Virtual Memories

I think it’s great that this article on how the discipline of literary studies has killed student interest in literature is by a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.

Annapolis, [my students] tell me, is the place dreams come to die in the daily grind of shining shoes and passing inspections. And the verdict of society is as strong here as on poor Emma [Bovary]: There’s only one way to do things here at Annapolis — those who think differently have to give in.

He laments:

Literary studies split off from reading in the early-to-mid-20th century as the result of science envy on the part of literature professors. Talking about books somehow didn’t seem substantial enough. Instead of reading literature, now we study “texts.” We’ve developed a discipline, with its jargon and its methodology, its insiders and its body of knowledge. What we analyze nowadays is seen neither as the mirror of nature nor the lamp of authorial inspiration. It just is — apparently produced in an airless room by machines working through permutations of keys on the computer.

The thing is, there are as many Annapolises as there are, um, Annapolitans. A hundred feet away from where Prof. Fleming works is St. John’s College, where the theoretical claptrap of literary studies will get you laughed out of the room and students must read The Books Themselves, not critical theory about the books.

Or, as I quoted a few months ago from Lawrence Berns’ article on developing St. John’s graduate institute’s syllabus:

As soon as we were seated for lunch [Mr. Ossorgin, another St. John's tutor] turned to me and said, “Larry, I think all of human life can be understood in terms of the Iliad and the Odyssey.” And then for about two hours he led me in a wonderful discussion about how the Iliad and the Odyssey clarified the foundations of human life, at the end of which I asked him if he would redraw the literature sequence to extend the time for the Iliad and the Odyssey.