Our University-Culture, Chapter 3: Our Postmodern/University Culture (Part 1)

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“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” — Nietzsche, Dawn (sect. 297)

I. University Art

Our culture is dominated by artists, philosophers, writers, and thinkers educated in our universities. Historically, this is highly unusual. In the Modern Era, Jane Austen was educated by her father and brothers and with her own reading; Goethe went to university, but studied jurisprudence; Charles Dickens’s education was scattered at best and barely adequate, meaning he had to primarily educate himself. None of this was uncommon. The great artists of the 18th and 19th century did not typically attend universities, and when they did, they didn’t study anything related to literature or the other arts. We see this pattern continued into the renaissance period between the Modern Era and our Postmodern Era we call Modernism. While William Faulkner did in fact attend the University of Mississippi, Ernest Hemingway became a reporter right out of high school and Proust received only a spotty education as a child due to illness. At the same time, James Joyce, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot were all university graduates. But none of them majored in anything resembling creative writing. However, if we take a look at our postmodern authors, the following all have degrees in…