Literary studies rant

[bagheera_san]

One of my classes is English Literary Studies, and it keeps bothering me. The professor isn't the best, but that's not really the problem - the problem for me is the way they tell us to look at technical things concerning literature, such as POV or narrator.

I identify as both writer and reader, but the classes and the book we use obviously is written for people who never in their life have written an English prose text or would ever consider to do so or - God forbid! - think about how it's done. They are just supposed to look at the end product.

What the teachers don't seem to get or don't want to teach the students is that writing is a craft. I know you shouldn't look at authorial intent, but if you want to understand basic stuff, like unreliable narrators or figural narrative, why not just tell the students, "Look, there is a guy, and he has a story and he wants to write it down. There are people in that story and stuff happens to them and they have feelings about that. Now the writer has to pick a way to tell that story - does he want the reader to know everything important that's happening at all times and what everybody thinks about it, so that there are never any questions or any uncertainty, or does he want to tell it in a way that shows us how one particular person in that story experiences what happens, at the cost of not being able to tell us what everyone else thinks or what happens to them while the perspective person (= focalizer) isn't around?" I mean, wouldn't that be easier to understand for people?

I guess my problem is that I can never sit in a class and not think about how it could be taught better. Maybe becoming a teacher wasn't such a bad choice after all.

Comments

[hoperoy.livejournal.com]

Wow, English is my first language, and from what you're saying here I think I should be glad it is. They really try to teach you like that? If so, I'm glad you're going to be a teacher then, because we need more people who view writing like you do.

[bagheera-san.livejournal.com]

I can only guess that Literature must look a lot different to people who never tried to write anything beyond an essay or a paper themselves - and our professor clearly belongs in that category. It seems that to many non-writers, writing is this sort of mystifying process that can only be understood with hugely complicated literary theories and lots of Latin and Greek words, kinda like Quantum physics. Or maybe that's just a German thing, making everything more complicated than it is.

[idunnoit.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can totally relate to what you're saying. I used to think like that all the time, esp. during high school. I eventually concluded that the teachers themselves might not get it, because why would they hide behind all these big words otherwise.