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The bad news was reported by a second-year student: “I was struggling to find an essay subject that hadn’t been replicated anywhere else. My first idea was to explore the politics of gender in Milton’s Paradise Lost using both feminist and queer theory, but of course there are journals full of that. So I added some post-colonial theory, put a symbolist spin on it and wrote in the style of e e cummings. My tutor informed me an almost identical article had been published that week in the Times Literary Supplement.”
This story is repeating itself throughout the department as students begin to prepare their essays over the summer vacation. Many are angry that they were so woefully misinformed about the state of their subject area; first-years report that even at the start of this term their lecturers reassured them they could find an original idea.
The Yorker interviewed an English lecturer, who wishes to remain anonymous, about the extent of the problem:
“We’ve been kidding ourselves for years now, blinding our eyes to the all-too-real possibility that there is simply nothing new to say about the use of medieval euphemisms for ‘vagina’ in Chaucer.” She told our reporter. “I have no doubt that this is why the arts are losing their funding. We’re all basically going to have to become reviewers now – we can’t write about another person’s writing without repeating ourselves, so we’ll have to write about what we thought about what other people wrote about other writers. It’s a mess.”
Despite the apocalyptic mood pervading the department, there may be a glimmer of hope. In an attempt to help their ailing counterparts in the arts, Computer Science whizzes have been working on a programme which will allow students to compare an essay idea with all existing academic writing in existence. The hope is that there might remain one or two pockets of literary academia left unexplored, which have been too obscure to discover by human brain-power alone.
In response to this, our anonymous English lecturer was unimpressed: “The Computer Science department is just cashing in on our misfortune. What a load of ******s.”
I love this so much. Essay ideas = zilch.
Ahhh the familiar feeling of thinking that you've thought of something original, only to find someone else has thought of it, and proceeded to write an essay on it to a standard you could never hope to achieve.
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