the New Sincerity

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Doug wrote:
>Well the folks I'm talking about are involved in union work on their
>own campuses, antisweatshop activism, anti-intervention movements -
>real gritty stuff, in other words. Eric Alterman, in a Wojtek-ish
>diatribe against postie politics, quoted Nelson Lichtenstein as
>saying that the strongest student support for the University of
>Virginia's Justice for Janitors campaign came from the theoryheads in
>English. When I was at the UVa English department 20 years ago, it
>was hard to tear folks away from their Dryden.

That's probably because we (lit crits/theoryheads) have one of the dimmest
prospects in the job market among all grad students (well, we may have a
better chance than those in classics).  While back in your days, Dryden
could have been a career, now it's a ticket to a lifetime of genteel
poverty.

all dressed up, but nowhere to go but to organize (while making minimum
payments on my credit card debts, that is),

Yoshie