snap!

[adelaidesean]

Of his experience studying English at university level, Garry Disher says (in the latest issue of Lumen, the University of Adelaide Alumni Magazine):

"I hated it. Back then I was already keen on becoming a writer, and it seemed to me that English was going to ruin my love of reading and books. I found the analysis of the novels we were reading too academic, too difficult, and in some respects wrong-headed. But I was just a kid, what did I know? I wasn't ready for that way of looking at literature."

I had the same experience at high school. It feels very weird to be a PhD candidate now.

(Received my first knock-back for a conference paper the other day. It didn't occur to me that by entering this world I'd be opening myself to rejections from a whole new sector!)

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Listening to: Harold Budd & Robin Guthrie - How Close Your Soul

Comments

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

it seemed to me that English was going to ruin my love of reading and books

My experience entirely. When I finished high school, I didn't touch a piece of fiction for many, many years. How I hated that analysing!

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

I studied John Wyndham's The Chrysalids in year nine, way back in 1982, and still haven't been able to re-read it. There must be a better way to go about it...

[mikandra.livejournal.com]

LOL!

As author, I'd be worried that some English teacher decides to study your work in class, and you'd have thirty students going: oh no, no way I'm ever reading (insert name of author) again!

In this way, my kids have developed a solid hate for Bridge to Terabithia which is being flogged to death in schools right now. They didn't even want to see the movie.

[seanwilliams.livejournal.com]

Ah, it's a shame when good books are killed by school! There should be a law against it. Or at least a law forbidding the forcing of books on kids who already have a feel for what they like. They should be able to analyse a book they already know, perhaps, rather than be dragged kicking and screaming through something they're only going to end up hating forever.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with The Chrysalids and for many years considered it the least enjoyable of Wyndham's books. I now suspect it's probably the best (and I'm astonished that it's never been filmed).

That said, the only lit course I did at WAIT (now Curtin) was more useful to me as a writer than any of the creative writing courses, and I say that with all due respect to the damn good CW teachers I had there (de mortuis nil nisi bonum). The lit course, called Modern Novel or something similar, took us through one book a week and made us look at how authors had dealt with technical aspects of writing - passage of time in Camus's The Plague; chapter division in Catch-22; Arthurian allusions in Waugh's Handful of Dust; how Poe, King and Henry James had scared people; etc. Similarly, hands-on experience as an editor in the film course taught me more about screenplay writing than I could have learned from books.

Part of the difference is whether the students want to learn - and in CW classes, they usually do. How to make this work in high school, unfortunately, is beyond me - which is why I transferred out of a secondary teacher training course, but generally enjoy teaching at uni.