First: literature classes seem to be designed for people who don’t read. This semester, during a particularly inane session of Early American Literature, it suddenly dawned on me that students so lazy they wouldn’t read The Scarlet Letter unless required to by a professor were the real target audience of the course. Maybe students who are really interested in literature should study something else — something easy that left them plenty of time to do basic reading on their own, to maintain some kind of literary dignity. Additionally, if more literature students studied something else, then perhaps I wouldn’t have to make the next complaint.

Second: literature professors display a truly horrifying summary knowledge of intellectual history and non-narrative ideas. I’ve seldom felt so dismayed on the behalf of my peers (typically I don’t feel anything on their behalf) as when my Modern British Literature prof assayed to serve up Kant in five minutes with one whiteboard diagram. I suspect this particular prof’s understanding of Kant actually only derived from a comparison (presumably encountered in an introductory essay in some anthology, written by another literature prof) between Kant’s epistemology and the Copernican Revolution. (I only raise this possibility because I am convinced I once encountered the same diagram she used to explain Kant, used in another classroom to explain Copernicus’s crazy idea about the earth’s wanderings.) The only literature profs who seem to avoid this haziness and this damaging over-simplicity, tend to be philosophers, psychologists, or theologians in disguise, bent on using literature to explore their own dearer subjects.

Third: the papers I end up writing for literature classes are despicable hack-work. The best of them rise only to the level of a puzzle — tracing a constellation of explicit allusions in order to propose a less likely one — the worst of them become the medium for truly hasty reflections, a training ground for calculated ambiguity. Clarity of idea — and consequently clarity of expression — only impede getting good grades on literature papers. I have concluded that over the past year my immersion in literature classes has actually decreased my rhetorical ability. Comparing papers from the year before and the papers from this year, I find the former much better written. I seem to have lost both the punch of the right word — in favor of the grade-raising tickle of the long word — and also the exciting rhythm of transparent argument and easy narration. This is at least partially the fault of literature courses.