Gradedown! Post 8

My grades are due in to MOR tomorrow afternoon, so this might well be the last Gradedown! before the end. Check back later this week for some thoughts about how you might keep your literary muscles in shape for the summer!

Right now, all I have left to grade are

• 18 hebdomadals.

I've been finding that these last hebdomadals are, with some exceptions, the most consistently strong textual interpretation and analysis I've seen this semester. It seems that the brutal practice of writing weekly hebdomadals helped many of you find the right language with which to articulate your literary investigations. I know that as a student it can feel as though all learning is too incremental to be immediately appreciable; however, if you were only to look back at your first hebdomadal and your last you might immediately appreciate the ways you've become better writers. In fact, you might want to go do that now.

Consider Louis Menand's remarks about higher education in last week's New Yorker. He concludes that in recent years colleges and universities have sought to make students feel prepared for whatever unpredictable life awaits them, whereas in fact students would do far better to be aware of just how unprepared they are, and how impossible it would be to be prepared. In an odd way, an English degree can do what a business degree can't: it can show you what happened when Beckett, and T. S. Eliot, and Auden, and Woolf -- all at the heights of their careers -- came into direct and expressive contact with the real, and found themselves lost and hapless.

Is it learning, then, to be able more effectively to articulate the techniques and the nuances by which these writers understand their blindness and their confusion? I think so, if only because it gives you (1) the language with which to describe to yourself your own situation when you look around you in three months or three years and feel that utter panic of uncertainty, and it gives you (2) the absolute certainty that people have been here before, and that comparatively few of those people drowned themselves.