So I am supposed to be studying for my big final. I take it tonight at 8pm. The class is Critical Theories of Literature. This class is to English students what Organic Chemistry is for my younger brother the chemistry major. This is the much-dreaded class that says, if you can’t do this, you do not belong here. It is the class that otherwise good English students end up taking two (or, I have heard, even three times).
It is basically the class that teaches you what every oh-so-important thinker has thought about the ways that we read, and how we determine meaning. It starts with the Greeks and moves right on along to the things that college professors were arguing about this morning.
It is, in short, a class about how cool academia thinks academia is.
That being said, it has been interesting. For instance, did you know that Queer Theory and Gay Studies are two totally different schools of thought? And that they are basically, diametrically opposed? Gay Studies says there have always been gay people and we can prove it with these texts! Queer Theory is more like, yeah there is totally some ambiguous sexual stuff going on in Billy Budd, but who the fuck knows what it is about?
Me? I’m just trying to get the grade and move on. When you really get into the English program, there are two types of people. There are the people who lean toward the theory side of things (these people seem to be Philosophy majors who switched to English. What? For the expanded employment potential?) and then there are the writers who are all like, “Why the hell do I have to take a theory class! I’m already totally an unrecognized genius!”
I am the latter, I guess.
Either way, we all have to learn what Jacques Lacan thought about The Purloined Letter.
Anyway, I guess my point, if ever there was one, is just that college is not HARD, not the way that real life is bone-crushingly, soul-killingly hard, but it can be difficult. And it is a different kind of stress. At work I get stressed because I deal with actual money that doesn’t belong to me and in that situation you are always one giant fuck-up away from getting fired. And people get fired for that stuff. In school, the stress isn’t as immediate, it is more ghostly. The train of thought is, “Oh god, if I fail Critical Theories of Literature then I won’t get into UCLA (everybody at CSUN wants to go to UCLA) and then I won’t be able to get a good teaching job and then I won’t get to stand in front of a class and act all smarty-pants and that is the only thing that will validate me as a person!”
Yeah.
I have a love/hate relationship with this whole culture of college. This grad student in one of my classes is constantly relating EVERYTHING back to Theory and I just want to scream at him, “NO ONE CARES WHAT HEGEL THINKS! NO ONE WILL EVER BE IMPRESSED THAT YOU CAN VOMIT UP GRAMSCI’S THEORY OF HEGEMONY!” I want to take him aside and be all like, “Look dude, you need to get away from school for a while. Go work on an oil drilling platform. Go get your heart broken. Go eat a bald eagle. Go do something else for the love of god.”
But I also understand that college is how you get your ticket punched.
And not for nothing, I realize that I’m being a bit of a hypocrite. After all, part of the reason I plan to go on to get an MFA is so that I can teach at the college level (though in my heart of hearts I still want to teach at community college, I think I owe that to myself, but we will see how that works out) and so I know that I can’t really have it both ways. Either I have to buy in to this academia thing or not and if I buy in I should probably stop bitching.
Thankfully, I still have a few years to straddle that one.
Anyway. I guess I have wasted enough time. I really do have to go study, because I have to pass this test, it is totally very super important, as I have explained.
I hope that as you read this you are lounging on a beach somewhere, sipping a fruity drink with a little umbrella in it and laughing at my problems. For the moment you can be my grounding. I’m counting on you to be all, “Oh, he is stressing out over a literature test. How cute.”
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