It’s honestly really distressing to having people saying things like “actually as an English major, this children’s book IS my favorite novel and my most important influence”
I don’t 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 it’s 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 “well as a physics major I actually think it’s fine if students only want to do arithmetic.” That would be absurd. The assumption is that if you’re studying physics, it’s to study up until the hardest physics you possibly can wrap your brain around.
I don’t know there’s just something here that I can’t quite capture, a lack of respect for the written word and literature as a real field of study. Perhaps it’s because reading is also an activity people do for pleasure, while math rarely is, there’s this sense that being too academically minded about literature is elitist and exclusionary when saying similar things about mathematics would strike people as absurd.
It’s 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 you’re saying, but I think you’re comparing apples to oranges in a way. Math and physics advances and builds upon or supplants prior work. There’s not much point in reading Newton’s 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 doesn’t exactly advance and supplant. As art, it changes with time, style, trends, and history. A significant number of the “classics” in the canon were written for “cheap” 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 isn’t. 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 “performed.” Dickens is an example of doing something simple very well.
I’ll end with this quote by C.S. Lewis, he says it better:
“Critics 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.”
I’ve gotten into the habit of blocking people who write text walls at me about why actually it’s good that adult students are exclusively interacting with children’s media however I did just want to squint at the statement “Math and physics advances and builds upon or supplants prior work”
(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 :)
