Dr. Boli explains lit crit

[marycatelli]

A BRIEF GLOSSARY OF COMMON TERMS IN ACADEMIC LITERARY CRITICISM.

One way of challenging the gendered nature of bourgeois society is to write a female character with thoughts of her own, since academic literary critics believe that no one but academic literary critics has discovered that women have thoughts.

Comments

[michal wojcik (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, Dr. Boli's hardly fair. Lit crit at universities has moved beyond Marxist theory since the sixties.

Now it's all about this: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

(This is why I dropped my double major in English and History to a single major in the latter)

[marycatelli]

Ah, but the cutting of lit crit, namely, Wikipedia still has it!

[michal wojcik (from livejournal.com)]

Tee hee. That's about the level of lit crit I expect from Wikipedia.

Fortunately, I found Comparative Literature a much more...sane field. One you allow works in translation/multiple languages as objects of study, the "putting a magnifying glass to the prose" method no longer makes any sense. Also, having a broad range of cultures to pick from means western-centric stuff like Marxist theory becomes next to useless. And then you start talking about stuff like story. And characters. And you get to study fairy tales and science fiction, too!

Only I didn't take any comp lit until my last year at uni, so it was too late to minor in that.

[marycatelli]

Life is short, art is long -- it's hard to learn everything.