This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).
Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.
In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.
I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?
Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.
In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.
I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?