When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I grew up in a literary home and majored in French, English, and sociology. They all have served me well over the years.
I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.
I was a semiotics major at Brown, and there's this idea that stories are better, books are better, and movies are better if they cocked you off your axis and you were completely disoriented and you'd really have to rethink everything. Nobody has that experience, actually.
I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic.
When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those.
All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.
I was a typical French student of the 1990s - I imagined that, after a short excursion, I would work the rest of my life at home.
As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.