Penismightier, apparently, still

[oursin]

Two articles in today's Education Guardian:

One on that threatened species: the academic literary critic.

And one on creative writing courses.

From which we seemed compelled to deduce that these fields are still pretty much Jobs for teh Boyz, because no women at all get cited in the first, and only two (apart from the name-checking of Zadie Smith

Comments

[angevin2]

Feh. Since when is literary criticism about "objective aesthetic standards" anyway? A great deal of recent literary criticism -- at least in my own subfield (i.e. early modern studies) -- has a great deal to do with the debunking, or at least setting aside, of those standards (such as they are) in order to get a better idea of the cultural conversation. (In early modern studies this tends to mean "looking beyond or recontextualizing Shakespeare and Spenser.")

But then, I was raised by New Historicists...

[oursin]

I suspect that the historian equivalent would be bewailing the lack of good oldfashioned narrative history about dead white males and their achievements diplomacy, war, the business of government, and big social movements discussed as entirely impersonal phenomena.

[angevin2]

This seems entirely likely, yes.

My dissertation is actually about history-as-literature and literature-as-history and so it gives me a sort of feminist-enfant-terriblish thrill that in being about this it turned out to mostly be about sex and clothes.

[curtana]

In early modern studies this tends to mean "looking beyond or recontextualizing Shakespeare and Spenser.

Records of Early English Drama, where I worked for a time, is devoted just to that sort of recontextualizing and looking beyond the Big Names, saying look, Shakespeare didn't spring fully-formed out of the void, here's what the picture looked like before, and here's what fills in the background, and here's what happened after, etc. Very fanfic-ish (to tie in to oursin's next post ;) Mind, they've been going since the 1970s, so hardly 'recent' I suppose.

(Mind you, I think everyone there would secretly have loved to uncover a brand new ref. to some aspect of Shakespeare's career, even if only for the publicity/funding it would have brought in ;)

[sollersuk]

I have ambivalent feelings about creative writing courses.

On the one hand, I treasure the story about F Scott Fitzgerald, several over the eight, addressing an auditorium full of wannabe writers.

"How many of you want to write?" (All hands went up) "Then why the fuck are you sitting here instead of at home writing?"

On the other hand, I went to an excellent one, from which I derived useful things like the list of the Twelve Basic Story Types (which I still have around somewhere) and gems like:

"Writers have immaculate homes." (Loud protest from whole class) "Comparatively speaking. There will always be times when you would rather scrub the floor than sit down and write." Alas, all too true.

She also gave us a good way of getting over writers' block which still works for me.

[oursin]

I seem to remember that there was, or possibly there was only being contemplated, a creative writing option as one of the final-year choices in the English degree I was doing. But not a whole course.

[gillo]

I did a mock interview a couple of months back with a girl who wants to do a creative writing degree. She thinks she'd like to write plays or romantic novels, but had never heard of
Waiting for Godot or read anything that isn't published in thick paperbacks with the title in raised gold lettering. She will probably get a place somewhere not hugely impressive and almost certainly drop out of the course after a miserable first year. They offer this sort of course at a lot of what are euphemistically called "recruiting universities" because they are cheap to teach and can be used to increase the headline numbers of undergraduates. In a lot of cases I believe it is a con.

In my day an English degree did concentrate pretty much on DWEMs, apart from the obligatory small group of Top Female Novelists. But the course did teach me how to think and analyse and apply these skills to other books. I'm not wholly convinced all courses of that name still do that. (Evidence I'm getting old, I fear.)