I was just looking for a little feedback on these rough thoughts on Levy I'm sketching out. I thought Doug might be interested, particularly, since Levy comes off as such a "great books" reactionary in this one section I quote, which contains all the code words that a conservative would use against academia ('party line' PC, Dead White Mean, "troika of race, class, and gender," etc.:
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/03/13/levys-confession/
"Nouvelle raunch feminists are not concocting this illogic all by themselves. Some of it they learned in school. A fervid interest in raunchy representations of sex and a particular brand of women's studies are both faddish in academia now, and the two are frequently presented side by side, as if they formed a seamless, comprehensible totality. I went to Wesleyan University at the height of the "politically correct" craze in the nineties. Wesleyan was the kind of school that had coed showers, on principle. There were no "freshmen," only "frosh." There were no required courses, but there was a required role-play as part of the frosh orientation in which we had to stand up and say "I'm a homosexual" and "I'm an Asian-American," so that we would understand what it felt like to be part of an oppressed group. It didn't make a lot of sense, but such was the way of PC.
I remember a meeting we once had, as members of the English major committee, with the department faculty: We were there to tell them about a survey we'd given out to English majors, the majority of whom said they wanted at least one classics course to be offered at our college. We all bought the party line that such a class should never be required because that would suggest that Dead White Men were more important than female and nonwhite writers. But we figured it couldn't do any harm for them to offer one canonical literature course for those of us who wanted to grasp the references in the contemporary Latin American poetry we were reading in every other class. It seemed like a pretty reasonable request to me. After I made my pitch for it, the woman who was head of the department at that time looked at me icily and said, "I would never teach at a school that offered a course like that."
It was a pretty weird time. It was not okay to have a class tracing the roots of Western literature, but it was okay to offer a class on porn, as a humanities professor name Hope Weissman did, in which students engaged in textual analysis of money shots and three-ways. In an environment in which everyone was talking about 'constructions' of gender and pulling apart their culturally conditioned assumptions about everything, it seemed natural to take apart our culturally conditioned assumptions about sex i.e., that it should be the manifestation of affection, or even attraction. And sex wasn't just something we read about in class, it was the most popular sport on campus. [ ]
The modish line of academic thinking was to do away with "works" of literature or art and focus instead on "texts," which wer always products of the social conditions in which they were produced. We were trained to look at the supposedly all-powerful troika of race, class, and gender and how they were dealt with in narrative and that narrative could be anywhere, in Madame Bovary or Debbie Does Dallas rather than to analyze artistic quality, which we were told was really just code for the ideals of the dominant class."
more at the blog. I'm interested in support for Levy's positions and criticism of my crits of her. They aren't worked out particularly well, but.
Also, if Doug's till reading: I can safely say that, while Levy wished she'd included material about the M/W complex, she doesn't really. That was just some retroactive explanation she had after she was criticized.
"Scream-of-consciousness prose, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org