[dennisw]

Selected Works: Norton Critical Edition of Robinson Crusoe (1975)

[Torie]

The only aspect of freakishness really that I can discern, is the hopelessly narrow specializations. My nephew is off and running for a doctorate in English in some field that is so esoteric, that I cannot even begin to describe it, but it is something about desconstructionist fantasy motifs. But then, that is how the Great Universities operate these days. There is a case to be made that that might not by wholly appropriate in the humanities, where by definition, a very broad based understanding needs be applied to the particular, in order to give some context and meaning (my nephew thought Singapore and the Malay Peninsula was near Korea; I'm not kidding). To a lessor extent, that is also true of the social sciences.