wait! I thought I was the observer of that phenom and original coiner of that definition of gradstud! Every time I say it, I get hoots and hollers as if no one had ever heard it before and they are highly amused. All I know is I learning that lesson the first day of grad school. (Ever since I read a book review by Terry Eagleton, too, I have decided that no book review is _ever_ written for the purposes of learning about the book. Rather, the most widely <del>read</del> and popular book reviews are those that tell you a whole shitload about the _author_ of the book under consideration. To actually write a review about the book is a sign of failure, a real sign that said book review author has nothing of importance to say!
Anyway, the day I started learning this lesson, we had meet and greets with various faculty. At the time, I had no clue what a dog and pony show it was, with each one an on-going participant in intradepartmental wars of which would win out: the fat old dead white theory guys or the slim young rootin tootin (class)-race-ethnicity-gender ([c]reg) gals. Whatever they were saying, the audience was the other profs, not us. Meanwhile, one of the the [c]reg gals was meandering on about Thomas Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. She said, I still remember her words to this day, "The problem with Thomas Kuhn is he doesn't have a theory of how science changes."
*blink* *blink*
Being a moron who didn't go to a "normal" school to learn all the rules of deference and demeanor (I had tutors and mentors, no one was called prof) where the prof was the font of wisdom spewing abolute knowledge at the front of the classroom, I said, "Buh buh buh buh but that's precisely *what* the book is about. It's in the title, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
So, dumbass that I was, I started arguing with her about the book because, unlike everyone in the room, I had read the book, the whole thing without a lecture from a prof about it and without a "guide" or textbook giving me an overview of what Kuhn supposedly said. Arguing about a book after reading said book was exactly how I was evaluated in my coursework. I was expected to come to class and argue with the tutor. Think: Educating Rita only about philosophy, political theory, etc. From then on, I heard tell about countless books about which it became rather apparent that the person holding forth on said book hadn't actually read it. One of my last exposures to this was on a team taught course I'd won a fellowship to construct and teach. We had a committee to select readings for a section of the course. Selected chapter in hand, we were to read it and return to debate it and its usefulness, etc. to the course. I can't remember the details, but the chair of the committee was droning on about his objections to the article when I realized, this turkey hadn't read it. I said something to another woman on the committee, the wife of my mentor and dissertation chair. She nodded and said, "Yeah, I know. He hadn't read a word of it."
Since then, what's become patently clear from watching internet exchanges, is that what I was often observing was the practice of pronouncing a book worthless based on what everyone else is saying -- all based on the broader political wars that define social science and humanities disciplines.
you'd see this countless times in feminist bloglandia and, as dwayne's observed, it would send me to the fucking book to actually read it since the debates always turned into debates about what people had said _about_ the book, regardless as to whether the book made that argument.
the irritation makes me a horrible postmodernist doesn't it? I mean, why should _I_ of all people be worried about slip sliding along the signifying chain. There is no foundation, no archimedean point, right.
well, no actually. the foundations are contingent, not non-existent. not that you, SA, care about that rantage in the last two paragraphs, but i was on a roll!