Kiss Dartmouth’s Fern-Hating Fanny
The "reply all" contagion that has long plagued the lovesick and food-poisoned students at Princeton spreads now to Dartmouth, where midterms come with a lesson on the danger of online rants:
Subject: Kiss my Fanny
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:28:14 -0400 (EDT)
From: [redacted] @Dartmouth.EDU
To: "ENGL.041.01-FA07"WHAT the HELL were we supposed to get out of Fanny Fern??? Just the sentamentalist ideology? She's really like the weakest link out of the bunch and not just becuase that reading seemed out of place but also because it's one that I know the LEAST about. God bless him for trying to throw a woman in the mix but curse him for throwing that curve ball. Taking the 19th century woman from the kitchen to the classroom is FUCKING me all up. So again, WHAT the HELL were we supposed to get out of Fanny Fern??? Thank you for your consideration and goodluck with the studies.
More amazing than the fact that the writer expected peer "consideration" of a triple-question-marked, profanity-laced query is the fact that he apparently forgot that the professor's e-mail address tends to be included in online class lists. Professor Michael Chaney's "reflective" and metaphor-heavy response (Michael Jackon's "We are the World" comes to mind), after the jump.
Subject: Fanny
Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:14:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: Prof. Michael Chaney
To: "ENGL.041.01-FA07"About the last email, regarding what you are expected to get out of Fanny, I have prepared the following reflective remarks:
The payoff in reading this material, as I'm sure many of you passionately know, can never be encompassed in a college course nor converted neatly into a grade. The real wisdom of literature is delivered ever so slowly, through careful reading, and even then only after many repeated and dilligent encounters. Thus the "yield" of any of the texts on the reading list is, ironically, a message that you must deliver to the World rather than the other way around.
But never wary of life's little ironies and accidents, I humbly play the role of the World in our little drama of English 41. And although, in lectures, I am called upon to encompass for you what the world has already made of David Henry, Fanny, and Frederick Douglass, I am also awaiting your response to the world--what you make of them in relation to what has already been said; this is the kind of synthesis or application expected of you on papers and exams.Please also keep in mind that I would be a different kind of person were my intentions in the exam to trip you up rather than set you up to express your synthesis of any of the material.Although we were not able to spend as much time on Fern Leaves as I would have liked, I expect that you have read it, attended the lecture on it, and can now put its content into a larger nineteenth-century context (which, by the way, would include its difference from and similarity with other nineteenth-century texts).As a basis for understanding that which the canon exerts itself against, not to mention later writings by women like Larcom, Stein, and Hurston, the general value of Fanny Fern cannot be underestimated. As for its particular value, the world awaits your delivery.Until then,
MC
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October 29th, 2007 at 11:21 am
Refreshing to see Dartmouth blogged again, but you people can not refrain from having to bring either Princeton, Yale or Harvard into the story. Unless you start doing something different and pay some attention to the other ivies, I am going to declare an official boycott on IvyGate. Its getting OLD guys…your obsession with Harvard and Yale is really pathological….Get a fucking life
October 29th, 2007 at 11:25 am
Wow, guys, fix the formatting on this, remove the auto-link to Chaney’s email, and don’t repeat the entire email twice. And yeah, do what Brown’11 says.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
has a very vague hint of Salinger to it.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
i love the prof’s email. very well done. and a really cool take on the value of reading literature.
but people who bitch about their bad grades deserve none of our attention. everyone knows that no one does all the reading for a course. the goal is to figure out what and how much to read in order to get a full understanding of the texts. clearly this dartmouth student needs a bit more practice in this regard.
@Brown’11: IvyGate functions based on tips they recieve from kids at ivy league schools. for example, kids who were in this english class and could forward these emails. if the content of IG is too HYP-heavy, that just means that kids at the other ivies (like you) haven’t been doing their jobs. so next time you want to rant about how much IG is harvard-yale centric, why don’t you just send them a good tip on a Brown story instead and see where it gets ya.
October 29th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
props to the professor for not completely slapping the dude on the face for such an eloquently stated email. salinger indeed. it kills me.
October 30th, 2007 at 12:14 am
i would like to have a class with that professor.
January 16th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
I do.
He rocks.