blargh, coursework

[edenfalling]

My English course is reminding me of why I tended to annoy my English teachers until my senior year of high school and my first two years of college-- whereupon I frustrated my English teachers instead. *wry* Because I love reading, I can write articulately, I can spot the expected things in stories... and I think at least 85% of literary analysis is bullshit and that shows in my attitude. *sigh*

Also modern literary fiction tends to bore the shit out of me. I read for entertainment, not "meaning," and if a story doesn't grab me I flatly don't care. I want to read stories where stuff happens, with meaning and layers as a secondary thing to add flavor and resonance and whatnot, not stories where layers and symbolism and "the nature of humanity" or whatever are the primary point and stuff only happens as an afterthought. *deeper sigh*

Anyway, we've had four stories assigned so far: Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" (which was okay, but what I really want is a story that takes the title literally, because that would be amazing); Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" (which I guess is a classic but felt weirdly flat to me, perhaps because Vietnam is not a defining cultural experience of my generation and also I'm tired of men-and-the-nature-of-war stories); William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (which I guess is best described as a Southern gothic sociological case study? anyway, it's dead obvious what happened from very early on so atmosphere and small-town willful blindness seem to be the main points); and Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (which is creepy as ever-living fuck and weirdly hypnotic about it, but I disliked the main character and wanted to know more about her family and friends early on to balance out the long snake-charming dialogue stuff that forms the bulk of the tale).

I have also been reminded that it's invariably best to read the stories before any of the introductory material.

...

In comparison, my Child Psychology class is fine. I think I like it better because I feel like I'm actually learning new and potentially useful information, instead of navel-gazing. I suspect I'd be less hostile to an English course whose textbook A) had a tone other than "let us teach you how to read properly because reading and writing are Serious Business, and how cute and childish of you to think that stories are primarily written to entertain people; goodness, how naive!" and B) contained genres I actively like instead of ones I kind of benignly tolerate. *deepest sigh of all*

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

As a librarian and a former student, I have long said that nothing kills the love of reading more than the crap that they make us read in school. This does not change in college, unfortunately.

-RurouniTriv

[edenfalling]

I am so grateful that my parents taught me to read (more or less by osmosis) early enough that I could find and read stuff I liked well before I started school and had stultifying glop forced on me.

I mean, I did by and large enjoy my college English/writing classes. One was a writing seminar designed to teach freshman how to construct an essay, whose topic was the development of Christian monasticism (I chose it mostly for the topic, since I already knew perfectly well how to write an essay), and the other was on early English literature, namely Beowulf up through... I think Milton? Or possibly even Swift. Anyway, mostly medieval and Renaissance, with a dash of Enlightenment, and thus vastly less annoying than most modern literary genre stuff. But there was still a point past which I always found myself saying, essentially, "everything in this work exists to A) be entertaining and keep people's attention or B) expound Christian doctrine and virtues, and any further analysis is cat-waxing for the sake of cat-waxing, which is ridiculous and I object."

[branchandroot]

Yeah, lit crit is not something everyone enjoys. And I think the utter blindness of most lit profs to that fact is of a piece with their equal blindness to the fact that dead white modernist men /is not a neutral, everyman viewpoint/. That's really why a lot of them get defensive or angry; you're pointing out that, just because /they/ discovered this story and it spoke to them on a deep and meaningful level, does not mean it will speak to everyone--because /they are not everyone/. Which, you know, cry me the world's tiniest violin or whatever. *snorts*

[edenfalling]

Actual quote from the instructions for my current assignments:

Why do we study literature? We study literature to learn about human behavior and the different ways people deal with life. Literature (prose fiction, poetry, and drama) present a variety of human personalities dealing with a variety of human problems. We read in order to comprehend a character's motives, actions, and reactions, which in turn reveal our own culture, history, and truth about ourselves.

How do we read literature? First we read to answer basic comprehension questions. Who is the main character? What is the setting? What is the conflict? How is the conflict resolved? When we are sure we have the basic understanding of the piece in question, we begin an analysis. Analysis is the careful deliberation of the literary elements and how the elements work to present the entire story. After the analysis you will be able to clarify your thinking even further. You will be required to synthesize your interpretations using summaries, paraphrases, and quotes from the work in question. Being able to write about what you have read is an invaluable skill in any college course.

*headdesk*

I mean, this course is actually pretty good on inclusiveness in terms of writers -- both women and men, and people of all races -- but it's still heavily American, mostly 20th century, and so far as I can tell, entirely lit-fic. *sigh*

[wistfulmemory]

Your thoughts concerning lit classes are the reasons why I was a Writing and Speaking Emphasis in my English degree instead of a Literature Emphasis. I love reading, but I honestly don't care about symbolism and the hidden meanings we're supposed to find (which aren't always things the author actually meant/included). When teaching the literature portion of English to my high school students, I do it in a way of just introducing them to different types of stories/poems/plays/authors, but I don't make them have to do in-depth analyses. I want to familiarize them with the material, and future teachers can go deeper if they want to.

[edenfalling]

I think that also, as a writer, my viewpoint leans heavily toward, "No, significant portions of the stuff you're digging up are NOT intentional, and even if they are, that doesn't necessary mean they have some deep symbolic meaning; sometimes I just throw things in because I think they're fun."

Like, my HP story "Knives" has a recurring color scheme where everything is red, green, white, or black. I made it do some symbolic work after the fact, but at base it's there just because I like the whole "lips as red as blood, hair as black as night, skin as white as snow" line from Snow White, happened to cross-connect that to Ginny's CoS poem line about Harry having hair "as dark as a blackboard," and then tossed green into the mix because of Harry's eyes. I am pretty sure I am not alone in this approach.