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What the heck.
AS much as I love reading and books and talking about books and what have you, this whole English major thing is getting old. Is it even possible for me to be any more sick of literary analysis? Do English majors EVER do ANYTHING other than analyze literature? Honestly! I've even got a creative writing concentration - I should be focusing on the craft, not feminist readings of "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall"! I have no problems with reading Tenant, but let's look at how the author crafts a story, not what she may or may not have been trying to suggest about repression of the female voice in Victorian England. I. DON'T. CARE. If I cared any less, I would have anticare, and if it ever collided with care... it'd be like matter and antimatter. The friggen world would end.
Seriously. I've been reading critical essays until I thought my brains would leak out my ears, because all of a sudden once you get up into higher level English classes you no longer are expected to think for yourself, but to do lots of research on what everybody else thinks and then write a paper about it, cleverly disguising the mix of opinions you got from all of them as one cohesive opinion of your own, so you can throw in the occasional quote here and there. And of course you better look at it through some theoretical framework or other, because it would make no sense at all to think about what the novel might actually be saying before you try to impose some old dead guy's ideas onto the text and try to derive some meaning out of that.
Original thought is so highly discouraged. We did a peer review the other day and this one girl was writing an argument against Greenblatt. For those of you who don't know this, Greenblatt is, like, the god of the literary world. You just don't argue with Greenblatt, because he's the authority, and it's as simple as that. The rest of us in the group were saying, "more power to you! Knock him down, prove him wrong for once, the arrogant old bastard." And she was scared out of her wits to actually do it. Doesn't that seem wrong, that she has to be so worried about what Greenblatt has to say about Donne's poetry that she can't give her own argument without feeling awful?
And I just can't get over the epic lameness of CSU's creative writing program. There are exactly -three- courses required by the English department for creative writing concentrations that have ANYTHING to do with creative writing. These courses are: Beginning Creative Writing, Intermediate Creative Writing, and - you guessed it - Advanced Creative Writing. That's it. Now, laying aside for the moment my qualms with the creative writing courses and their little biases and crap, what the hell? How does that qualify as a concentration in ANYTHING? Why not have a class like "Intro to Genre Writing" or "Characterization Techniques" or "Narrative Styles and How to Use Them" or stuff that might actually be USEFUL? And then we can get rid of "Modern Women Writers" unless you want to take it as an elective. And how about a capstone that isn't "let's study one author until you're so sick of them and you're glad they're already dead" but something more like "Short Story Capstone" where you have one story that you write and polish and edit and perfect all semester, with other little writing exercises and stuff? Yes, you should have to take some literature class, you need to be able to understand what people are going to do to your writing and besides, you should be exposed to a wide range of fiction. But three all-inclusive "Creative Writing" courses is just bullshit. There is no way you can cram as much information as we need into those three classes. It simply can't be done.
I can't wait for next semester when I have to do a "senior survey" of the English department. It's going to be scathing, because I am SO sick of this crap. This isn't an education if I'm constantly doing the exact same thing over and over and over again and never learning anything new except what those ten critics I read said about gender equality in Wuthering Heights. That does me no good whatsoever. I might as well be a Bio major and learn the ins and outs of a mouse's femur for four years. Sure, it's interesting and potentially useful information, but there's really only so much I can take, and there are so many other, better things I could be doing with my time.
Sigh. All right, now I'll see if I can drag myself back to the databases and try to find some more articles, preferably ones that I can read past the first three pages without throwing my hands in the air in frustration or disgust. Or both.
-Jaya-
pissed offSeriously. I've been reading critical essays until I thought my brains would leak out my ears, because all of a sudden once you get up into higher level English classes you no longer are expected to think for yourself, but to do lots of research on what everybody else thinks and then write a paper about it, cleverly disguising the mix of opinions you got from all of them as one cohesive opinion of your own, so you can throw in the occasional quote here and there. And of course you better look at it through some theoretical framework or other, because it would make no sense at all to think about what the novel might actually be saying before you try to impose some old dead guy's ideas onto the text and try to derive some meaning out of that.
Original thought is so highly discouraged. We did a peer review the other day and this one girl was writing an argument against Greenblatt. For those of you who don't know this, Greenblatt is, like, the god of the literary world. You just don't argue with Greenblatt, because he's the authority, and it's as simple as that. The rest of us in the group were saying, "more power to you! Knock him down, prove him wrong for once, the arrogant old bastard." And she was scared out of her wits to actually do it. Doesn't that seem wrong, that she has to be so worried about what Greenblatt has to say about Donne's poetry that she can't give her own argument without feeling awful?
And I just can't get over the epic lameness of CSU's creative writing program. There are exactly -three- courses required by the English department for creative writing concentrations that have ANYTHING to do with creative writing. These courses are: Beginning Creative Writing, Intermediate Creative Writing, and - you guessed it - Advanced Creative Writing. That's it. Now, laying aside for the moment my qualms with the creative writing courses and their little biases and crap, what the hell? How does that qualify as a concentration in ANYTHING? Why not have a class like "Intro to Genre Writing" or "Characterization Techniques" or "Narrative Styles and How to Use Them" or stuff that might actually be USEFUL? And then we can get rid of "Modern Women Writers" unless you want to take it as an elective. And how about a capstone that isn't "let's study one author until you're so sick of them and you're glad they're already dead" but something more like "Short Story Capstone" where you have one story that you write and polish and edit and perfect all semester, with other little writing exercises and stuff? Yes, you should have to take some literature class, you need to be able to understand what people are going to do to your writing and besides, you should be exposed to a wide range of fiction. But three all-inclusive "Creative Writing" courses is just bullshit. There is no way you can cram as much information as we need into those three classes. It simply can't be done.
I can't wait for next semester when I have to do a "senior survey" of the English department. It's going to be scathing, because I am SO sick of this crap. This isn't an education if I'm constantly doing the exact same thing over and over and over again and never learning anything new except what those ten critics I read said about gender equality in Wuthering Heights. That does me no good whatsoever. I might as well be a Bio major and learn the ins and outs of a mouse's femur for four years. Sure, it's interesting and potentially useful information, but there's really only so much I can take, and there are so many other, better things I could be doing with my time.
Sigh. All right, now I'll see if I can drag myself back to the databases and try to find some more articles, preferably ones that I can read past the first three pages without throwing my hands in the air in frustration or disgust. Or both.
-Jaya-
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