Azrael the cat said:
I'm not denying that there's a lot of crap in modern literature courses. I'm hesistant to go on the insulting side, as philosophy and literature departments have always hated each other as long as universities have existed. Philosophers have traditionally seen much literature analysis, especially of the 'commentary on society' type, as trying to do philosophy without the need for logical argument. I.e. if what you're really trying to do is say that colonialism is bad, or that particular systems are unjustly racist/sexist, surely you should just make an argument to that effect, with your premises and reasoning explicit so others can analyse and respond.
BUT in their defence, if you want to be a writer, it really doesn't hurt to be thoroughly familiar with literary critiques, both in terms of doing them and knowing how literature professors will approach them. Most ARE motivated by love of literature, although whether they're someone who lacks the talent to write a good book themself depends entirely on the quality of the university. You'll find that the more acclaimed professors at top universities are almost always established authors in their own right - academics are judged almost entirely on the basis of their publication record, and original work is held in greater esteem than secondary commentaries.
What tends to happen, though, is that each author has their own ideas of how they want people to interpret their OWN writings, and (like most people) they impose those onto whichever other books they are teaching about. If they were teaching courses on their own work, their approach would probably make a lot more sense - othewise what you get are authors whose work is highly sexualised reading sexual/gender themes into a low-sexuality work, or authors whose work is all about social criticism reading social metaphors into other works.
You make very good points - I wasn't quite aware of the degree to which the philosophy departments are involved with literature, but it makes lots of sense. Looking at the matter from such a perspective definitely gives the literary studies representatives a lot more room to escape the "responsibility" of actually backing up their claims with logic - a feature that is unfortunately all too common at the moment.
Our "older" lecturers were all very multi-faceted folk that could go ranging from common sense analysis to ultra-rad-post-feminism without skipping a beat, but unfortunately we've had all three replaced by "the new thing", young lecturers that are very excited about Derrida and the likes and go chanting about gender/class/sexuality's holy trinity through
all their courses, whether postmodernism or gothic horror. I ended up doing an Ocham's Razor analysis of Turn of the Screw's analyses just out of spite. I don't deny the g/c/s approach, but it's just incredibly over-used to the point of ridiculous.
I guess they're the fruits of the study approach that was fresh and new when
they were still students themselves and it'll air out of them after a while - hopefully anyway. A return to a more practical or more varied range of analytical approaches would definitely be welcome.
They're still good skills to have - there are plenty of great authors who DO write in a deliberately metaphorical way - Joseph Conrad comes to mind as someone who tended to blend a straight-forward narrative with metaphorical comment on civilisation and/or morality. Scouring work for meanings put 'under the surface' of the narrative is a great skill to have both when you encounter works that use it, but also when writing yourself.
Curiously, I was just re-reading Joseph Conrad about a week ago,
Heart of Darkness mainly, and he certainly is all that. It's very interesting to read the novel from all the different perspectives, and surprisingly it's one of the novels where post-colonial approaches shine with the "silenced voices" approach and the likes - not in an obtrusive way, either, more of a compliment approach.
You don't have to agree with the interpretations that particular academics give to a novel (it isn't as though they agree with each other - though it might seem like that if you're doing a course at the one university, with a handful of academics who are only picking commentaries from the small group of other academics that share their views) in order for their methods to be useful.
This is actually what I find irritating though. On one hand, there is the "you should
not slant the evidence in your favour if there is contrary evidence" mantra of the academia that one will be reminded of over and over; on the other, there is the utter and complete disregard for it coming from the lecturers
themselves more often than just once. Certainly, they may be driving home the point that this particular work
can be analyzed from a feminist perspective, but by doing so, they completely silence all the other approaches - and if it isn't a course on feminism, I expect the presentation to deliver on as many angles as possible.