A Life In School by Jane Tompkins (#14, Nonfiction)

Read this book and you will never want to go to grad school for English literature. Jane Tompkins paints a pretty grim picture of what it is like to study literature in grad school and then go on to teach it in the collegiate arena. It doesn't seem very fun. We get to hear all about how it beats her down, depresses her and makes her life a living hell--that is until she meets Stanley Fish. Fish, one of the foremost literary theorists of our time, changes the way she looks at the study of English lit and she does a 360 that allows her to follow her passion. She breaks her new criticism chains and starts looking at literature from a more cultural, political standpoint.

It is interesting to read about her experimental teaching phase, where she starts rebelling against the traditional classroom set-up of lecturer and students, and turns it into students as the lecturers, while the teacher sits back and listens. This role reversal was just one of her new teaching methods that she implemented while at Yale as a means by which she alleviated her own stress and anxiety about always being under the professor microscope.

I found her writing to be too introspective, too whiny. It really is a book where we learn all about Tompkin's perceived shortcomings and emotional ups and downs. There is just something off-putting about a perpetually negative narrator, especially when the book is a memoir and everything is true.