Having devoted a good deal of my studies to the classics: Latin, Greek, English Renaissance, I must say that I think very highly of it as a field of study because without it, you simply cannot understand the Western Mind. You need to know this tradition inside out to understand how our notions of objective truth, beauty, value, hierarchy, tradition, art, science, etc., were created and shaped. This is not to say that the study of gender, race, etc. is not important, and it is not to say that those western notions are absolute and eternal in any way.
I do share Levy's nausea with academic self promotion and pomo text reading for its crass ignorance, for its vacuous verbiage, for its self-importance, for its stupidity, for its arrogance, for its betrayal of clarity and of rigor, and therefore for its betrayal of the working class.
Nuff said,
Joanna
info at pulpculture.org wrote:
> :)
>
> 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
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>