Upon asking my overflowing-with-knowledge but apologetic-to-alarm Brit Lit (All my Brit Lit Instructors have been female, BTW) instructor if we were going to be writing about Moll Flanders, I discovered that no, no we probably weren't going to get an opportunity to write about the novel. I hope the poisonous dart of frustration didn't actually come out of my eyeball; I ran away too quickly to actually know whether it hit her or not.
I mean what is the point of having us BUY a novel that isn't in the anthology if we aren't going to write about it? And isn't the point of a survey class to cover several pieces within a given amount of time and then to have the scrutinize them on the own? At the 300 level? I feel like I'm being shoved back in the nest. Ugh...I feel so fragmented. First I'm on two campuses, which is not quite tearing me apart Jim Stark style, but does create some division in my mind, if only on a spacial level. Then I have a poetry class with a very sweet instructor, but there's nothing special going on there, hence I often forget about the class when preparing. I think I've already told most of you about the Lit Crit class from the bizzaro version of my life -- where the instructor is actually treating us like college juniors, only the entire class is cross eyed (myself included) after reading work that seems utterly ironic and impossible to penetrate; seriously, Derrida is somewhere looking at us laughing uncontrollably. I mean what kind of system doesn't require you to take ANY underclass literature courses to qualify for their literature program, and then approves an instructor that chooses to only give you theoretical texts to see what you make of them? Oooh, avant garde, yeah, hooray. Please, just one diagram. If he wold only give us one diagram. One definition. Seriously, I think he's afraid of the texts, and afraid to teach them. I looked at the class today, and I think I saw human cattle. The survey courses aren't nearly as vague -- but both of the instructors are overwhelming us with Old Historicism and New Historicism and History and Herstory and the PAST. These poor texts. We are waving at them from afar...and I seriously think our Brit Lit is a Anglo-Sympathizer. She is far too forgiving when she discusses Eurocentrism and Anglo-Power. She's very pretty, and she has these watery eyes that do remind of some Anglo faraway upon a time, but she is just...I don't know, silly about England. I just really can't fathom why she made us buy a text we aren't going to write about. I'm almost mad.
So I figured that since I'm not going to write about Moll Flanders I'm going to have to blog about it.
I think that there is strong suggestion in the text that language is the most powerful weapon a person of either gender can wield against another, and Moll's story is about a woman realizing that her worth is contingent on her ability to manipulate language and control others through artful conversation. I haven't read the whole novel yet, but I think that from the beginning her character only has an advantage when she can articulate her feelings clearly. I'm not sure if this theme is adequately developed all way through the novel -- we'll see.
And is it just me or is the time change evil?
3 comments:
So interesting how great minds work alike. Only a couple of days ago in my 104 class, we were discussing Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in terms of how the male and female main characters battle for the right to speak.
I'm assuming that your instructors at CSUDH assign topics for papers rather than let you choose? I always kind of resented that approach myself. I'd much rather write about works that interest me, not what interests the instructor. I guess that's why I've always made my literature class assignments so open-ended, much to the frustration of some students who are more familiar with the other method.
All of my British literature professors (at both of my alma maters) were male, by the way, except for one female professor at USC. She was perhaps best known for asking each week, "Would you like me to copy a few pages of that for you?" So we ended the semester not only having read something like 15 Victorian novels (which, as you know, are known for their brevity anyway) but also a stack of book chapters and journal articles and other materials that stood about two feet tall on my desk.
When I started at USC, one of the required classes was literary theory. (I think that requirement is gone now, by the way.) You had to take it as soon as possible after starting the doctoral program. And it's just as you described your class. Each week we read a work by another literary critic. Derrida was, of course, on the list because he was so much in vogue at the time. It was one of the dullest classes I've ever taken. You are right: no discussion of the relevance of this to the study of literature. Just reading and discussing theory, that's all. How is this useful? Are we supposed to figure it out on our own? You'll perhaps notice as you continue on in your studies at the graduate level that so many people seem to be leaving the study of literature itself behind. I hope it begins to swing back away from "pure" theory at some point, to get back to the text in some way, even a small one, but that is what you hear a lot of at conferences and what you read a lot of in journals these days.
I think the person who came up with Daylight Savings Time should be shot. If he/she is already dead, the body should be exhumed and shot. I've been exhausted all week.
Thanks for validating some of my complaints. I'm very stressed out at the moment, and it helps enormously to know that I am not crazy.
The Brit Lit instructor assigns topics. The American Lit professor assigns themes because he gives you the option of writing your essay in class, and actually requires that one essay be written in class. The poetry class doesn't assign themes, just requires that you apply the instruction in book to your formal critique, and therefore lets you come up with your own argument.
The Lit Crit class is wholly different. I think it fulfills several major requirements, and therefore may be hailed as a philosophy type class (although it is English); the instructor claims that literary criticism doesn't exist as a sausage factory, so he doesn't want to apply the theory to literature, but wants to expound on the literature that is in the theory, if that makes any sense. Or how the theories influence and criticize each other. Of course this gets easier as you get into Freud, and New Historicism. I can appreciate what he's trying to do, but I don't think he was prepared to actually do it. This is his first time teaching the class, and other versions of this class this semester are using the textbook that Blythe is using in her 104 class. Serious extremes. The clearest idea about theory I have at this point is that it exists to police ideas, as much as it exists to free them. Genius is so relative, you know? There is this fear of being inconsequential that emerges in most of these theoretical texts.
Post a Comment