I was not talking about literature being inherently a matter of regurgitating the prof's opinion, but we are talking about the context of Riley and Maggie Walsh and certainly there seemed to be a regimentation within her class. Not surprising - she ran the military special ops group Riley was in. I have had one teacher of English Literature in all my years at school who I would consider to have led an open, free-wheeling discussion and that was a worthwhile class to be in. But just one class in many years of school? BTW I have done some writing on my own, both of novel-length and music lyrics as well as business writing and have no difficulty with language or resentment of the arts - just despair at the way it is taught.
As far as art is concerned, what we call "still life', the French translate as "nature morte" or dead nature. In spite of the number of works of this type, it is still called "creative" in spite of the sameness of most of these works whereas if you are faced with the question of "how would you design the stabilization system for a 3-axis stabilized spacecraft", there are a multitude of answers and the one you choose depends on the priority you place on the various requirements.
In the Canadian Hermes spacecraft that I was associated with, we rejected analog control as too inaccurate, digital computation as too much electronics and settled on a digital differential analyser. We used offset thrusters so that we could limit cycle over a period of ten minutes from one extreme of pointing error to the other and the combination of offset thrusters and the pitch momentum wheel gave us a system that was unbelievably accurate and used the minimum amount of thruster fuel. The overall design was crated by a mathematician and the creativity involved was mind-blowing - nobody had ever done it this way before. The result was a spacecraft that weighed over 1500 pounds (808 pounds after its internal apogee motor burn) and remained stabilized for its 45-month life using only 35 pounds of hydrazine - less than a pound a month! I was in charge of making sure the electronic implementation was going to work. There are just so many more possibilities for creativity in engineering and science and even more than that in mathematics.
Having a foot in both camps, I can say that my ranking of creativity with mathematics first, science / engineering second and the arts last is what I can justify with facts. There is no comparable creativity in the arts because the average person has to understand it and at best understand avant garde concepts. The the performance of Buffy / Willow / Xander at the end of "The Puppet Show" was assumed by Snyder to be avant garde when it was actually lack of preparation because he didn't understand it. Another way of saying it is that truth is less limited than fiction because fiction has to make sense to the average person whereas quantum mechanics doesn't make sense to anyone - it just describes observable behaviour. And if one piece of writing has multiple interpretations, unless the writer intended some form of double entendre, he failed in his task of transferring the contents of his mind into his reader's mind.
I will be the first to agree that the arts could be somewhat creative and it certainly would necessitate better teaching than I have seen. But my experience seems to be quite common. Independent thought in the arts is not encouraged.
Your negative experience with literature teaching may be common, but that doesn't mean it is universal. It's certainly not mine. There's also a difference between the way something is taught and how a student approaches a subject him/herself. I'm taking a horrifically taught film module this year, but I enjoy writing the essays, and coming up with my own interpretations because I enjoy the subject matter. The student has to take things into their own hands as well.
Also, creative thought in the arts is not limited to the classroom. So just because you had some bad, less than creative experiences in your literature classes doesn't make Literature (in general) like that.
Ok, you may find engineering or whatever more creative (other people certainly won't share your view) but that doesn't make the arts therefore not creative by default.
Concerning your "nature morte" example, the paintings are all the same to
you. Others are likely to see more differences.
There are just so many more possibilities for creativity in engineering and science and even more than that in mathematics.
This is a completely over-generalised claim. How can you measure what has more possibilities for creativity, when creativity itself is a subjective concept? What is creative to one person may not be to another. You say you can justify this with facts, but it's not about 'facts'. There are no hard, scientific data analysis charts that you can read which determine that one thing is more creative than another.
And if one piece of writing has multiple interpretations, unless the writer intended some form of double entendre, he failed in his task of transferring the contents of his mind into his reader's mind.
Ok Literature 101 - have you heard of the idea of the Death of the Author? (an idea which is debatable by the way - open to
creative interpretation) It really doesn't matter what the author/artist intended, what matters is what the reader/viewer/recipient gets from the piece of work. This isn't a failure. Transferring exactly what is in the author's mind to paper is 1) impossible and 2) not the point of literature.
The fact that you have such a narrow minded view of literature and haven't even considered this possibility means you greatly underestimate the creative potential of literature from a critic's point of view.
