Pretending to read

One of my major pet peeves in graduate school is when someone claims to have read something and then spends a class period "winging it" through the discussion, pretending to have actually read the day's readings. It's a complete waste of time for everyone in the class, including for the person winging it. But people do it all of the time. They'll listen for a short period of time as someone who HAS read the text talks about it, think they've got the basic idea of the text, and then they'll start to "critique" the text they haven't read yet. Often, they'll introduce "new" readings to the conversation that goes something like: "Yes, I agree that the interpretative perspective of Melville was most likely normative, which reminds me of this write up on Bruce Willis I was reading in People Magazine the other day...." or something tripe like that.

But I was in Barnes & Noble earlier in the day, and I came across a book in the creative writing section that was titled, How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII. The book essentially tells you how to "wing it" through conversations about having read important scholarly works. Needless to say, I was immediately in peeve mode when I saw this book. And it would not surprise me to find a whole bunch of college students picking up that book so they can somehow "fool" the professors yet another semester.

Whatever happened to actually just reading the required text?

Stumble It!