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| Hearsay: |
Appearing at Hay, Hanif Kureishi slams university creative writing classes.
Kureishi, himself a research associate on the creative writing course at Kingston University in London said, “One of the things you notice is that when you switch on the television and a student has gone mad with a machine gun on a campus in America, it’s always a writing student.
“The writing courses, particularly when they have the word ‘creative’ in them, are the new mental hospitals. But the people are very nice.”
Kureishi – whose most famous work includes The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Black Album – was speaking at the Guardian Hay festival about his latest novel, Something To Tell You.
He said that he was impelled to start teaching writing by the example of his children, who have tennis lessons, piano lessons and the like. He became convinced that teaching a skill was an honourable calling: “I felt if I knew something, I should pass it on.”
But he said of his students, “When I teach them, they are always better at the end – and more unhappy.”
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May 26th, 2008 at 10:04 am
You can’t be an observer of the human condition, without being depressed about it. You can’t be a good writer without being a keen observer of the human condition. Does being depressed make you a writer? or does being a writer make you depressed. i don’t know.
May 26th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Wow. Kureshi may or may not be right about writing, but he’s certainly wrong about school shootings. If they’ve taken place in a university setting, the shooter is almost always a science major. (Off the top of my head I remember a physics and engineering for sure.)
May 26th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I guess the Virginia Tech shooter was an English major. He’s the only one who has majored in the Humanities.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Yes, but in sound-bite logic, the last thing that happened is all things that happened.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:00 am
And you always find something in the last place you look.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:48 am
That is a pretty ridiculous article. I first encountered Kureishi’s work in Granta years ago and thought he was absolutely brilliant. The story was With Your Tongue Down My Throat, and really the title said it all. This meandering of ego is just silly histrionics. It sounds to me as if Kureishi gets from his students exactly what he puts in, and therefore exactly what he expects to get. Little. There are many different sorts of people taking creative writing courses, and indeed some may fit in the mental hospital category. Many students have no aspirations to be writers but just want to learn about writing and play with it. Some students are serious, and I see no reason why one shouldn’t treat these students particularly seriously. In other words, by the end of the course, a serious student ought to have learned (unless his ego hinders him) whether he is able and willing to rigorously focus on his craft. The rest is not really up to the teacher.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:46 am
What kind of convoluted logic would induce someone who is so obviously misanthropic to teach? A little more self-awareness, there, Kureishi.