Education these days is very fragmented and fulls of embarrassing gaps. Part of the excessive stimuli available in the electronic age, I guess.
A lot of people throw around terms from the currently popular postmodern curricula, but like the lead character in Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge they likely have ever actually read the original authors and not just summarizing texts. I doubt many who talk about narrative theory have read Eco, Lucan, Derrida, etc. Much less Bretch, Ionesco, etc. They read summaries about postmodernism, but that has to ride on a wider understanding of modernism and structuralism. Sometimes in discussions people go on in huge pretentious rants, and being a pretentious BS-filled faker myself, I reply with not-so-veiled allusions to Mann, Hesse, Eco, Kant, etc. which generally are completely missed, and that tells me there is no much use on continuing conversations with such individuals.
Hey, even Terrio, our esteemed Oscar-winner BvS/JL scripter, in a statement a while back showed he could not distinguish between different Greek gods unlike any kid who read Edith Hamilton.
I think it was Harlan Ellison who said that in the modern age, in terms of being well-read, we are all fakers.
