Which university actually consistently produces novelists? Think about it. D'Annunzio never went to university...

Which university actually consistently produces novelists? Think about it. D'Annunzio never went to university. Neither did Leopardi. Blake was nigh illiterate for years, and didn't even attend a full second-level schooling. Whitman was some random hillbilly. Lewis went to fucking ART SCHOOL.
Eliot was a slacker. Pound got kicked out of university. Yeats had reading problems, possible dyslexia, and never went to university. Cendrars got kicked out of school, if I remember correctly. Spenser was poor. There are also a plethora of novelists who didn't study literature or anything even related. Will the Oxbridge/Harvard (Ivy Jewbridge) meme ever end? (Oxford doesn't even teach innovative literature).

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No, unis do not produce artists of any kind. Very invested fans of philosophy and literature will become PhD students at best (don't even think about becoming a professor) but by that age (24-25 year old) people usually abandon their artistic velleities and unapologetically only read articles/books concerning their fields. University is good in the first years, when you are more opened about being challenged intellectually by new ideas. After that you're basically a highly qualified plumber fixing texts instead of tubes, with a very good knowledge of your material and virtually none of all the rest.

Artists operate outside of the academic bubble and are poor and unrecognized until their late 40s, if lucky, if not forever (but they rarely make it past their sixties in that case, so it's not a problem). The reason why this happens is that, if you want to live as an artist, everything else will be your "secondary" activity. You will live incognito, and trust me, it is very difficult to compete and do good at any job if your competitors are put 100% of their energy in being good and you are trying to do other things on the side. The world is full of people who are very serious about getting a career, money for a house, a family, etc., and each and every single one of them, even the stupid ones, will do better than someone seriously doing art on the side. This is not visible during your undergrads, when you still have the time to do everything together, but as soon as you are past your master's degree you'll see what I'm talking about. People can be very fierce about getting stuff, you can't half-ass your way to financial success, and art does not give you financial success in most cases.

why shouldn't I think of becoming a professor. I mean by now, teaching meta-plumbing is the only think I can think of doing, since meta-tubes don't exist in the real world.

You are the best of us all

If you don't go to Oxbridge or Ivy League then you will never get your foot in the door. Unfortunately for the most part Oxbridge massive are intellecutally and ideologically incestuous and consequently their thinking is totally inside the box and contributes to stagnation in the fields of academia and literature.

>The world is full of people who are very serious about getting a career
Art is a career, and is enormously dependent on the contacts and social connections you make at a good university. That's the whole point of university for any career - contacts and getting yourself into the right circles to help you advance in your chosen profession

Nobody goes to Oxford for the quality of their research

>Oxford doesn't even teach innovative literature
ox4rd's saving grace

where do you get this?

don't make stuff up

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Believe what you want to believe user. If you think any career in any field does not rely on contacts and social connections then best of luck. Considering your jpg, how do you think you get a publisher to look at your work?

That's just academia in general, at least in Oxford they have academic freedoms not given to other universities in the UK, especially when it comes to fields of research like terrorism studies, where lesser universities are banned from teaching certain things because its dangerous. Having taught in the UK system it is shockingly apparent that the education is a two-tiered system: one tier for the elite, which delivers a great, state-of-the-art level education, fit for leaders, and one for the masses, which delivers, frankly, shit. It is sufficient to produce obedient subjects, though, but not enough to actually give a solid base knowledge, or basic reasoning, critical thinking skills.

>Believe what you want to believe user
that's rich.

& by sending your book to a publishing house. if you imagine a thing like getting published relies on social connections you must fall into the 'people outside the literary world' category.

>by sending your book to a publishing house
Or you could get a good agent with good contacts and the ear of submissions editors

then they'll send yr book to a publishing house

Yes they will. And there's a world of difference between different submissions.
Let's do a thought experiment. You and I are equally talented. You submit your manuscript cold. I take the submissions editor out for dinner the day before I submit mine, share stories from when we dated at Oxford, buy some great wine, then casually mention the book I've been working on. In the morning our equally good manuscripts arrive in her in-tray. Which will she be more kindly disposed on?

That's not really the case, publishing is super incestous due to the agents relying on political criteria as "their kind of book", at least for the Big Five.
Baen's people were even somewhat bullied for publishing libertarians and new mil-SF.

Sanderson had a writing advice class some time ago and more or less adviced kids to quota in stronk heroines because only a bad book that won't get published wouldn't have them.
It's not exactly a secret that 90% of publisher agents are old women and political homosexuals either.

I agree on the importance of contacts, but it's more people in the editorial words than professor, and academia is often estranged from it. At good unis you don't make contact to have a career in art, unless you are in some design school. The publishing world, for instance, is pretty estranged from academia, and for good reasons - mostly the fact that academia produces stuff that is only accessible to other academicians, as it happens for novels written for literary critics.

Thank god for self-publishing.

v interesting experiment, really. but let's stay away from your hypotheticals. my friends working on a magazine for a university project, and he met my uncle, who's a publisher, at a guest dinner and after sending the first draft received the email enclosed.

he's also advised me literary agents are only useful in the case of someone like frederick forsyth, with requests for film, digest, serial and anthology rights flooding in the whole time.

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Editors don't come from oxford user

Most of the people you named aren’t novelists, or aren’t known for their novels

I'm 34, already sorted career wise. Need a random degree to step up.

Looking purely to improve my writing skills, is Eng. Lit. worthwhile? If not, what else should I be aiming for?

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This is my 9th year at university on my 5th degree. I started and IT/Communications degree in 2005 then switched to Business/Communications because I couldn't handle the programming. In 2011, after working in the mining industry for a bit I decided I wanted to become an author. I did a masters in Creative writing and wrote 3 novels as well as numerous short stories for competitions.

I never made it. After 2 years living with my parents writing day in and day out I realised I was missing something that every good writer needs, experience. So, I joined the military (as I was a military scifi writer mostly).

After my service I did another degree in Intelligence and spent a few years in the start-up industry.

I'm 31 now and returning to university to study Computer Science and I've recently been itching to add a Japanese double degree just for kicks.

I'm writing again. Working on another scifi novel and my writing is much better than it was all those years ago.

Narrative is not so much about writing. University teaches theory, history and the technicalities of writing, but without experience you don't actually have any material to put on a page.

Art is suffering and pain. I don't think I will produce anything of note or narrative depth until my 40s or 50s when I have really lived and suffered and lost.

I love university, but I don't think it makes great writers. You need to go to the school of life for that.

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So personal contacts and relationships are already helping him and yourself with advice and career guidance

My point is in lots of jobs you get a lot of 'my girlfriend's dad recommended me' or 'we were in the same college at Oxford' but in writing that's not the case at all, and to tell people it's 'enormously dependent' on such is a boldfaced lie.

So you are quibbling about the precise definition of 'enormously'? Writing is a career like any other, and it would be truly astonishing if unlike every single other field, personal and social contacts were not highly important

No, I'm arguing against it's use at all, or anything near it. Writing isn't a career like any other, most positions in the workplace are filled because someone told someone else to hire someone, a publisher has to show a profit, and should you meet one, you might perpare to be astonished.