Friend Interview
I just saw on my friend Ari's site an interview with Adriana Tatum (another friend). Here's my favorite quote:
Several years ago, in Israel, I got into an argument with a classmate who questioned the validity of literary study. She was a Professor of Accounting and basically asserted that because reading is something you can do on your own, why bother spending money on a literature major? The fact that a novel, for instance, has a historical and cultural context that is relevant to the work but not explicitly stated within its pages didn't matter to her. Did she really need to take a class to know when Don Quixote was written? No. Would knowing anything about Don Quixote really matter to her life at present? Would it change her reading of the novel? If you are reading for pleasure, I guess not. So when I asked her why I should take an accounting class--after all, do I really need to study accounting to do my taxes? Isn’t that what HR Block is for?--she replied, “You don't need to know that stuff, but I do. Someone needs to know how it works.“ Ah-ha! I said. You may not need to know anything about the history of Spanish Golden Age literature and the literary and cultural impact of Quixote but I do, because someone needs to know how it works. Someone needs to know—to remember--how things connect. Don Quixote was written 400 years ago. A lot happened half a millennium ago that is now lost to us, why is this book still on our bookshelves?