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10 Comp Lit Fails

It's pronounced "Benjamin."

Last night Stephen Colbert said he couldn't wait for BuzzFeed to do a list of "10 Comp Lit Fails."

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These are those fails.

1. Trying to figure out what an author meant.

2. Having the experience of remembering something without telling the person sitting with you that it’s profoundly Proustian.

3. Phallogocentrism.

4. Believing that anything is outside the text.

5. Overemphasizing Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur in the founding of the discipline while overlooking the early influence of Russian formalists like Shklovsky.

6. Not already knowing German.

7. The Sokal Affair.

8. Pronouncing "Benjamin" "Benjamin."

9. Enjoying reading.

10. Thinking that a subjective “you” “wrote” any of the items in this list when in fact you merely served as a medium for the transmission and replication of power ideology.