"How can you know anything about literature if all you've done is read books?"
Dear Geoff Dyer: I love, love, love you. Kindest regards, Toria.
I'd love to be able to offer a defense of academia, in the face of my new best friend's commentary on "the academic way," but reading Dyer's writing was like having someone suddenly show up on the desert island you've been populating by yourself. I've recently been having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the field-wide obsession with the production of a very specific type of text. From the first day of orientation here, all I could think of was my depressingly blank vitae and the conference papers and publishable articles I should have crafted yesterday.
But then, here's my beef. We study these amazing people, and read these incredible works. Debbie has a good argument against Dyer's huffiness -- we are often the only ones reading this stuff. That's got to count for something. But for the most part we study people who are long gone. Frequently, we wait until a text has yellowed at the edges before we deem it worthy. What about those people out there - people who still have a pulse - churning out incredible stuff? Who are these people? What does it say on their passports..."Writer"? Does it ever say "Academic"? Do we have to pick a team here, or can we do both - be the academic AND the producer of the texts studied by academics? Shouldn't we be hybrid models? Hybrids are, after all, very "in" this year.
In 101 I tell my students that to become better writers, they should read, read, read. And I'm not just blowing sunshine up their skirts...I really do believe it. People learn from example. So I ask them to read examples of personal memoir when I want them to write actual personal memoir. NOT when I want them to write ABOUT personal memoir. But why don't I practice what I preach here? I read literature and then, instead of writing it myself, I write ABOUT it. And fine, 101 is a writing class, and I'm in literature. But wouldn't we have more to say about literature if, instead of just reading it, we wrote it as well?
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Yes, I have those moments of doubt about where I belong in the academic/real world, and the Vitae nightmares, "You've been here long enough Jerry, get some shit on it." Still, if it comes to picking a team, I still want to change teams now and then, or even join another league. This course does focus on story telling and scholarly writing, a bit of prose to situate the moments of scholarly discovery on a non-theoretical footing. Maybe we can write to academics and sane people too, or to both at the same time as Dyer seems to do.
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