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Tuesday, January 04, 2005
POST TRAUMATIC TOXIC SHOCK
RECOVERED MEMORY DISTRESS SYNDROME … …is the diagnosis that UD (not a professional psychologist) would have to give many of the thousands of stragglers returning to their homes from this year’s catastrophic MLA convention in Philadelphia. Everyone seems to agree that the scope of this year’s disaster was greater than any that has gone before: “It was virtually unimaginable,” according to one participant, “in terms of any conceptual categories we have traditionally had at our disposal.” It wasn’t just about unintelligibility, static conformity, irrelevance, irrationality, and a permanently bad job market this time around; English professors, according to Robert Scholes, the head of the organization, have now lost all cultural authority, and are actively disrespected when they are not ignored. Why us, oh Lord? One explanation, also from Scholes, seems plausible to UD: “There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions." When the president of a disciplinary organization dedicated to public discourse about literature and language issues a statement urging that its members represent a discipline and use reasoned argument, you know things are bad. It’s like the head of the Pediatric Oncologists’ Association having to announce that from now on members of the association must work on curing cancer in children. |