4 ms·
I feel like if a college student had originally written this, or some more modern equivalent, it would have been shit on as sanctimonious with a needless wistfu
by mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I feel like if a college student had originally written this, or some more modern equivalent, it would have been shit on as sanctimonious with a needless wistfulness about it that feels like it’s straining to sound grand. I can just so easily see my old rhetoric teacher reading a line like, “jawbones of deacons” or “birds the color of red-flannel petticoats” from a student’s essay and just thinking come on, be a grown up, stop trying to sound like a big grown up writer.
I don’t say this to be critical of this passage at all. It just makes me feel like literary acclaim is just super random fashion signalling. When one person writes foo bar baz, we pay people lots of money to relive it on a stage and revere it as classic. Someone else could have totally thought to write foo bar baz in some other circumstance and be told they’re some simulacrum wanna-be spewing out overwrought drivel. It just seems so random.
- atr_gz 8y agoBecause language is always going to depend on context. If a college student in 2018 writes like that then they are probably being pretentious and deserve some criticism. It seems a little dismissive to call it fashion signaling.
- losteric 8y agoThe college student would be regarded as pretentious because they can't follow through with the expectations set by that sentence. They haven't developed a mastery of all the techniques and an intuition around using/abusing rules to enhance the reader's experience. A student could create that sentence, but they could not create the story.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoThis is exactly what I thought of Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Someone else could have written that book, and we'd all be better off for it having never been published. I wonder if I'll ever try to reread it hoping I missed something.
- jhanschoo 8y agoHonestly, it just has little place in a typical college essay. For a software analogy, you have quite a bit of freedom how you want to build your own personal project, but ought to follow standard style and technologies once people need to rely on understanding your code.