Literary Criticism: A Rant from Within the Confines of Academia

I wanted to share with you the fruit of my higher education, to impart upon you some of the crucial knowledge that my university is so generously lavishing upon me in order to make me a better informed, educated, well-rounded individual.  Because education is an investment, after all, and you can't assign a dollar amount to your mind!  What magic, secret knowledge from within the ivory walls of academia am I going to enlighten you to today?

Literary Criticism.

Basically, you take a box--preferably an outdated one that was once created by some "great thinker" or another whose ideas have since been completely and utterly debunked by reality, such as Freud's psychoanalysis or Marxism for example.  But it doesn't necessarily have to be an outdated one; a currently over-thought perspective will serve just as well for this box: Feminism perhaps, or Queer Studies (that's literally the term, if you laughed you are probably an uneducated barbarian without the intellectual capability to discuss this blog post any further).

This box defines your identity as a reader: it's Who You Are.  Because, you know, college kids are learning who they are, and the more we can influence that developing identity with our mushy ideology, the more effectively we can ruin them for proper functioning in the Real World.

Now then, does everyone have their box?  Okay, now here's this story.  It doesn't matter when it was written or by whom or about what.  Maybe it was written before Marx was born, maybe decades after Psychology figured out that Freud just needed a cold shower, maybe it was written by a man about men and has absolutely nothing to do with women (because, you know, if it isn't about women, then clearly the guy was a chauvinist pig).  Now take this story:

Wad it up and shove it into your box, stamp it down if you have to, light the edges on fire if necessary, and make it fit in there.

Viola!  Literary Criticism!

Now, of course we're going to teach you how to do it, so here's an assignment to go find some.  But it has to be within the last twenty years so it's new and edgy, otherwise it isn't relevant to the discourse anymore.  Because, you know, there's so much new to say about Hawthorne from the past twenty years that nobody could've possibly thought of earlier, even though the guy lived and died in the 1800's.  And it has to be published by a University press, because you can't trust anything that's written outside of academia, it might be tainted by the Real World, and we can't have any opinions from the Real World, now can we?

To help you find an acceptable article, I've given you this ambiguous list of publication criteria with no explanation whatsoever as to what any of these terms mean, OR that list of ten specific journals you can pick from, but none of them will actually have any articles on the piece I wanted you to look for.

Oh, you've done the assignment and met every single criteria except the time of publication?  Weird, most of your classmates did the same thing.

So all of you have a grade of "Incomplete."  Back to the drawing board, suckers!

Meanwhile, here's this week's reading list.  Not that we'll actually have time to discuss half of it or anything, but you'd better read it all twice anyway, just so you're "prepared for class."

People, I cannot tell you how ready I am to graduate and get out of here.

~  *  ~

I should inform you however that I am loving my Thesis workshop!  I'm writing about Tolkien as a writer: the research is fantastic, the writing is a blast, and I don't feel guilty or stupid after investing six or more hours at a time on it.  Tolkien is teaching me infinitely more about writing and my own identity than any of these silly literature classes ever will.

As for that Parent Teacher Communications class... Yeah, we won't talk about that one.