Posted on 06/02/2004 9:46:33 PM PDT by kattracks
Recently, I wrote an article called “Summer Reading,” which was intended to motivate my readers to take some time to read classic literature over the summer. While mostly apolitical, it did close with the following line, which was deemed offensive by one of my readers: “(Go out and) pick up a great work of classic literature and enjoy the reading. You know, like the kind they used to assign in college when English professors taught English instead of homosexuality and feminism.”
The offended reader, from Ithaca, New York, called my above assertion “sexist, heterosexist, and gratuitous.” So, naturally, I apologized. No, I’m just kidding. Instead of apologizing, I decided to search the webpage of the nearest university English department to see what I could find. Naturally, I went looking first on Cornell.edu. Here is a summary of what I found out about the English faculty at Cornell University:
James Eli is an expert in gender and sexuality.
Frederic Bogel is an expert in critical (that means Marxist) theory.
Mary Pat Brady is an expert in U.S. Latino and Latina literatures and cultures, cultural studies, and American multi-ethnic literatures.
Laura Brown is an expert in feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, and cultural critique.
Cynthia Chase is an expert in women's literature.
Eric Cheyfitz is an expert in federal Indian law.
Barbara Correll is an expert in gender, cultural studies, lesbian, bisexual, and gay literary studies.
Elizabeth DeLoughrey is an expert in feminist theory and women's writing.
Laura Donaldson is an expert in American Indian literature and culture, American Indian women, gender, race and law.
Alice Fulton is an expert in critical (that means Marxist) writing, postmodernism, and feminist theory.
Andrew Galloway is an expert in the sociology of knowledge, and visions of women and women's writings.
Ellis Hanson is an expert in lesbian and gay studies, and psychoanalysis.
Molly Hite is an expert in feminist criticism and theory, and postmodernism.
Mary Jacobus is an expert in feminist literary criticism and theory, and women's writing.
Phyllis Janowitz is an expert in women and literature.
Biodun Jeyifo is an expert in African and Caribbean Anglophone literatures, comparative African and Afro-American critical thought, Marxist literary and cultural theory, and twentieth-century revolutionary social philosophy and literature.
Carol Kaske is an expert in Middle Ages and Renaissance, and cultural history of these periods (especially gender).
Douglas Mao (not to be confused with Chairman Mao) is an expert in gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies.
Kenneth McClane is an expert in African American literature.
Kate McCullough is an expert in women's literature, feminist literary criticism and theory, and lesbian/queer theory.
Dorothy Mermin is an expert in women's poetry.
Satya Mohanty is an expert in critical (that means Marxist) theory.
Timothy Murray is an expert in cultural studies as well as lesbian, bisexual, and gay literary studies.
Mash Raskolnikov is an expert in feminist and queer studies.
Shirley Samuels is an expert in feminist criticism.
Paul Sawyer is an expert in Marxian and feminist approaches and the ways questions of politics and ideology can be related to close local readings.
Hortense Spillers is an expert in the study of aspects of African American and American literature, feminist, Marxist, and more general theories of contemporary criticism.
Shelly Wong is an expert in Asian American, African American, and ethnic literatures as well as Asian Canadian literature and, finally, cultural studies.
William Jefferson Clinton recently gave the commencement address for the Cornell University graduating class of 2004. He is an expert on college interns with thong underwear.
Mike Adams (www.DrAdams.org) is a professor of Elderly Asian Lesbian Criminology. Just kidding. He is actually the author of “Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel.” Signed copies of his book can be ordered on his website.
©2004 Mike S. Adams
Already in the 1960s, French theorists were spinning ever stranger theories to keep the "quality lit crit biz" going, but that well is going dry as well, and people are beginning to ask what the point of some of the wilder theories was. Another answer is to look at second-rate works in terms of sociological categories: race, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, colonialism, etc. Now one can't expect this to go on forever. It's certainly not cutting edge today. Your kids aren't shocked or much impressed by it, and one can't imagine their kids taking much interest in it. So what happens next? What is the next wave? Will there even be one? And what becomes of today's radical feminists and queer theorists when their time is passed?
A lot of the problem lies in the university system. It probably works alright in the sciences. Big problems are divided up into smaller pieces and each scientist works at his own specific aspect of his field. But in the humanities it doesn't seem to work that way. Scientists add to some body of truth or test their hypotheses against reality. In the humanities one can do that for a decade or a generation, but then increased efforts yield ever less of real value. People get bored and frustrated and move on to "the next new thing." You can see it as a kind of "paradigm shift." In contrast to the sciences, though, when the "paradigm" changes, there's much less continuity, and there's no sense that one is getting anywhere. The older work appears to be just thrown away It could be, that however important art and literature and philosophy are, academic study in the humanities isn't as important or substantial or fundamental as scientific work is.
In fact, though, in reading on our own, we do make use of past achievements in literary criticism, and much more use than anyone will ever make of today's more narrowly restricted fields of work in literature departments. Just as old science lives on in technology, older achievements in the humanities can live on in our own understanding of the world, while what's done in the universities becomes ever more remote from everyday life.
datum.
I knew all this, of course. It wasn't this bad at Tulane in the early '90's, but the trend was evident.
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