Thread replies: 6
Thread images: 1
Anonymous
English: What do you learn in academia that you can't from reading on your own?
2016-06-25 01:24:56 Post No. 8204885
[Report]
Image search:
[Google]
English: What do you learn in academia that you can't from reading on your own?
Anonymous
2016-06-25 01:24:56
Post No. 8204885
[Report]
"'There are many things fit for a man’s personal study, which are not fit for University examinations. One of these is “literature.”…[We are told] that it “cultivates the taste, educates the sympathies, enlarges the mind.” Excellent results against which no one has a word to say. Only we cannot examine in tastes and sympathies.'"
"Since then, literary “science” has yielded many genuine discoveries. Biographical scholars have uncovered salient facts about authors’ lives; textual scholars have hunted down corruptions introduced by copyists, printers, or intrusive editors into what authors originally wrote. But for most students, especially undergraduates, the appeal of English has never had much to do with its scholarly objectives. Students who turn with real engagement to English do so almost always because they have had the mysterious and irreducibly private experience—or at least some intimation of it—of receiving from a work of literature “an untranslatable order of impressions” that has led to “consummate moments” in which thought and feeling are fused and lifted to a new intensity. These ecstatic phrases describing aesthetic experience come from Walter Pater, who was writing in Oxford in the 1870s—at just that “point of English history,” as T.S. Eliot put it, marked by “the repudiation of revealed religion by men of culture.” This was also the moment when English first entered the university as a subject of formal study."
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/04/05/it-makes-you-wonder/
(Full article isn't free, sorry.)