I know that as an English major and now a grad student, I was and am supposed to take literary criticism very seriously. Or so they say. Parts of it interested me in college, but most of it, no matter what I did, just wouldn’t stick. I would read it, retain none of it, re-read what I could, and give up. When my professor or a classmate would talk about it in a “Lit-Crit For Dummies” sort of way, I’d be okay. For a long time, and even a little so as I write this, I feel like this makes me some kind of academic fraud – like to fit in with the “cool” English majors, I have to be able to carry on a philosophical conversation about literary theory. The truth is, I will fall short of that expectation every single time. Part of me is afraid to write this because I don’t want everyone to think I’m an idiot. I’m really not. I just don’t “get” literary criticism all that well. This is me being a realist.

I started reading Textual Power. And I was trying to understand it. I really was. I was making notes in the margin and asking myself questions. Some parts weren’t that difficult, but it just got so dense that I found myself re-reading pages and pages trying to figure out what was going on. I tried these techniques we’ve been talking about in working through the difficulty, but there aren’t enough hours for me to re-read that much (I’d never get my other homework or my grading done. Or sleep.)

And then Hemingway showed up.

I don’t at all care for Hemingway. I’m not familiar with his body of work, so there are large parts of this text that I just couldn’t even relate to, no matter how he tried to explain it. I have read criticism that is still academic sounding, but that I can actually understand. I felt like in a lot of this book, the Scholes was unnecessarily wordy and made things too complicated. At some points, he was down-right snobby. I wrote this in the margin of my book and continued reading. About 30 pages later, I came to a page that had been marked up by a former owner of the book. Next to a comment much like the one I marked as snobby, this reader had marked the same thing, only in slightly more vulgar terms.

So at least I know that I’m at least getting something someone else is :-)

I don’t usually care much for Kate Chopin either, but I really liked this story. It’s short and to the point and contains so much in such a short period of time (as the title would imply). I’d really like to use this with my 9th graders for examples of irony next year.