/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.16029949]

What have students of Literature programmes been up to in recent years? They can't all be doing critical race & gender analyses, right? At a certain point deconstructing must become tiresome to all those professors and students, I would think/hope.

[Anonymous No.16030086]

>>16029949
I study in continental Europe, and honestly am somewhat confused by the differences in approaches between Europe and the anglophone world.
At my uni, pretty much anything goes, from old-fashioned philological, historical and stylistic studies, over formalism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, narratology all the way to the fancy-schmancy cultural studies, feminism and new historicism. (Queer and postcolonial/race shit is quite underdeveloped here.) Basically you just pick what you feel like, there's lots of freedom in selecting your classes. The newer stuff has some sort of a prestigious aura, of course.
Regarding the students' interest, the themes of the last several issues of a student mag can be an indicator:
>a critical approach to the poststructuralist dominant in theory (which received a response by one prof who, quite fairly, pointed out the diversity of what you actually can learn about literature at the unis here - but poststruc. and related approaches certainly are the most prestigious)
>an issue focusing on the concept of "world literature", Goethe etc.
>some marxist/cutural studies sort of stuff, "the culture of the working class"
>some feminist stuff about the culture of young women
What happens in USA, however, is not quite clear to me. In some texts and comments, I read that the more radical sorts of postcolonialism and similar stuff are somewhat losing their popularity - but that likely depends on the particular institution or circle of people.

[Anonymous No.16030184]

>>16030086
I'm also stationed in Europe but not really in touch with Literature studies. Glad to see there's a wide range, even if the student magazine is kinda cliché again. Do you think there's a 'decolonizing' moment going on which might alter the canon, or is there's a pretty hefty establishment? It seems to me there's a growth potential for more and more Arabic literature, just demographically speaking.

[Anonymous No.16030277]

>>16030184
I live in a shithole, no Arabs here whatsoever, no idea how it will develop elsewhere.
However, IMO a solid, classical approach to non-european literatures is sorely needed - not that postcolonial stuff that does shit in a vacuum, but to-the-point philological stuff, establishment of a sort of canon (texts that you should be familiar with for productive dialogue, not some mythical list of the best of the best), and a culture of translation that you can then work with further. We kinda have that for Indian studies (largely thanks to the importance of indo-european linguistics, I wager), but it's still pretty small.
As for the mag, the first issue I listed definitely desired and kind of did create a polemic around the matter of the scholars' focus. But, by now the editors of that issue are done with studying (the mag comes out yearly, if we're lucky), so they had nothing to do with the newest issues.

[Anonymous No.16030774]

>>16030277
>IMO a solid, classical approach to non-european literatures is sorely needed - not that postcolonial stuff that does shit in a vacuum, but to-the-point philological stuff, establishment of a sort of canon (texts that you should be familiar with for productive dialogue, not some mythical list of the best of the best), and a culture of translation that you can then work with further.
Yeah, good point, I agree. sorry I'm boring