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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Elliptical, shimmering. More trashing of a new book (for UD’s discussion of an earlier trashing, go here) whose clueless posturing has dismayed serious leftists the world over. A few excerpts from the review reveal trends in the humanities which are -- thanks to the damage books like this one continue to do -- on their way out: The remarkable fact about humanities professors isn't how slavishly left-wing their politics are but how smart the smart ones are, and how dumb the dumb ones are. The reviewer now cites a typical sentence from the book under review: "By and large, however, the state now stands in such naked, brutal relation to all but the most pleasure-domed of our eminent bourgeois that the chief executive is now less representative than, in a multi-mediated, fictional sense, representational: the imagined or invented persona of a no less simulacral people whose condition[s] of existence are thereby occluded." A glutton for his own and his reader’s punishment, the reviewer hits us up with more: [The author] believes that the consensus leftism of the '90s set itself up too explicitly against identity politics and thus wrote off "the way blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others have transformed utterly the very category and meaning of 'the poor' or 'the left' on behalf of whom they write." To this sentence—with its inverted commas ("the poor," "the left," the graphic equivalent of up-speak), vacuous intensifiers ("utterly," "very"), and tongue-tied syntax ("on behalf of whom they write," instead of "on whose behalf they write")—one cannot be kind….Juvenile sneer words (Jefferson is the country's "ur-cracker") share space with stale lit-crit jargon ("subtended"), and all attempts at wit are downright puzzling. "Nixon's Deep Throat told reporters to follow the money; Clinton's deep throats say follow the money shot." Come again? Imagine tons of this juvenility tossed out in real time and you understand why Camille Paglia describes the atmosphere of the MLA convention as “snide groupthink.” |