Among his many rants, my friend Orson Scott Card likes to heap venom upon English programs and the kind of writing they produce. He's talking here about literary writing, which he doesn't read as a genre. I do read it, and I sell it, too. There is some really good stuff out there--Chuck Palahniuk, Dave Eggers, Christopher Miller (okay, so I don't read female literary writers, but I didn't realize I wasn't doing it...) and then there is some crap. The filmmakers behind Everything is Illuminated had the right idea in trimming all of Jonathon Safran Foer's self-indulgent sections set in his family's past. Every time I left Alex and Jonathon to go back to Jonathon's ancestors in that book, I winced. But for the most part one has to understand the conventions of a genre to enjoy it. If you don't understand that a fantasy book will take great pleasure in anthropological/historical details like what kind of surcoats Lord Baltingham's troops are wearing, you probably won't get through A Game of Thrones. And if you don't understand that literary fiction tries to weave poetry into the prose, you won't get through Fight Club. So there he's expressing personal preference rather than some higher aesthetic taste.

But.

Nearing the end of my first quarter as a Master's English student, I cannot believe that I am studying what I'm studying, or expected to write what I'm expected to write, and Card's comment about the universities of America is making horrible, horrible sense. This is supposed to be a program in creative writing and English. I've got one creative writing class which has been a lot of fun. It's not asking me to produce nearly as much as I want to (or as much as anyone who is not a bestseller must to make a living at writing) but it is fun. I have noticed there is a curious lack of the nuts and bolts usually present in genre workshops. We're not going over the basics of character--they want something, something stands in their way, or the basics of plot--action rises and builds and questions are suspended until the end--but we are having fun sharing our writing with each other. In some senses, I feel like I've gotten the workshop without the lecture first. That's not the problem, though.

What really gets me is the interrelationship between English departments and creative writers. English academic writing, based in literary theory, (really based in five French guys from the 1960s) produces the most unreadable texts in the world. It doesn't allow for anything like an appealing analysis, like a movie review one might read in the newspaper. No. Nobody reads Foucauldian analyses except Foucauldians. If you even know who Foucault is and why he matters, chances are you got exposed to him in a theory class. It's useless. Nobody bothers to try and make it accessible, which is a clear indicator of the fact that it has no use outside the small group of enthusiasts.

What is more, the critiques offered by my professors rarely break into the nuts-and-bolts that real writing, the kind of writing an agent deals with, must know. My teachers tell me what the paper needs in vague generalities and then when I say, "How do I do that?" they look at me as though I've just asked them to write the paper for me.

AAAAAH!