From: esti@quads.uchicago.edu (Paul A. Estin)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: Mundanity (was Re: Creation and Destruction)
Date: 5 Apr 92 20:35:42 GMT
Reply-To: esti@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: Insanity Etc.

In article <1992Apr1.230850.17666@samba.oit.unc.edu> Elizabeth.Mccoy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Elizabeth Mccoy) writes:

>I am told (by that same teacher) (and other students) that the whole
>"writing" department has the same bias against SF&F. 
>
>There may be perfectly reasonable profs who aren't SF&F fans, but the
>ones who allow *no* quality to the genera, simply because it isn't
>"real," are the (quite justified, IM-Indignant-O) targets of my
>distaste.

	Snark empathizes, "I got hit with that attitude a little
earlier-- in high school-- which may have worked out better in some
ways, but which also had the effect of killing off any hope I might
have had of being a English major.  In fact, for years, I had a
distaste for reading 'classics', on general principle.

	"The entire English department at my high school, save one
cool teacher I had in tenth grade, had more-or-less the same attitude
towards 'litrachoor'.  One of the necessary conditions for *any* novel
to have literary value (not to be considered a classic, mind you, but
simply to have literary value) was that it be written before, oh, 1930
or so.  I suspect they'd have preferred the turn of the century, but
then, that would mean excluding their darlings Hemingway and
Fitzgerald, wouldn't it?"  He grins.

	"Actually, I enjoyed almost everything we read for class in
high school.  (Henry James was a bit dull, and I despised Herman
Melville's pretentiou wordiness, but other than that I liked
everything.)  I didn't consider this too surprising, since, after all,
the teachers had their pick of last few centuries, so I was sure they
could come with the better stuff. :)

	"(Digression: Although, they didn't manage it in French class
as often.  Why oh why are the Gargantua and Pantagruel tripe
considered literary classics? :)

	"What *did* bother me was, first, the way my teachers would
pick and dissect to pieces, say, a good Dickens or Hawthorne story,
focusing on some of the most boring aspects of it, and effectively
killing the joy I actually got out of reading it, so that only now,
six years later, can I contemplate reading lit classics on my own.  An
example: we had an entire class session devoted to whether the title
of a certain Hemingway novel should be stressed as _THE Sun Also
Rises_, _The SUN Also Rises_, _The Sun ALSO Rises_, or _The Sun Also
RISES_.  Aargh!

	"The second thing that drove me nuts was, as mentioned, the
department teachers' refusal to consider anything written after 1930
and uncanonized to possibly have literary merit.  My senior year
teacher, Ms. Burke, considered herself broad-minded (for the
department) because she at least did *read* some recent books.  For
fun and escapism, mind you-- certainly the things were by definition
devoid of intrinsic value.

	"Junior year, my junior thesis had gotten torn apart for
daring to treat Vonnegut and Heller seriously.  Unconvinced, I
proposed a senior thesis having to do with looking for trends and
cross-cultural comparisons between Brit and American mystery and
detective novels.  Now, for the senior thesis, the two graders are two
random teachers in the department, neither of whom is my own teacher,
Ms. Burke.  She was kind enough to warn me that perhaps I'd better
pick a more serious topic.  I basically told her that I planned to do
a serious job on a topic that had some intrinsic interest to me, and
all I expected was for it to be treated seriously as such, because I
wasn't planning on picking a dull topic just because it looked more
serious on the surface.

	"Well, to bring this long-winded story to a close, I learned
the same lesson as Kurt Vonnegut did when trying for a Master's degree
in anthropology (at, ironically, the University of Chicago, where I
received my B.A. and M.A. in psychology)...  that there are some
groups of people where it will not do to study something that looks
like too much fun.  I got a D+ on the damn paper (admittedly, it
wasn't great-- I'd have given it a B+ myself, given how the department
usually grades), which served to convince myself that their opinions
were totally worthless."

-----
"This must be the Red Sox' year. Statistics of the last 75 years prove that
the Sox always win the World Series one year after a Russian revolution."
  --Dan Shaughnessy

Paul Andrew Estin, net.Snark, R.A.C.W.P., UCSFC F.C./K.S., F.C.S.
paul.estin@um.cc.umich.edu  or  esti@midway.uchicago.edu
214 Beakes St. (home)  330 Packard Rd. (work)  Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Newsgroups: alt.callahans