What another alumna says

Gall and Gumption is an interesting blog by a former Literature student named Kia. She graduated in 1981 and also taught here for a while; she was friends with Marvin Mudrick and is friends with other CCS Lit old-timers like Max Schott. I think some of you are familiar with her name because she's been published in Spectrum several times. She's written several good blog posts about Mudrick, which makes me happy. Learning about CCS history helps me understand why this college is like it is now, which is a useful understanding to have as I try to get the most out of CCS Lit and also try to help make the program better. You probably share my aims and would like to learn more too! Yay!

This 1995 article is a summary of part of CCS history, mostly from a CCS point of view. Here's some relevant background material from it:

Since the college was established as a reaction to conventional undergraduate instruction, there has been tension between the college and some academic departments, especially English.

Some of the bad feeling between the college and the English department has to do with personality conflicts of long standing; some has to do with the approach to literature. The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory.

The external review team found that the college's literature faculty was "extraordinarily inbred," most being former College of Creative Studies students who had received their Ph.D.s from UC Santa Barbara, and recommended that they be replaced by English department faculty.

The literature lecturers disagreed. "It's almost impossible to find people who have enough of a sense of what's going on here to teach here," said Max Schott.

"It is true that we don't spend time talking about intellectual fads like 'deconstruction' and the 'new historicism,'" said Kia Penso, another college lecturer. "Primarily we read the literature and talk about what we have read. But the fact that we don't devote a lot of time to literary theory doesn't mean we are less rigorous."

Kia's blog posts give first-person detail and color to that history. She explains aspects of Mudrick's personality:

The exuberance that so grated on his critics was an urgency of feeling about the richness of this idea as he experienced it, and an impatience with all the phony or less satisfactory notions of the good that just got in the way. Yeah, there are people who laugh at their own jokes because they're nervous and don't know how to be cool. Marvin laughed at his own jokes because he was jubilant, full of high spirits, of energy, of rejoicing in goodness and beauty, in what was out there.

She has ideas that I like:

Which is sort of the point of literature, to give you a more interesting and revealing and rich theory of life and experience (including literature and music, yes) than the half-baked notions we walk about with unthinking.

She also describes her ideas about how to teach reading, which seem to be a decent description of the CCS approach. That approach is one of those controversial things about CCS Lit (note the statement in the above news article that "The college is interested in teaching students to read carefully and to write well, while the English department is more interested in literary theory"), and the success of this approach depends very much on how good the teacher is.

There's an interesting comment on a post criticizing Adam Gopnik, which is one of the posts that I might find interesting (along with this one about riding trains) even if I didn't care about CCS. The comment is about Mudrick's strange appeal:

I went to bed perusing Mudrick on the web-don't even wonder why after all these years his voice is singing high ptched over my shoulder as I read what I type....The thing about Marvin was that you loved him so much despite every reason to dislike him.

I liked reading the second-hand Mudrick advice in some of the posts, reminding me to not worry too much about self-indulgence when writing:

If he read a book on Chaucer he would dispatch it efficiently and then have lots of room to write about Chaucer in a way that considerably increased your pleasure and understanding of Chaucer...The extended inquiry into ideas that you find in one of Mudrick's pieces, the pursuit of the author's presence, the use of jokes as little revelations, all of this sort of thing is self-indulgence...not at all in conformity with that great American virtue of being sparing of words and "sincere" with the few simple ones you use, and in which thinking and inquiring into the ideas that people live by is a frightful piece of presumption.

And to not worry too much about using generalizations when writing and talking:

A generalization was a place from which you launched out into a subject, with the assumption that your observations -- or the observations of other readers in conversation with you -- would correct the generalization. That was what it was out there for, to be corrected, to be filled with content, or to be discarded as not sufficiently descriptive or for any number of reasons that resulted from investigating the questions it raised.

If you're interested in more, I quoted some other people talking about Mudrick in an earlier post. There's also a book called Mudrick Transcribed, but I haven't read that yet.