Jenny writes:
The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else?
I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess, Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton, etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
You are quite right! But if 100% of the classes I have taught thus far in my life have focused on academic ways of writing seriously about literature, there is a certain appeal to taking another tack. People occasionally teach graduate classes on academic/intellectual writing specifically, though I would think it is usually more usefully subordinated to the study of the primary texts (only a handful of academics are writing stuff interesting enough worth being studied for its techniques!). But here's the thing: what if most bright and literary undergraduates in the end do _not_ have a vocation as a professional literary scholar, and what if the time spent working on skills is somewhat beside the point? What if examining and beginning to develop a voice more like Orwell's or Burgess's or Jonathan Coe's were a near-indispensable skill that is basically not taught at _all_, either in English departments or in creative writing programs?
I presumed Davidson meant recent examples of non-academic writing about literature, and you're reaching back quite a ways.
Jenny:
I completely agree that this would be a good class. My only comment was that I didn't think it would be hard at all to find good material!
Cosma:
No, actually Jenny wrote, "I'd definitely like it to be not just all contemporary." That's why I gave some old examples.
P.S. to Jenny: I'm a huge Jonathan Coe fan, but Like a Fiery Elephant disappointed me. My impression was that he was trying too hard to make a tour de force, to make interesting literature out of an uninteresting subject. But I didn't really think he succeeded.
I was wary of Like a Fiery Elephant to begin with, but was won over by the humane treatment of the impossible B.S. Johnson. However I am not rushing out to read B.S. Johnson either…