Set to the animating strain of Vivaldi’s Gloria in D Major, oil paintings, stained-glass windows, and antiquated books flash across the screen. Thus begins The Chair, starring Sandra Oh, who plays the newly appointed department chair of English, Ji-Yoon Kim. Upon entering her new office, she tears open a congratulatory gift from her coworker, a tawdry nameplate that juxtaposes the previous scenes of seeming elegance and refinement: “FUCKER IN CHARGE OF YOU FUCKING FUCKS.” The nameplate appears to be a gag to garner cheap laughs, but the jarring contrast between refined academia and crude vernaculars reveals the prevalent issues throughout the series: What is the value of literature? Is it to obtain knowledge or to establish communication?
Much of The Chair tackles the issue of modernity as Ji-Yoon must bridge the gap between the antiquated English Department and its modern students. In the first departmental meeting of the year, Ji-Yoon gives an impassioned speech about the significance of literature by quoting literary critic Harold Bloom: “Information is endlessly available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?” Information is the cold, stony-faced Rosetta Stone that presents immutable facts while wisdom requires the infusion of humanities. Information can only be transmuted into wisdom through the framing of judgement and experience. Such is the Herculean task of English professors.
In The Chair, the English department has fallen into the folly of disseminating pure information. The consequence of this is seen in the catastrophic student enrolment within the department. The connection between the professors and their students has broken down as older professors refuse to consider student evaluations while simultaneously resisting the modernization of their contents and delivery mode.
Just as crucial to the content of a course, the delivery mode of the class constitutes much of its appeal. In a prophetic line, a professor is heard telling his colleagues, “The future is online education.” More relevant to contemporary times than ever, The Chair ponders if and how literature can survive such a transition between media. As all digital humanities students can recall Marshall McLuhan saying, “The medium is the message;” the method of communication is just as important as the message itself. The Chair wonders what happens to academia when the age-old teaching method of a professor standing up on a podium and delivering a pre-written, uninterrupted speech fails to captivate students.
In opposition to the forlorn classroom of her older colleagues, Yaz McKay, a young African-American professor, has packed her lectures with a flashy course title— “Sex and the Novel”— while imploring her students to attend her office hours or shoot her an email. Yaz’s method of teaching involves asking her students to “tweet” their favourite line from Moby-Dick and compose catchy songs regarding its contents. Far from deploring the encroachment of modernity, The Chair demonstrates the advantages of technology and social media as a way to bridge the gap between the ancient and the modern.
Integral to the premise of The Chair is an impossible question: why should we care about literature? I will spare my readers the highbrow answers that deify literature while further removing everyday people from accessing it. I think the answer is, as Ji-Yoon points out, that literature teaches empathy. It is a form of human communication capable of surmounting the gaps of time, race, gender, sexuality, etc. To be cliché, literature requires the reader to walk a mile in the shoes of another. The objective of literature is not for students and professors to quote Prufrock at will. Literature should and could accomplish more.
In a comical speech during a departmental party, Ji-Yoon is compelled to make a speech while high on marijuana. She wonders how students can be interested in literature when societal issues loom over us all: “Climate change. Racism. The Prison-Industrial Complex. Homophobia.” While the speech is intended for comic relief amidst a tension-filled party, it highlights the apparent irrelevance of literature in the current atmosphere. While Ji-Yoon herself does not necessarily find the answer to her own question, Yaz does: by integrating traditional content within a modern context. In a combined class on Herman Melville in which Yaz must teach parallel with the antiquated chair of her tenure committee, a student interrupts the lecture to ask if Melville’s reputation as a “wife-beater” will be discussed. While his question was rebutted with the formulaic answer that the class focuses on Melville’s literature rather than Melville’s character, the student wonders how the two can be separated when his personal letters are used to decipher the novel. The contention is only resolved when Yaz states that Melville’s attitude towards women and the influence of female figures will be discussed in her section of the class.
This scene grasps upon a tendency in English to place literature on a pedestal where no semblance of vice may touch the pristinely written words. Similar to the American habit of omitting the founding fathers’ practice of slavery, we tend to glide over our authors’ prejudices, flaws, and imperfections. This practice is obsolete and it is imperative that we stop presenting sanitized versions of literature without acknowledging the underlying commentaries beneath these so-called classics. It is only through acceptance and recognition of its failings that we can truly bring literature to the modern age.
While I do not wish to highlight The Chair on its diversity alone, its grasp on the issues of gender and race deserves commendation. BIPOC protagonists in media are often shoe-horned into a narrative where the series focuses on their race or gender alone. In contrast, The Chair illustrates the struggles of several minority faculty members (Ji-Yoon, Yaz, and Joan) that deviate from the formulaic conflicts of women versus men or even minority versus majority. These women demonstrate a relatable pattern of self-doubt, self-oppression, and occasional compliance to the white patriarchal structure from which they have suffered themselves. In one scene, Ji-Yoon admits to wondering, “why’s some Asian lady teaching Emily Dickinson?” Nor does Ji-Yoon’s position as Chair render her impregnable against the wills of its older faculty, and Yaz must game the tenure system, held in the hands of her older white colleague, despite her brilliance as an academic.
As women, we often claim the title of “feminist” but consciously or unconsciously maintain the prejudices from which we often suffer. In The Chair, Joan, the only elderly woman professor in the department, arrives at the Title IX office to report the removal of her office to the basement while her male colleagues of the same rank maintain their space. The person handling her case, a young woman of Asian descent, bends over to pick up a stack of files and inadvertently gives Joan a view of her bright-red undergarment. Frustrated with the inefficacy of bureaucratic procedures, Joan accuses the woman of unprofessionalism for showing “her fanny” while acknowledging that women should be treated equally regardless of their dress. In another instance, Joan encounters the same woman again and confides in her the resentment she harbours towards the sexism within the English department. Her male colleagues are recognized for their achievements while she is neglected, despite producing the “first feminist reading of ‘The Wife of Bath.’”
What is refreshing about The Chair is not the presence of minority struggles but how it depicts them. It demonstrates that the dismantling of systemic oppression is not a straightforward path where there is a hero and a villain. Rather, it is a complex and winding road where you are consciously desisting oppression but also unconsciously participating in its preservation. It is a system that pits women against other women and minorities against other minorities. In this instance, The Chair does not place the blame on Joan but recognizes her personal imperfections and, overwhelmingly, it is empathetic to a woman who has had to withstand sexism for decades and finds it difficult to pull herself from a system that she is long accustomed to and has become unwittingly complicit in.
