Intensive Courses

There's a new article over at Inside Higher Ed., which states that a new poll shows students prefer intensive courses—"those [courses] taught on a tighter than normal schedule, with more class time each week, but fewer weeks."

This may be true, but I wonder if the same educational value exists in shorter, more concentrated courses. It seems to me that people need time and space to process what they learn. In my case, I don't know that I was able to learn that much in my concentrated courses because it was all so quick. The one quad class that I really benefited from—a course on W.H. Auden—was helpful because I returned to the material later, revisiting poems and themes discussed in the class. I look back on my term at Oxford, which was as concentrated as it gets, and I know that I learned how to write and think more effectively, but I don't know how well I learned philosophy.

Of course, concentrated courses are a great idea if one is just trying to jump through hoops—which is why they are so often used in for-profit education.

Jim Lewis in Slate

Jim Lewis has an interesting article in Slate about Erich Auerbach's landmark book of literary criticism, Mimesis. Lewis (perhaps only partially facetiously) dismisses MFA programs, saying instead that writers can learn far more from Auerbach's book:

What emerges from all this is the idea that prose should be as dense as verse and as welcoming of close reading; that not a paragraph of real writing escapes the context of history; and above all, that style is philosophy, that a decision to use commas where others might use a semicolon, or to elide the word "afterwards," or to shift narrative perspective twice in a single paragraph, is as momentous as the decision to believe in the infinite, or to act in accord with the Categorical Imperative, or to endorse an inalienable right to privacy. They're all part of the same will to represent the world: Kings may stand or fall on the point of a period.

I use the word "interesting," to describe Lewis's article because I don't know what to make of it. He background as a novelist is all to clear when he dismisses the historical nature of Mimesis:

"The subtitle of the book is The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which gives you some idea of its scope and ambition. "Real," of course, is an almost meaningless word in its standard broad use, but Auerbach has a something specific in mind; not the metaphysically real (as opposed to the fantastic) but the socially real—that is, the lives of more or less ordinary people engaged in more or less ordinary activities: the literary equivalent of genre painting.

To be honest, the overarching theme of the book may be its least interesting aspect. Realism of this sort is mostly a phantom concern, from a 21^st century perspective anyway; daily life has been a part of our literature for so long that it seems quaint and forced to make a point of it. So, the grand structure of Mimesis is relatively uninspiring [...]"

I would say that the grand structure of Mimesis, which is terrifyingly vast, is anything but uninspiring. But that's a minor detail. My main qualm with Lewis comes at the beginning of the article when he says:

Criticism is a conversation between critic and reader, to which the artist under consideration can neither add anything interesting nor take away anything useful. Writers' own remarks on the novel—Flaubert's letters, say, or Nabokov's Lectures on Literature—can occasionally be enlightening to anyone sitting down to write a book of his or her own, but studies by professors are entirely beside the point.

This sentence is odd because it seems that the rebuttal to the first sentence is unintentionally contained in the second sentence. Certainly Flaubert's letters or Nabokov's Lectures on Literature—and what of Auden's prose, perhaps the chief value of which is to illuminate his poetry—can add to the conversation. It is probably true that writers do not learn from critics (with the exception of Mimesis, perhaps), but I doubt that artists "under consideration can [not] add anything interesting" to criticism.

Lending Books

The limiting factor in how much I read is not money—books are cheap, probably cheaper than they've ever been (though I wonder how long they will remain so with the advent of electronic reading technology). Rather, how much—and what—I read is limited by time. The job I have now forces me to read quite a bit, though the books are not always the ones that I would choose. I do not have much time for "free-reading," though. Which brings me to my point: I really don't like it when people foist books on me, when they say, "Why don't you borrow this?"


I currently have at least 5 books that people have lent me. I will probably read one of them. The truth is that I have a stack of books that I would like to read and a stack of books that I *have* to read. Finding time for another book is not really an option.

I have never, except in one case, had the heart to say no. This is in part because I'm terrible at saying no, and in part because I don't want to insult the other person's taste (your favorite book is not worth my time.)

Asking to borrow a book is another matter, but now I think I would rather just buy the book myself so that I can underline in it and make notes.