From: Douve1-AT-aol.com Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2000 16:45:20 EDT Subject: Re: PLC: With which fork does one eat crow? In a message dated 08/27/2000 2:59:23 PM Central Daylight Time, zatavu-AT-excite.com writes: > > First, I did not say that Barron hated me, etc. I suggested that many who > enter literary criticism (and I suggested that perhaps he was among them) do > so because secretly they hate literature because they are themselves > incapable of writing novels or poems themselves that approach those we > consider literature. OK, last time. This is crap. This simplistic, psychological dichotomy between critics and writers is untenable. It's the literary world's version of penis envy, which is equally untenable. That some critics do not understand literature the way that writers understand it IN NO WAY leads to the conclusion that they hate it or writers or go in the critical profession in order to exercise their resentments. Your statement commits the fallacy non sequitur and makes psychological assumptions about a man and a whole group of people you do not know, which commits the fallacy stereotyping. Stop it. As such, they make suggestions as to how literary texts > are constructed that are completely wrong as much as anything to mislead > young writers and to misdurect them, suggesting they should take an approach > to writing that 99.99% of the time results in failure. Critics do not make suggestions about how to write literature. Critics are looking at the lit. on the page, not the process of making it. They deal with artifacts, not processes of creation. A writer who goes to such critics to discover how to write is doomed. A writer who goes to such critics to learn how the think and write critically about literature will fare better. Writer's know this and so they write essays and books on how to create, or rather on how they themselves go about it in the hopes that some that insight will be useful to others, and they run workshops to help young writers in their apprenticeship to the art. Further, by > approaching the teaching of the texts as has been suggested, students are > turned off from them, discouraging them from reading literature. This is > perhaps done more to avoid competition, since unfortunately the demand for > literary scholars had been shrinking of late. If they made literature > truly accessible, more people would want to read it, and more people would > perhaps want to enter the field of literary studies. Given the job market, no more people need to enter the field for a good while. Secondly, Literature is difficult, it is work -- and that work is part of the joy. This is one of my assumptions. My job is not to make it easy for my students, but to give them the tools to deal with the difficulty -- this is how I create 'accessability' for them. Thirdly, to assume that tenured professors are trying to shoo us off is just mean. To assume that grad students are trying to shoo off competition is just mean -- they may just not yet be sure of themselves enough to be good teachers. That is just part of the process of being a student and being a teacher: getting your bearings in Lit and Theory while teaching it is hard to do without having to stick really close to your theory for several years. Being one of their students is no piece of cake, but there it is. Most grads are so freaked out when they walk into the classroom that they feel they can't afford to have students challenge them without losing all their authority in that class room. It takes some time for this fear to wear off (of course, I'm speaking only from my experience and the experience my friends have reported to me, and watching some young profs develop over time). Lastly, I hope that if one loves Lit and reading, a few crummy teachers will not be enough to shoo one off. What any one person shows us of a topic is never, ever, all there is to it. Geez. Can we just be done with this now? s. --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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