Acquired Tastes: The Onion Dispatch

Since I'm down to my last couple of papers, and I'm about to send mail informing my students to pick up their corrected papers before rogue waste management specialists recycle them into Lord-knows-what, I thought that I'd kick back and relax with America's Finest News Source. Apparently, today was a good day to rifle through their Education section. To wit:

Freshman Term Paper Discovers Something Totally New About Silas Marner

STORRS, CT-A major contribution to the study of 19th-century literature was made Monday with the handing-in of "Silas Marner: Paper #1" by Lori Durst.

Here, we read that:

According to leading experts on Silas Marner, George Eliot's 1861 fable of cruelty and redemption in the rural English countryside, Durst's three-page work contains a revolutionary insight into a key piece of symbolism in the novel which had previously escaped scholars.

"It's a staggering observation, one that's certain to alter the way we approach this text forever," said Harold Bloom, Yale professor and author of The Western Canon. "On page two, Durst makes a connection between the golden hair of the child left on Marner's doorstep and the misplaced heap of gold coins with which he is obsessed. While it may take decades for the full significance of this 'chromatic objective correlative' to ripple through academia, in my mind it has already opened the door to a rich, fertile, and heretofore virgin soil of Eliotian structural analysis."

And that:

Durst, a native of Holmdel, NJ, who plans to major in psychology, said the idea for the essay came to her approximately three weeks ago, when her professor instructed the students to "start thinking about which book we'd want to write our first papers on." Durst said she chose to focus on Silas Marner "because it looked pretty short."

"My friend Lisa did hers on Middlemarch," Durst said, "and I was like, 'Are you crazy?' That thing is like 10 times longer."

Professor Thomas Perkins, who teaches English 140, was unavailable to comment on the paper. But another University of Connecticut English professor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Perkins and his colleagues were "stunned and somewhat embarrassed" by Durst's 12-point, Chicago-fonted magnum opus.

"You have to understand, many of us have read Silas Marner 10, 20 times," the professor said. "Maybe we had a vague sense that this adorable, golden-tressed waif who comes along to redeem Silas' soul could have something to do with the gold coins that, prior to her arrival, had been the focus of Silas' life. But we, and apparently every reader before Ms. Durst, simply dropped the ball."

While the above account deals with the staggering inability of adults to perceive what's in front of them (and I'm only half-joking), here's one for the youth (and I include myself in this category, for nostalgic reasons):

Nation's Teens Disappointed By Banned Books

WASHINGTON, DC-Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Catcher In The Rye are just a few of the many banned books to which U.S. teens are reacting with disappointment, the American Library Association reported Monday.

Here, we read that:

In a letter sent to the ALA, the American Association Of High-School Students cited its members' other complaints with banned books, including: the monster in John Garner's Grendel isn't scary at all and doesn't even act like a monster; William Golding's Lord Of The Flies is not actually about a mutant insect man who can control the world's flies with his mental powers; and there is no reason to read Stephen King's Cujo when you can see it on cable 24 hours a day; plus, it's not that good, anyway.

"Desensitized to sex and violence from an early age, today's teens simply expect more out of their banned books than previous generations," said Naomi Gould, director of the D.C.-based National Education Consortium. "For the teens of yesteryear, access to novels like Tropic Of Cancer, Portnoy's Complaint, and Lady Chatterley's Lover was an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime thrill. But for teens raised on Cinemax and Def Comedy Jam, it just doesn't cut it."

Matt Kornreich, a sophomore at Hialeah (FL) High School, agreed. "It's just a big tease," he said. "If I want porn, I'll go get some porn. And if I want to, like, be intellectually stimulated... Yeah, right."

Picture above comes from The Onion.