made far worse by the fact that so few women writers and writers of color are included on the test. It felt like a cruel joke—having to find time between my full-time job and trying to launch this cool feminist website to make flash cards of basically all the writers that feel least relevant to my actual scholarly interests and life. Continue reading
