In keeping with my satirical mood towards my background, here are more terms following those introduced in my previous post.
Bloom, Harold: Literary critic and self-appointed cultural arbiter, especially as leading voice against reading Harry Potter in recent years.
Art major: Highly talented student who faces bleak employment prospects after college.
Avant-garde: highly encouraged in art, but is an exercise in futility for English majors and MFA students, where intellectual laziness in the creative writing workshop often gets in the way of helping an innovative writer with their work. Unfortunately, avant-garde has been used as a cover for lack of literary talent for some English professors who moonlight as writers.
Carver, Raymond: Writer of literary fiction whose minimalist style, banal subjects, and odd sensibilities are often aped by advanced creative writing students. A notable Iowa Writer’s Workshop‘s professor, Carver helped shape the myth of the drinking writer.
English Teacher (high school): A means of stable, but financially unrewarding employment for the English major. A cynical shadow of the former college self who projects his or her intellectual insecurities upon their students, contributing greatly to the illiteracy rate in the U.S. and perpetuating myths about grammar, not in any particular order. Some manage to escape this rut, such as Stephen King (see genre fiction).
Faulkner, William: 20th century Southern-fried American novelist whose extremely long, but stylish sentences overshadow his stories. Also responsible for helping perpetuate his hunter’s tweed jacket as a fashion item for “respectable” types, including writers, English professors, and truly committed English majors.
Flaubert, Gustave: 19th Century French novelist whose painfully belabored prose and slender literary output is the ancestor of and gold standard for modern literary fiction. Best known for Madame Bovary, the sexiness of which is lost in Flaubert’s quest for le mot juste (the right word).
Gardner, John: English professor and literary fiction writer whose legacy includes the novel Grendel and The Art of Fiction, an arch-conservative treatise on writing and literature. Raymond Carver was his former student. Think of Gardner as the Palpatine to Carver’s Darth Vader.
Graphic arts major: Sellout. See art major.
Hemingway, Ernest: Big, burly American man and novelist of the early 20th century whose persona perpetuated several myths such as being a tough, macho writer (see male poet) and travel as a writerly activity. His brief, manly style is often aped by beginning creative writing students.
Iowa Writer’s Workshop: The mother of all MFA Creative Writing Programs at the University of Iowa, carrying with it a perverse prestige. Many notable writers have studied there, with much more famous ones on faculty. Perhaps the institution most responsible for literary fiction‘s high emphasis on style and realism without much substance.
MLA (Modern Language Association): Pedantic professional organization of “language professionals,” including English professors, best known for inflicting their format on students addled with the task of writing research papers.
O’Connor, Flannery: A notable alumna of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, a brilliant Southern writer, and detractor of the creative writing workshop in her post-MFA years.
Harry Potter: A series of novels centered around a magical orphan, whose highly successful author, J.K. Rowling, demonstrates point made about Charles Dickens.
Science fiction: Genre fiction that English professors and most English majors actively avoid, as they are too intellectually lazy to read it on its own terms.
Technical writer: Often an English major or from other “creative” background, though there are some alumni of programs specializing in this field. A stable and much more rewarding profession than being an English teacher, the technical writer harbors dreams of becoming a novelist and works on creative writing projects while pretending to browse the Internet like most other time-wasting office employees.
Thomas, Dylan: A notable poet in English literature despite being Welsh. Under no circumstances duplicate his lifestyle as he drank himself to death.
Tweed: Fabric of choice for dowdy clothing worn by writers (see Faulkner, William), humanities professors, and students. In recent decades, tweed has fallen out of favor with English professors, English majors, and MFA students who fancy themselves as hipsters.
