Text 7095, 59 rader
Skriven 2006-08-27 20:10:00 av Robert E Starr JR (7592.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Studying English.....
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* * * This message was from Joseph DeMartino to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
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John wrote:
.
>  I mean that makes sense right?  Study writing by reading great writing? <

Setting aside the problems you address in the main body of your post, I
have to question your basic premise.  Frankly there is no reason in the
world for anyone who wants to write things that other human beings will
actually want to read to "study" English as an academic discipline.  If
you want to write incomprehensible, intellectually worthless,
deconstructionist CRAP - the kind the got your professors their jobs -
by all mean, stay in the program.  But if you want to be a writer, read
good prose and write as much as you can.  A class or a book can teach
you structure, grammar, can offer you the benefit of critiques of your
work from instructors or other students.  It can't make you a writer.
It can't give you the talent or the desire.  That's either there or it
isn't.

Studying English literature in order to become a writer is like
studying masturbation in order to become a stud.  <g>   How can you
learn from people who don't know any more about what you actually want
to do than you do?

You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to an institution
of higher education to read Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky or Harlan
Ellison or Nabakov.  Any decent bookstore or library is going to have
copies of "Beowulf", "The Illiad" and "The Odyssey".  Any hotel room in
America is going to have a Bible, that font of so much of western
literature.

If you have some other professional reason to get Master's degree, or
you simply want to have the academic validatiion, pick a field that
will actually teach you something interesting that you wouldn't
otherwise have known about, and that involves something concrete, not
the kind of thing that people can (and will) just gas around endlessly
about.  Or at least less than they can about literature.  Transfer into
an economics or psychology program (yes, these will also have
tendentious and competing "schools", but at least you can choose one
that is congenial to you.)  Enter the program with the understanding
that you're going to learn some technical stuff, that you'll probably
have to blindly parrot your profs in order  to get your degree and that
you can forget everything they all say once you've got the sheepskin in
hand.  And at the end of the day you'll be a better *writer* because
you'll have broadened your experience and interacted with people you
might not otherwise have met.  And *they'll* teach you more of what you
need to write than anything you'll ever learn in an English Lit. class.

Regards, 

Joe
                                                                               
                           
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