Reseña del libro "Malamud and Spanier at Oregon State (en Inglés)"
Academic literary study has been severed for a long time now from literature, which consequently separated literature from reality, reduced literature to an object of examination that taught nothing about life. Malamud and Spanier at Oregon State reconnects literature and life and does so with layer upon layer of irony, but not deliberate irony. The irony just happens to be present at Oregon State, a college when Bernard Malamud, literary giant and comp dog, fled back east just before A New Life saw print and embarrassed the cow college that changed its name to university as if doing so would diminish the absurdity of having writers generate the stuff the literary (alleged) scholars made a living reading. So the OSU Department of English was the Department of Reading where writers were second class citizens, even those producing prose worthy of Pulitzers and a National Book Award. But the readers weren't about to relinquish their power to the writers, and even with prose masters showing up on campus on occasion; instead universities just invented the MFA in writing as if writing literature were a field of literature, a program in an English department along side myriad lit study programs and, of course, something called literary theory. All those MFA grads could find jobs like Malamud did, teaching comp at lousy pay with no opportunity to advance and no First Amendment protection through tenure. After all, literary study was more important than literature at OSU, which is not atypical. To be certain at OSU that the writers knew their place, even decades after Malamaud left, Graham Spanier, the now disgraced former Penn State president, arrived as OSU provost in 1986 with his spouse in tow, a trailing spouse given a job in the English Department teaching literature. Spanier, a self-serving punk, decided to improve the reading department by purging the writers, which meant ignoring the recommendations of the Writers Program Administrator experts who concluded that the OSU writing program was not much better than one found at an underfunded community college but could be given the strong core of accomplished writers. Spanier's solution was replacing professional writers with badly trained grad students and tenure for his wife. I had the privilege of teaching comp at OSU from 1984 through 1991, the year both Spanier and I left Corvallis, me to collect unemployment and Spanier to take a job at Nebraska, the last step upward in his march to president of Penn State, and the hell with anyone who got in his way, including some non-tenure-track comp dog who decided to do what he taught. I had the privilege of connecting writing to life at Oregon State, to demonstrate that life and literature connect, to do so by exposing the corruption of the OSU English Department purge, and that, of course, exposed the blatant absurdity of an English Department, bullied by Spanier, attacking a writer. Maybe, like Malamud, I should have run away before publishing something so embarrassing to Oregon State that the president told Spanier to do something about the writer, a comment Spanier interpreted to mean yell at the chair of English, who then yelled at the writing instructor, and tried to bully him into resigning. Yes, censorship. In a department that supposedly venerates freedom of expression. But I'm glad I stayed to report on all that irony, corruption, and absurdity. Spanier, of course, self-destructed at Penn State, and the chair of English who did his bidding, self-destructed at Oregon State, and the old English Department is now the School of Writing, Literature, and Film where over half the faculty are once again writers, where the readers still run the department and don't do much more than squabble among themselves about theory, whatever that is. None of them know how to connect literature to reality. This book does that.
