An underlining idea of what I have been trying to do is that one should never really trust academics when it comes to literary matters. They mostly get everything wrong and this has always been so in the modern age. Today,no sane person would ever seriously expect to study literature at an American university as that is the one thing that is not studied in English and foreign language departments at 99% of American universities.
A very good example of your typical tenured, honoured, respected academic is Elaine Showalter. She has chosen to publish A JURY IF HER PEERS, a 608 page study of American women writers. Of course the absurdity of such a book is self-evident as if it was really of interest to study writers on the basis of whether or not they have a vagina or a penis... but even allowing for this sort of trivializing ghettoization is the simple fact that she overlooks Evelyn Scott whose body of work from the 1920's 30s, 40s is far superior to any of the writers she does actually pretend to discuss: most of them are minor to say the least and deserving of their obscurity when compared to so many other writers who happen to have other physical attributes... but it is in wondering how she could overlook Evelyn Scott.. who introduced Faulkner's THE SOUND AND THE FURY and received for her troubles his back-handed compliment, as being pretty good for a woman.. though Faulkner well knew Scott was in so many ways his equal through her actual books: THE WAVE, A CALENDAR OF SIN, BREAD AND A SWORD, THE NARROW HOUSE, BACKGROUND IN TENNESSEE, ESCAPADE...
Of course the real reason Showalter is afraid of such a writer as Scott is simple laziness and tenured academics always avoid the difficult as that is never a good career move. Showalter will drivel on and on about Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale and Adrienne Rich...
If a young person wants to actually study literature at a college or university they should probably study geology or botany or chemistry or mathematics... in the former Soviet Union where literature departments were as awful and as stupid as your typical American literature departments the real readers were in the sciences and it was these people who kept alive for instance the work of Mandelstam and many others...
1 comment:
Most of these books appear to be available at my local library. I was thinking of trying Escapade, since it looks to be the earliest. Is that as good a place as any to start? Thanks.
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