For me, this goes against the spirit of studying writers' studies.
"It's like studying writers by studying their use of words, their grammar.
One student commented on the value of studying writers with whom there is no immediate sense of identification or shared belief.
For two decades, Bergler studied writers who suffered from "neurotic inhibitions of productivity," in an attempt to determine why they were unable to create — and what, if anything, could be done about it.
New discoveries pertaining to Shakespeare, the most exhaustively, obsessively studied writer in history, are rare.
Assuming credentials are equal, you may prefer to study with writers whom you admire instead of writers you are unfamiliar with, but you may run the risk of only imitating that writer's style and not finding your own.
In 2014, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, announced that British children should study British writers, and so Steinbeck must make way for Austen, Dickens and Bronte from next year.
As successive chapters treat Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, and Anne Carson, Rae makes it clear that those who study these writers' fiction ignore the poetry at some peril.
When case-study writers from Harvard Business School asked Barr to describe the inspiration behind Green Dot's model, he didn't cite other schools; he named the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And now, perhaps, it has ridden in on the coattails of the iconoclastic trend in the modern study of fairy tales, with Disney's prettified versions being execrated by feminists and queer-studies writers.
