Hello Mortals,
you see this piece of paper? This is a Master Degree. My Master Degree in Comparative Literature that I have been slaving over for four years. It's a cool discipline, half-way in between Cultural Studies and classic text analysis, it stole my heart for a brief moment from 2005 to 2007. Then I started working. I looked upon the world with the bewilderment of a new born, a chaotic mixture of fear, wonder and sheer bewilderment. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't all that bad. Especially that I had my feet in this said world for twenty-five years at the time (twenty-eight now).
So now I have the goddamn paper...and then what? I guess that my opinions and interpretations about literature are superior to yours (or not, if you understand the point I'm trying to make). I guess I'm an educated person now. Smart? I don't know (it's going to be the subject of another feature soon), but yeah, I'm somewhat educated in the very narrow field of the fiction of Philip K. Dick (which is who my thesis was on). Now that my degree is in my face (and not a very hypothetical, headache inducing title), I want to use it. I want to use it for good though and not to perpetuate a tradition of self-involved useless intellectuals.
So here are five opinions I have about literature and its Academic treatment that you can you in arguments and back it up by saying it's a literature teacher (What? I'm almost there) that told you. I had all those opinions before I graduated, but now they have material value (so I like to think)
1. James Joyce is overrated. He's not a bad writer. He's actually quite good, but his main claim to fame is that he was thinking outside the box. James Joyce is an historical yardstick that marks the exact moment where literature stopped being formatted. Ulysses was written to prove a point. No matter how you decide to write your novel, as long as your writing is tight, the story can hold up.
As far as content is concerned, it's where shit hits the fan. Joyce had one simple fucking obsession: Ireland. If you want to learn a bit more about the ways of early twentieth century middle class Irish people, read Dubliners. If you have nothing to do with a pedant intellectual vision of a pretty mundane life, you shouldn't even bother. I don't see the point of reading Joyce outside the walls of an Academy and I don't see the point of remembering anything else than Ulysses.
2. Dying doesn't buy you credibility. One day during my bachelor degree I was reading Brothers Karamazov for my own personal enjoyment. I met this guy Nick in the subway as I had the book in my hands. He gave me a warm, friendly smile and asked: "So, how is it?" He hadn't read it yet. Nick was a classmate. He was also one of the sharpest readers I had ever met, a playwright and a pedant fucker. I say that with some tenderness, he wasn't a bad guy, just buying into his own intellectual greatness like he was some kind of cerebral Kama Sutra God or something.
A few months later, I bump into him again, this time I have a book from Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt in my hands, a very living writer. This time, Nick grimaces and says: "I don't know how you can read living writers. I vowed not to read them before I'm forty. I give myself up to forty years old to read all my classics". Unfortunately, a lot of people think like Nick. I don't. I think there are some fine writers that still live today: Jonathan Franzen, William Vollman, Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy and Chuck Palahniuk are five I can throw to you like that, without even thinking. I can also tell you that I loathe Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac & most of Henry James' novels. And I will most likely have a word about what novels you children will read and pass on to future generations.
3. Books survive time for plenty of reasons. You all know I hate the term "classic". It's meaningless and even classical musicians hate it. Books almost never survive a generation because of their content alone. The Count Of Monte Christo is one of those rare occurences where I can think the story has such an universal appeal that everybody will always love it. The Odyssey is another. Some amazing novels never survived heated political climates, some other were forced upon the population through the institutions. Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov's book is a real hit over there. I'm sure you didn't even had an idea of Uzbekistan's president name before I told you.
Take an example. Mein Kampf that book would have been long forgotten if it would have been written by any other given Charlie Chaplin lookalike. Some other writers like Honoré de Balzac or H.P Lovecraft were considered pulp & garbage back in their days, but are revered today. Balzac is renowned for his mastery of description, but what you don't know is that he was paid by the word. He invented those insane description to fill out paper and feed himself. Some of you might choke on their steak while reading this, but in a hundred years, Stephen King will be rememberd as an equivalent to Lovecraft & Edgar Allan Poe. Time gives you a different perspective on things. Let's just hope humanity will forget about Danielle Steele & James Patterson.
4. Literature serves a purpose. One of my teachers told to the class once that literature studies didn't have any purpose and that if you cannot forge your own meaning out of it, you better do something else, like bricklaying. That made the classroom of uppity intellectuals laugh. One of my favorite teachers said that, but I can't agree. I'll go even further, by saying that it's by perpetuating this sort of thinking that we get so much garbage literature and so-called "mass entertainment".
Fiction was always there and always served a very precise purpose. Illustrate a point. How many times your math teacher told you a story to help you understand an abstract idea? "Jamie has five marbles, but Corey punches him and takes three. When Jamie wakes up, he counts his remaining marbles. How many does he have left?" Here's a flash fiction based around a mathematics problem. The more complex and abstract the point, the longer is the story. Every story has a point or at least tries to have one. You don't need Foucault to tell you that, only a little bit of common sense.
5. Literature will never die. Stories will always be written. The medium might change (the kindle will SLOWLY win the book market over, and by slowly I mean twenty to fifty years. It's only logical if you think of the forest and the printing costs), but stories will always be written and published. Even if people find ways to download controlled oniria from one consciousness to another, the words will always hit the paper (or the text software) and be read by somebody else.
