And yet something dies in me ever time I realize, once again, that my students are so excited by the possibility of studying anything that isn't literature.
***
There are two sides to the same problem. How to realize that scholarship is limited, there is more to the person than what that person writes.
The other problem is how to put more of that whole self into scholarship. In other words, scholarship is oriented toward a narrow set of problems (in any given instance). Yet the scholar's formation should not be narrow. The scholarship should still have depth to it. If not, the result is dullness.
By the "whole" self, I mean about 20% of it, instead of 5%. In other words, you will never get all of it in, nor would you want to, but you want to have four times more. These percentages are obviously invented and have no empirical validity.
1 comment:
I don't have the lit passion like that, but one cannot deny that it is the most interesting use of words there is.
I am passionately irritated at the student who said they don't like to read, but want to be a writer.
Post a Comment