Itās honestly really distressing to having people saying things like āactually as an English major, this childrenās book IS my favorite novel and my most important influenceā
I donāt know something about it just strikes me as cheapening the entire value of an education in literature and the written word. Like I get on some level what people might mean by this. In a way Harry Potter is the most influential book in my life because itās the first one I read all the way through.
But I just keep comparing this to my own field, math and physics. And there is none of this infantilizing where people can say stuff like āwell as a physics major I actually think itās fine if students only want to do arithmetic.ā That would be absurd. The assumption is that if youāre studying physics, itās to study up until the hardest physics you possibly can wrap your brain around.
I donāt know thereās just something here that I canāt quite capture, a lack of respect for the written word and literature as a real field of study. Perhaps itās because reading is also an activity people do for pleasure, while math rarely is, thereās this sense that being too academically minded about literature is elitist and exclusionary when saying similar things about mathematics would strike people as absurd.
Itās just anti intellectualism I suppose, at the end of the day. A disregard for the value of thinking about things in an academic way, as opposed to pure pleasure
I understand what youāre saying, but I think youāre comparing apples to oranges in a way. Math and physics advances and builds upon or supplants prior work. Thereās not much point in reading Newtonās Principia except for historical interest (Though, I think an argument could be made that historical science figures get their share of reverence in a way similar to authors/novels).
Literature doesnāt exactly advance and supplant. As art, it changes with time, style, trends, and history. A significant number of the āclassicsā in the canon were written for ācheapā entertainment, serialized in magazines. They have simply stood the test of time and stood out from their peers in some way. For example, Dickens should be boring yet he isnāt. His characters are often one-note and his plots are kind of straightforward and easy to follow. But again, his work was serialized in magazines and often meant to be read on-the-go or read aloud in group settings, to be enjoyed by the literate and illiterate alike. His style is still lively and benefits from being āperformed.ā Dickens is an example of doing something simple very well.
Iāll end with this quote by C.S. Lewis, he says it better:
āCritics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.ā
Iāve gotten into the habit of blocking people who write text walls at me about why actually itās good that adult students are exclusively interacting with childrenās media however I did just want to squint at the statement āMath and physics advances and builds upon or supplants prior workā
(This is at best a highly reductive statement and at worst just wrong)
Apologies I tried my best with the science analogy, but I did get my degree in English after all :)
