>Brian Siano wrote:
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>Sounds like literary theory to me. Frightens students, keeps'em compliant, and directs their attention to literary malfeasances and the condemnation of writers rather than the elites.
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>Is there something wrong with literary theory? I have found that it empowers the young people I mentor. They are not frightened at all. It makes them aware of the racial/sexual subtexts to works that are promulgated as "classics." It also empowers them to speak in their own voice through rap, hip-hop and other media.
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Empowering? Frankly, literary theory strikes me as one of the most
_crippling_ things ever devised. I've rarely seen anyone with a
background in literary theory acquire power, or even demonstrate an
ability to deliver power to those who need it most. Instead, those who
excel at literary theory seem to succeed only in academia, and maybe the
media once in a while. Those who develop skills in science, math,
medicine, law, or engineering really _are_ empowered.
Look at it as a matter of social control. In any large population, you're going to have people who are both marginally more intelligent than most, and who may develop a resentment for existing power structures. What do we do with such meddlesome people? We can't train them to do anything that might actually _affect_ the world. But, we can't simply deny them the chance to cultivate their brains in some way-- they'll see right through that.
So, we develop a curriculum which appeals to their sense of themselves as Smart People, but which fails to give them any training that might make them powerful or dangerous.We encourage them to cultivate a critical stance, but only about matters which are trivial and ephemeral-- stuff they can study without too much effort, without a lot of fact-checking or memorization, and without any applications to the Real World which might undermine their theories. We don't teach them about, say, how the law works, or how a scientific study is conducted, or how chemicals interact-- well, they can learn these if they _want_ to, which means they might become useful. But for those who want to wallow in symbols, well, they hang themselves with their own affected indulgences.
It's a bit like Jesuitical training, except that, unlike the Church, we _don't listen_ to these people. They can generate as much theory and discussion and discourse as they like-- in fact, it might become a tidy little market to generate some economic activity. But taking their verbiage into account would be like using astrology to determine industrial policy. Chatter about "code-words" and "discourse" and "difference strategies?" One might as well hire Piet Mondrian as a police sketch-artist.
The nice thing about this curriculum is that it actually _does_ train these people to be useful. To generate literary theory, they must learn the rudiments of language, like spelling, grammar, alphabetization, proofreading, and the like. Thus, when they graduate, they will be able to support themselves with low-level clerical jobs. This will be of immense benefit to existing systems, as they always need people to perform these tasks.
Those who follow this particular path will content themselves with the ego-boosting thought that they "see through" lies and mythologies. They may be saddened with the understanding that they cannot _change_ these things.