File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 342


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.





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