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Oxford University Press has a series of books called Very Short Introductions and they’re quite good. Two years ago in a class I took on visual narratives we started the course by reading Dada and Surrealism – A Very Short Introduction. In a separate course, another instructor strongly recommended we read the VSI on Literary Theory, which I duly bought and read. Both were quite good.

They’re like the Dummies or Idiot’s Guide series, only they assume a fairly high level of intelligence. Rather than assuming you’re a dummy or idiot who wants a dumbed down version of a topic, the VSI approach is that it’s a big, complicated world and people often find themselves wishing they were conversational in intellectual conversations about, for example, modern art, or perhaps animal rights, or maybe you want to know more about film studies. The VSI series do a good job giving a high-level overview of the given topic and, most importantly, clue you in on what to read next to learn more.

Coming into graduate school for English I knew virtually nothing about literary theory. For me, this created some low-level anxiety as I felt a certain expectation that somehow I should know all of this stuff already, but I’d never taken a theory course and had no idea where to start. Over time, I read a little Foucault here, a little Derrida there, a slice of Barthes, drizzle in works by some structuralist theorists, a dose of postcolonialism and it all started to come together. I should mention the dozens upon dozens of Wikipedia searches too—can’t forget those as a part of serious scholarship.

My program does indeed offer a survey class on criticism but it didn’t fit in my schedule the one time that a) it was offered, and b) I knew about it. Why this course isn’t a requirement, or at least strongly recommended by advisors when you enter the program, I have no idea. I wish I would have known about the VSI series a few years ago though because I think reading a core set of these little books would have helped me have a firmer grip on much of my coursework. The books are short too, about 150-75 pages so they can be read over a weekend. Here’s what would have been quite valuable to have read back when I started as an MA student, more or less in order of importance:

> Literary Theory
> Postmodernism
> Poststructuralism
> Barthes
> Foucault

Other less essential titles would be:

> Postcolonialism
> Capitalism
> Marx
> Dada and Surrealism
> Feminism
> Continental Philosophy
> Kafka

I’ve read Dada and Surrealism, Literary Theory, and I’m almost done with Kafka. I’ve flipped through portions of Poststructuralism and Postmodernism and I’m quite curious about Barthes and Foucault because I plan on reading their primary texts once prelims are out of the way. Some of the older books in the VSI series list Derrida as a book that’s coming soon, but I don’t see it listed in later editions which makes me wonder if it has been dropped.

Anyway, this reminds me a bit when I worked at the UW medical school I noted how the educational culture was one where novices or initiates to that world (med students) were made to feel their ignorance very keenly, perhaps as a motivational tool for these students to work harder. For me, this is crap. A healthier idea is summed up by something one of my professors said a few years back: “We have to remember where our students are at, not where we wish or where we expect that they would be.”

Current Mood: A Bit Relieved the Semester is Over |