On Wednesday, February 19, 2003, at 08:54 PM, Dennis Robert Redmond wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Feb 2003, Chuck0 wrote:
>
>> And why are so many smart left
>> academics allowed to publish such unintelligible bullshit?
>
> There isn't a single "academic field" which churns out Theory like a
> bread-factory producing loaves; there are all these sub-fields, a
> complex
> division of labor between teaching texts, reading texts, theory texts,
> disciplines, fields, etc., each of which needs its own theory and
> activism. My own field, Comparative Literature, is sort of the Great
> Red
> Spot of academe -- its this zone of radical coherence, moving amidst a
> perpetual Jovian storm of inter/cross-disciplinary fusions. But any
> Comp
> Lit-critter would tell you that we couldn't do what we do without the
> national, regional, local and international specialists.
i'm reminded of the way most medievalists appreciate and often find useful the work of german philologists and archival researchers publishing critical editions of, for example, necrologies, but would nevertheless not want to be one. ;-)
>
> My own gripe is that the field of lit-crit is structurally reactionary
> --
> the Dec MLA conference, I think, didn't have a single panel on
> videogame
> culture, and precious little on the mass media (someone correct me if
> I'm
> wrong).
you need to get to the sls conferences . . .
i organized a panel a few years ago on psychoanalysis and science fiction, that included a paper on virtual valerie/virtual valerie 2. no, seriously. there are some flakes, but also a lot of smart, creative people.
j