Am I a Literary Idiot?

Perhaps.

It's apparent here and there in my writing class that I'm not on my third year of an English degree. Everyone is always quoting authors and the odd literary term I've never heard in my life.

It was never more evident than during my presentation last week when I asked the class if they thought a particular section of the reading was an example of "stream of consciousness". The teacher called me out on it, saying "You just need to read more." At which point a few people in the class snickered. I thought it was a legitimate question. Why not explore if a passage is or isn't stream of consiousness--unless it is oh so blatantly obvious to everyone else (and I don't think it was). I thought that's what education was for.

My only consolation is for what I lack in literary knowledge, I make up for in life experience. One of the students in the class had to look up the ten most popular drinks on Wikipedia just so he could reference people drinking in a bar "properly". Add to that, his character is a taxi-driver, but the student has never ridden in a taxi--he had to ask us what it was like to ride in a cab so he could capture it "accurately". But I'm the ignorant one.

Another student made a reference to a character smoking "the green". At the end of the discussion, someone asked, "What's 'smoking the green'?" Seriously.

Unless all that really means is I've smoked pot and gotten drunk regularly enough to write about it "accurately".

Which still makes me a literary idiot.

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