Why I didn’t get a Magna at Harvard
Typically, I broke all the rules. Didn’t cite what other critics said, because they had no understanding, and I was going deeper than anyone else had gone. No footnotes. No plagiarism either. CLGS. What I learned from being an English major at Harvard. My two best 20th Century writers were Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wrote in my senior thesis about both of them, their two best books. I considered them absolutely equal in talent, beautiful, born brilliant. I had detected a sex difference worth writing about. Not about gender hierarchy. About the relation between sex and time as a dimension. Women are all about now, this moment. Men are about the arc of time, the span of life. I loved both books lavishly, but I came down on the side of, uh, no one. Just the revelation that men and women are different . My two graders were women. Not professors. PhD candidates. They kicked me apart for having no footnotes, no other authority beyond myself to leg...