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A+rts and Literature


Well, it's been a good two months or so since I've put a post, and I feel obligated by the very existence of my blog to do so again, and then subsequently ignore it for the following two months. In other words, this isn't going to be a habit.

It's been after the never ending wave of literature homework slowly descending upon you like the final row of Space Invaders that you just can't seem to hit no matter what, or the final bit of the Centipede that constantly evades your slow, blundering shots, that I've started to notice that my personal interest in the study of Literature is now a de facto Lemming.

Never before have I experienced such an utter repulsion for anything that has the label of "Literature" on it. And since the text in this blog is highly dependant on my personal whims, today we are going to talk about Dadaism.

But since my personal whims have changed drastically since the last paragraph, I choose instead to start this paragraph on a complete tangent. Does the repeated study of something lessen your appreciation for it? I'm certainly not going to try and combat the likes of Stephen Fry, but it's very hard to deny something like this after you've been studying Literature for four years now, and at about the fourth year, it simply doesn't feel like the fourth anymore.

Maybe it's not because of the repeated study of it. Maybe it's just because I don't like the subjects being taught this semester, and I'm starting to be convinced that that's really the case.

Maybe it really isn't the length of which you study something, but what you're studying that determines how much enthusiasm you have for something, but in the case of literature, I'm not really sure it should be something that should be taught in a class like the Sciences or Mathematics.

A very good example is Wordsworth. During Romanticism class we studied one of his poems titled "Expostulation and Reply", which was basically Wordsworth's justification for not spending more time in the study and slacking off in the deeper recesses of a forest on a rock. In the poem, one of Wordsworth's unnamed friends (whose existence is debatable) questions him on why he wastes his time sitting on a rock and enjoying the fresh forest air and the beautiful chirping melodies of Nature when he could be in a dusty study room reading the Classics under a dim candlelight. Wordsworth then proceeds to answer, "Well, duh."

It was in a overly air conditioned, depressingly light classroom that I received this enlightenment.

We've taken Wordsworth's philosophy and printed it in books, but what we don't realize is that the book has in fact been printed upside down. Sitting in rooms studying is precisely what Wordsworth was against. He wanted people to go out into the woods (or the AYE, in our case) and sit alone and think. So thus we take his advice and study it.

Maybe some things can't be stuffed into a graded cirriculum, simply because it goes against their very Nature (anyone who got that, my sincerest condolences). Some things simply need to be taught for the sake of it, for the enjoyment of the student, not for their potential use in the future.

But I suppose that's not going to happen any time soon. Literature and the Arts are always going to be accessed and graded like just about any other subject. And it's after writing this blog entry that I'm going to have to finish up that analysis of Percy Shelley's poems that I'll get a one grade penalty for if I'm so much as one day late.