Discourses of mumbo-jumbo
Thursday May 22, 2008
I just got the Fall/Winter 2008 catalog from a major university press. "Oh good," thought I, "let's see what's coming out so I can plan some editorial features for the second half of the year." It was like reading a...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Maybe the choices of books you picked out says more about what interests YOU, than about what interests "scholars in leading universities". For you didn't pick out books on mathematics or philosophy or even history. You picked out books in what looks to be "cultural studies", which is a nonsense area. AND THEN you indict "scholars in leading universities" as being up to nonsense. That's bad logic.
Nothing about extracting sunlight from cucumbers? I'm disappointed.
ditto Sal Mineo - your favorite
sounds like a good read while we await our telos in Heaven, we are indeed "sojourners in a strange land""signifiers" and "Signified" seem to concide, since Christ is still going on Posad waiting to be born in our hearts, right?
Maybe the choices of books you picked out says more about what interests YOU, than about what interests "scholars in leading universities". For you didn't pick out books on mathematics or philosophy or even history. You picked out books in what looks to be "cultural studies", which is a nonsense area. AND THEN you indict "scholars in leading universities" as being up to nonsense. That's bad logic.
sal, try reading the link below, it should be just what you're looking for..
Rod, you'll also love it.
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/
oops, my wisecrack ought read Posada and for
Nick the Greek
don't despair: "Eclipsing Sunlight with Cucumbers" might yet be on the list -- its biblical -- Jonah and his Gourd Vine are cultural icons in art and literature!
Reminds me of what a colleague once said; The presence of a colon in a title gives ample warning about what you'll find inside.
Some of those titles sound kind of interesting.
I wouldn't spend my own money on them, but I'd check them out of a library.
oh my! Sorry the Big Guy Upstairs doesn't seem to like me imago-ing him with sarcasm!
And maybe the world really needs to hear more stories of weeping icons and rural pederasty.
Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai'i sounds pretty good. It's about how a group of mostly middle-aged Hawai'an men have formed something called the Hale Mua, the "men's house," as a response to the "feminization" of native Hawaiian men by colonization and images like the "hula girl." Traditional Hawaii was an intensely patriarchal society which saw itself almost entirely overthrown in under two generations. I'm pretty interested in traditional Hawaii, so this caught my eye.
Reminds me of the scene in C.S. Lewis's dystopian novel That Hideous Strength when the scientist-baddies get their come-uppance. A particularly arrogant scientist-academic, in the middle of a jargon-ridden "serious" speech to his audience at the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE), begins to uncontrollably babble nonsense words.
" . . .reading it made me wonder if scholars in leading universities ever consider whether or not their work actually influences the society of which they are a part. Does it even matter to them whether or not their work gets read and discussed beyond the narrow confines of the academy?"
In general, probably not. The only audience that really matters is the tenure committee.
For you didn't pick out books on mathematics or philosophy or even history. You picked out books in what looks to be "cultural studies", which is a nonsense area.
Actually, I gave you a good representation of what's in this catalogue. Which you haven't seen.
I'm not arguing that any of these books are unimportant. How could I, not having read them? I'm only remarking on how arcane most of these titles seem to me, and how disconnected from the kinds of concerns most people in this society seem to have. I don't think scholars are obliged to write best-sellers, mind you, but I do wonder to what extent they themselves think the pursuit of knowledge should be in service to the wider culture that supports their work.
Clare Krishan: "Jonah and his Gourd Vine are cultural icons in art and literature!"
Those familiar with the now iconic American fictioneer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), subject of a recent installment of American Masters on PBS, will recall the title of her first novel: Jonah's Gourd Vine*, ranked by many even higher than her far better-known signature work, Their Eyes Were Watching God.
*No relation to Jonah's *Grape* Vine, a *roman à clef* chronicling a dark Corner of the web, loosely figleafed as a gang-blog**
**{Daddy was a gang-blogger
His yolks were a bit runny
He just 'stached that smiley face
And he loved to feel your money - after "Bankrobber Dub", Black Market Clash}
and designed to sell remainders whose revelation that both Nazis and "liberals" enjoy free-range carrots shone a lamp unto the darkness of Republicans convinced it would never be Spring again. - Ed.
Ok, cool, Rod; I'm a scholar at a leading university in one of the areas I mentioned (philosophy) and I don't think any of the books you mentioned well-represent anything like what goes on in mainstream academia (is that Penn State University Press, or Stanford?). A lot of what goes on in mainstream philosophy is related to stuff that concerns you, and the general public. I wish, rather than dismissing scholars today, you'd dismiss the silly titles you found without conflating them with scholarly work generally. We need the support of the general public, and we only control our own work.
As I said, this was one catalog, from one university (a prestigious one). I get the Harvard Press catalog too, and it's more mainstream.
Looks like the Earls of Duke have followed the Tobacco Road to where the money is pretty consistently; smoke 'em if you got 'em, there's no cure for the Po-Mo Better Blues...
Lit-review junkies, have a look at John Gross in the TLS this week:
The Man of Letters vs the Academy
"The old literary qualities of the freelance individualist do survive in the modern university."
entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3979098.ece
The real scandals here are two-fold: first, that our tax dollars go to pay for this. Second, that the "scholars" who perpetrate this lunacy are allowed to run loose and unmedicated.
We didn't close the insane asylums, we just renamed them "universities".
State-subsidized mass insanity is such a wonderful thing.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
Why am I not naming the university press? It's Duke. As Scott figured out.
"Ok, cool, Rod; I'm a scholar at a leading university in one of the areas I mentioned (philosophy) and I don't think any of the books you mentioned well-represent anything like what goes on in mainstream academia"
Do you walk to work in a hermetically sealed tunnel? I too work in universities - albeit without tenure as I have thus far failed to "queer" even one "discourse" - so my boomer lords and masters get tenure and benefits and I get two grand a class. On the other hand, I actually teach students instead of stacking up sabbaticals and 1/1 loads "queering discourses" and "gendering differences."
The humanities departments of major universities do not deserve public support - not from Rod, not from anyone else. The mission of humanities departments at our major schools is endless, pointless, naval-gazing and self-indulgent "criticism." The contempt for the students is palpable. Contempt for Western Civilization earns tenure. These ivy-covered bastions of hatred and malcontent ought to be burned to the ground and the professors retrained in a federal "tenure to work" program. This is the only way I can think of to break the cycle of pathological dependency on handouts which has developed among the smug overclass.
Bitter much?
"Contempt for Western Civilization earns tenure."
All I can do is quote Gandhi, who, when asked by a wiseguy reporter what he thought of Western civilization, said, "I think it would be a very good idea."
And Maurice Samuel, in "The Gentleman and the Jew," who pointed out that, to the extent that Christianity and Christian civilization are not Jewish, they are pagan.
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