how are arts and humanities at sc?

Tom_Holsinger_1
Fri, 14 Oct 2005 14:02:55 +0000

My then sophomore daughter at UCSC dropped out of the Literature major in the winter 2005 quarter after taking the introductory course required for all Lit majors, which she felt was horrible. My son who graduated from UCSC in June says that this opinion was shared by all the Literature majors he knew - none of them liked the introductory course and most of them hated it.

The universal comments were that the introductory Lit course (theory as I recall) is dry, sterile, and so theoretical and jargon-ridden as to maddening - some compared it to a math course. This may simply be that it is designed to weed out non-serious students, but my personal information from past majors is that the UCSC Lit faculty are thoroughly into deconstructionism and other trendy politically correct & post-modern nonsense.

Deconstructionism is a real Lit theory, but has at least been overdone and is under considerable attack even in the Lit academic community - my drama instructor friend says deconstructionism is on the way out among Literature academics.

It is certainly open to ridicule - go to this link for an example:

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern

Here are the comments on a random post-modernist deconstructive essay generated by this site, from my drama instructor friend:



Yow! That site is hilarious, and as a real live pomo academic, I can
read that stuff and actually tell what’s meaningful and what’s not (my
own estimate was that about a quarter of my colleagues couldn’t, and
about half who could lacked the self-confidence to say “This is
meaningless.”) Wonder how many other sublanguages – some of finance,
some of administration, etc. come to mind – the same thing could be
done for. (I think it’s the extreme recursiveness that makes it
possible, which is why I suspect those areas would also be vulnerable.
Probably some branches of psychology too, and almost certainly some
esthetics. Any field that 's turned into “pure discourse”, i.e. where
there’s no longer an objective relation … or where the ability to use
the jargon has become prized above the ability to perceive.)



My son says that any actual study of literature, by UCSC Lit majors, is pretty much up to the students without help from the faculty. There are a few Lit instructors who actually teach real literature and will help guide self-motivated students teach themselves. Courses not taught by the few non-idiots are at best ticket-punching to graduate, and won’t help with grad school applications.