Altarwise by Owl-Light: Fortunately, I know my Jonson from my Johnson

Where's that title from?

Altarwise by Owl-Light

I.

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentleman of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentleman, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

-- Dylan Thomas

04 November 2007

Fortunately, I know my Jonson from my Johnson

So, yesterday I finally took the dreaded GRE subject test in Literature. I'm sure many others have analyzed this strange phenomenon, but I thought I'd throw in my two cents, anyway.

To show that I am qualified to study and teach literature at an advanced level, I showed up to a dreary little classroom at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Around me, there were about 14 or 15 other students, testing in a range of subjects, from Lit to Psychology to Biochemistry. We all had our sharpened #2 pencils, like a bunch of elementary school students, because mechanical pencils are not allowed. (Presumably, they fear that some ingenious young Sydney Bristow or Jack Bauer will smuggle in a set of test answers hidden in the mechanical pencil's inner compartment.) Then I took a 230-question multiple-choice test.

I think I did reasonably well. (Herman Melville wrote The Scarlet Letter, right?) So this is not sour grapes. (Though I may have some of them to offer in six weeks, when scores come out.)

It just depresses me how the study of Literature has been included in this bean-counting version of education. I can see how such tests would be useful for Biochemistry, but somewhere, even now in 2007, underneath many tons of dissertations and test scores, there is still a burning ember of soul left in Literature. I swear it's still in there!

I still have faith in Literature, with a big capital L. And I fear having that faith stolen by the academic mishandling of the subject.

Well, not to worry. I'll just reform the whole system from within. How hard can it be?

1 comment:

Gary L. McDowell said...: Amen, Michael Cherry. Amen.

I agree that being able to recognize literary texts and perform memorizational techniques shows little about how someone will be able to teach an advanced course in Lit or CW. It's a shame that we aren't given an essay exam of some sort. I mean, it's the interpretation and analysis of the literary text what we'll be doing the rest of our scholarly lives anyway?

You're scores will be great though. I mean, of course Shelley wrote The Sound and the Fury.; 4.11.07