Wednesday 30 May 2012

Parks vs Dyer (vs the academy)

Borderline personal (and misleading) piece on criticism and its discontents, by Tim Parks. Couple of viable comments from the voice-of-the-dog, though, of which my favourites are:

If every one in America with a Ph.D. in physics suddenly died, what would happen to physics in this country? Now consider what would happen to literature in this country if everyone with a Ph.D. in literature died?

and

Accepted into a Ph.D. program in literature many years, I decided to find a life outside the academy, thinking then, as I do now, I had no wish to write more and more about less and less for fewer and fewer.

and (brilliantly)

I was unable to comprehend at least half of the writing in the recent inaugural issue of the journal "Translation"

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