The Reading List: A Tale of Comp Lit Disillusionment

Emily,

I loved your response. You have written an aesthetically competitive post about competitive aesthetics. Remarkable. And it's a good one, too. I admire your meta-oneupmanship there. Let me see if I can elaborate on my original comment.

Reading back over your post and my own comment on the original post, I'm pretty surprised at what I wrote. I've never been someone who's cared about cultivating high art sensibilities (I have little patience for film; I eat mostly cereal and plain pasta for dinner) or projecting my literary tastes as a reflection of myself. And yet there I was, sitting at my desk, agonizing over whether someone would recognize my name and realize that I had read not one but two Oprah's Book Club books, and that I had been about seven years late to the Dave Eggers party, one long left by anyone with any literary respect for themselves. Why did I care? What had happened?

I had started out with so much potential. I arrived on my first day at college proudly toting my On the Road and HOWL (sure to be found buried deep in the closet of any "serious" comp. lit. major - far from the sightlines of any potential visitors), ready to set the world on fire with my "I don't give a f---" attitude. I wanted to find a community of literary encouragers, rather than competitors, in terms of both reading and writing. And I don't think I was alone in this. I was one of many wide-eyed suburbanites (I'm originally from Long Island - there goes my literary credibility...) who had signed on to meet others to start the next great literary movement.

Well, of course, we didn't. And we still haven't. So what happened? How did a legion of idealistic poets become an embittered group of literary critics? Let's see if I can explain it.

As a freshman sitting in an upper-level comp. lit. class, one thinks he may have found that "vibrant discussion" that he read so much about in a college pamphlet. But soon he starts to notice something a little different happening. His passionate, reader response-ish discussion answer on a novel is met with crickets (maybe even a snicker). Meanwhile, somewhere else in the room, a grizzled senior has peppered his lengthy dismissal of the novel with only the obscurest Lacan and Derrida references, the professor has fallen out of her chair, and the admiring eyes of every female in the room are on him. One starts to get the idea.

On college campuses today, the obscure literary theory expert is the new high school quarterback. His field is the lecture hall; he captures the crowd not with touchdown passes but with high-flown theoretical sparring sessions with professors who, of course, see in him a younger version of themselves, and are willing to endlessly heap praise. And that is the ultimate currency on the college campus, is it not?

And so the race is on. Who will bring the most obscure texts to the discussion? Who will wow the world with their feats of Foucault and Spivak? The question becomes not "How can I find the text that will change me?" but rather "How can I find the text that will change the way others view me?" The literary snobbery of academia is vicious, and one can only exist in that environment for so long before succumbing to it.

And that's what went through my head when my reading list was aired to the world. I pictured Margaret Vandenburg reading it aloud in 3000 level Postmodernism, to the cruel laughter and pointing of hundreds of prematurely bald soon to be Ph.D. candidates.

So even though I try my best to live in opposition to aesthetic snobbery, you can understand my knee-jerk response. The high school quarterback had just pulled my pants down in front of the whole cafeteria.

- Editor @ 4:15 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

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