“I am so excited,” Professor Leonard Warrington of the English and Creative Writing Department said as you walked into class today. “This text is terrible, it’s racist and sexist and classist and it has lots of racist, sexist illustrations! Let’s dive in.”
Professor Warrington, who specializes in Old Things We Should Stop Reading with a concentration in The Worst Part of History, teaches a course every winter on epic poems from the seventeenth century that contain the most violent religious imagery he can find—certain to turn you off religion, and probably your lunch. If he can’t find a good, unnecessarily gory poem about angels, he will gladly settle for one that brings a whole new low to imperialism. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any lower!
“It’s important that we interrogate these cultural objects properly,” Professor Warrington said, way too excited to look at a grainy scanned image of a scroll on the projector he still doesn’t know how to use. “I just cannot wait.” He then attempted to zoom in and wound up blowing up the most obscene corner of the image. The computer then froze, forcing the whole class to stare down at their seats and reconsider every decision they’d made up until that moment.
“I’m glad to have an opportunity to talk about racism in an academic context,” Leah Shoemaker, ’20, said, an English major. “I just wish he wouldn’t look so excited about it.”
“We’re not sure what’s up with this guy,” Clint Conner, ’21, added. “Like, is he actually racist, or just actually interested in this stuff?” Other students were more confident that surely no one was actually interested in this stuff.
At press time, Professor Warrington had begun planning a symposium for next fall that will bring together enough horrific or otherwise cursed objects to probably summon some sort of devil. Anyone will do.
– CC ’21
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