The written medium allows mankind to put distance with its thoughts and to materialize them. Thoughts as a material object will never die. It might downsize or upsize with the generations, but it will never, ever end as long as there will be humans. So whenever an asshole calls to the "obsolescence" of literature to sell you a 3D Television or another bullshit technology, smile and flip the bird. It's not going to happen.
So now I have the goddamn paper...and then what? I guess that my opinions and interpretations about literature are superior to yours (or not, if you understand the point I'm trying to make). I guess I'm an educated person now. Smart? I don't know (it's going to be the subject of another feature soon), but yeah, I'm somewhat educated in the very narrow field of the fiction of Philip K. Dick (which is who my thesis was on). Now that my degree is in my face (and not a very hypothetical, headache inducing title), I want to use it. I want to use it for good though and not to perpetuate a tradition of self-involved useless intellectuals.
So here are five opinions I have about literature and its Academic treatment that you can you in arguments and back it up by saying it's a literature teacher (What? I'm almost there) that told you. I had all those opinions before I graduated, but now they have material value (so I like to think)
1. James Joyce is overrated. He's not a bad writer. He's actually quite good, but his main claim to fame is that he was thinking outside the box. James Joyce is an historical yardstick that marks the exact moment where literature stopped being formatted. Ulysses was written to prove a point. No matter how you decide to write your novel, as long as your writing is tight, the story can hold up.
As far as content is concerned, it's where shit hits the fan. Joyce had one simple fucking obsession: Ireland. If you want to learn a bit more about the ways of early twentieth century middle class Irish people, read Dubliners. If you have nothing to do with a pedant intellectual vision of a pretty mundane life, you shouldn't even bother. I don't see the point of reading Joyce outside the walls of an Academy and I don't see the point of remembering anything else than Ulysses.
2. Dying doesn't buy you credibility. One day during my bachelor degree I was reading Brothers Karamazov for my own personal enjoyment. I met this guy Nick in the subway as I had the book in my hands. He gave me a warm, friendly smile and asked: "So, how is it?" He hadn't read it yet. Nick was a classmate. He was also one of the sharpest readers I had ever met, a playwright and a pedant fucker. I say that with some tenderness, he wasn't a bad guy, just buying into his own intellectual greatness like he was some kind of cerebral Kama Sutra God or something.
A few months later, I bump into him again, this time I have a book from Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt in my hands, a very living writer. This time, Nick grimaces and says: "I don't know how you can read living writers. I vowed not to read them before I'm forty. I give myself up to forty years old to read all my classics". Unfortunately, a lot of people think like Nick. I don't. I think there are some fine writers that still live today: Jonathan Franzen, William Vollman, Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy and Chuck Palahniuk are five I can throw to you like that, without even thinking. I can also tell you that I loathe Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac & most of Henry James' novels. And I will most likely have a word about what novels you children will read and pass on to future generations.
3. Books survive time for plenty of reasons. You all know I hate the term "classic". It's meaningless and even classical musicians hate it. Books almost never survive a generation because of their content alone. The Count Of Monte Christo is one of those rare occurences where I can think the story has such an universal appeal that everybody will always love it. The Odyssey is another. Some amazing novels never survived heated political climates, some other were forced upon the population through the institutions. Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov's book is a real hit over there. I'm sure you didn't even had an idea of Uzbekistan's president name before I told you.
Take an example. Mein Kampf that book would have been long forgotten if it would have been written by any other given Charlie Chaplin lookalike. Some other writers like Honoré de Balzac or H.P Lovecraft were considered pulp & garbage back in their days, but are revered today. Balzac is renowned for his mastery of description, but what you don't know is that he was paid by the word. He invented those insane description to fill out paper and feed himself. Some of you might choke on their steak while reading this, but in a hundred years, Stephen King will be rememberd as an equivalent to Lovecraft & Edgar Allan Poe. Time gives you a different perspective on things. Let's just hope humanity will forget about Danielle Steele & James Patterson.
4. Literature serves a purpose. One of my teachers told to the class once that literature studies didn't have any purpose and that if you cannot forge your own meaning out of it, you better do something else, like bricklaying. That made the classroom of uppity intellectuals laugh. One of my favorite teachers said that, but I can't agree. I'll go even further, by saying that it's by perpetuating this sort of thinking that we get so much garbage literature and so-called "mass entertainment".
Fiction was always there and always served a very precise purpose. Illustrate a point. How many times your math teacher told you a story to help you understand an abstract idea? "Jamie has five marbles, but Corey punches him and takes three. When Jamie wakes up, he counts his remaining marbles. How many does he have left?" Here's a flash fiction based around a mathematics problem. The more complex and abstract the point, the longer is the story. Every story has a point or at least tries to have one. You don't need Foucault to tell you that, only a little bit of common sense.
5. Literature will never die. Stories will always be written. The medium might change (the kindle will SLOWLY win the book market over, and by slowly I mean twenty to fifty years. It's only logical if you think of the forest and the printing costs), but stories will always be written and published. Even if people find ways to download controlled oniria from one consciousness to another, the words will always hit the paper (or the text software) and be read by somebody else.
The written medium allows mankind to put distance with its thoughts and to materialize them. Thoughts as a material object will never die. It might downsize or upsize with the generations, but it will never, ever end as long as there will be humans. So whenever an asshole calls to the "obsolescence" of literature to sell you a 3D Television or another bullshit technology, smile and flip the bird. It's not going to happen.
