Christopher Witte

I find Millennial bashing to be as fashionable a recreation these days as combinatory yoga-pilates. Everyone from Time Magazine to Aaron Sorkin to Michelle Obama has taken a healthy swing or two, and younger people are exercising a right to reciprocal ire. Yet take a step back and this intergenerational warfare, fought across the trenches of technology-swayed narcissism and entitlement, arguably resembles a more fundamental and timeless sort of conflict – the pitting of emergent youth against traditionalist elders. While a simple examination of a historical case (e.g. the criticism heaped upon the sixties counterculture generation) might be sufficient to evince this, it is again ample occasion to turn to our literary canon in order to widen our scope and defog our vision – this time through considering the famous work “Middlemarch” by George Eliot. [Read more…]