But the endless recycyling of "what everybody knows" based on cursory reading of this sort is enough to drive one mad. It's taken me years to figure out that this is the norm rather than an aberration. The sort of reading that should be preliminary to deep engagement has become, instead, all that happens. Many scholars spend their whole careers publishing within the journals edited and reviewed by those within their particular professional networks/coteries, with the result that superficial acquaintance is rewarded with reciprocal praise.
Consequently, good scholarship gets buried in huge piles of dreck. So, yes, citing titles in place of argument is nothing more than the logical fallacy of appeal to authority.
OTOH, when someone says here that he doesn't know anything about the earlier scholarship that lies behind GGS, solicits titles, then responds to the titles provided with a snark, one may just smell a hint of troll.
----- Original Message ---- From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, May 10, 2011 12:34:59 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] vaca reading
On 5/10/2011 12:05 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> It's the Internet. No one wants to read a book anymore. Everyone wants a one-
>to three-sentence talking point.
There's nothing new about that. The age-old definition of a grad student is someone who can argue about a book he or she hasn't read. And it's not just grad students. If academic scholars only knew what they read in actual books (as opposed to reviews, summaries, historiographical essays, etc.), they would know a lot less.
I've always had a strong instinctive feeling that when someone responds to an argument by citing some book that supposedly proves the argument wrong, they have a discursive obligation to summarize the book. Otherwise it's the intellectual equivalent of having a girlfriend in Canada.
SA
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