This introduction is some wild shit. Not for the sexuality talk, just for all the ridiculous cryptic references, signalling to other academics and nonsense jargon. Talk about a walled garden of utter self-perpetuating bullshit. Like what could any of this ever add back to the world?
Whenever I see stuff like this I realize these kinds of academics live in a completely alternate fantasy reality from the rest of the world.
I dont think someone who’s not of that community should shit on this. It feels like punching down.
Also. I understood 70% of that blurb and it sounds interesting.
Criticizing a niche for speaking in the language of the niche is odd. You wouldn’t criticize a sport writer for making a bunch of sportsing references that only others sportsers understand.
This is kinda tucker-carlsonish take, where you find the worst exemplar of something and argue, suggest, imply that it’s representative of the thing, especially a thing as broad as “academia.” The challenge with reality, especially social reality, is trying to understand what is the state of things and why, not just that there is a distribution in the state of things with some outliers that you can point and laugh at.
Did you ever have to read Contemporary Literary Criticism in college? It’s the same argle-bargle nonsense, although admittedly this does take it to a new level.
I criticize flowery self-serious Frank Deford/Ray Ratto-style sportswriting all the time. Similarly, I have always thought universities were completely lost up their own butts on stuff like this.
This is published by Duke University Press. What am I punching down at? The academia-publishing complex?
What specifically did you find interesting about it? Help me understand.
I studied philosophy. We did not take literary criticism or the sort of pseudo-philosophy they teach in English departments seriously. We looked down on it, but not as something reflective of “academia”.
Fine. Change my post to “checking in on the nonsense wing of academia”. Attacking everything that happens at universities wasn’t really my overall thesis. I’m just generally fascinated by any group that gets so out of touch with the real world.
I’ve been reading a lot of travel writing lately to try to get ideas for my book and try to learn how to write better. It seems like a thing now where you have to sprinkle in endless quotes and references - to signal to other travel writers that you’re in the know. I call it travel writing for travel writers. Blech.
That’s why I like Bill Bryson’s memoirs so much. He just tells stories. He doesn’t constantly navel-gaze about the state of modern travel.
My advisor in grad school was some kind of dean and had to be on tenure committees for all sorts of professors, including humanities. For certain disciplines “impenetrable” and “cryptic” were complementary adjectives when describing a candidate’s body of work. It drove him as a hard science guy nuts, he was like this person’s colleagues are all “no one can understand this person’s work, he’s a genius, we have to give him tenure.”
I am going through this right now, sitting on a committee that reviews tenure and promotion cases for every department in the business school. Even within the school, it’s incredibly difficult to make assessments across different disciplines. I can’t even imagine trying to do this across colleges. Love to imagine myself evaluating whether some performing arts professor should get tenure.
Kanye West on a one man mission to inject some moral ambiguity into the Nazis. I’m sorry my brother in Christ, that’s an uphill battle, and you don’t have to fight them all.
