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Sunday, April 22, 2007
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Humanities Professor: Morphology UD has blogged about the appearance of her friend Peter Galbraith in the Sunday New York Times Magazine feature which interviews someone and includes a photograph of the person standing up. Here's today's personality, the cultural theorist Terry Eagleton. [Click on the photo for a larger picture.]  Eagleton says some mildly naughty things ("I don't actually read other peoples' books. If I want to read a book, I write one myself."), some senseless things (In response to the interviewer noting that he doesn't write about actual books, Eagleton says, "...the literary critic has turned increasingly into a cultural critic because there are so many crises in our culture."), and some snobby things ("As I get older, I find my visits to the States get shorter because I can’t take the general culture very much."). But what's mainly of interest to UD about Eagleton is his photo, in which the morphology of one strain of humanities professor finds its fulfillment. UD has already written a post about the varieties of beardedness among male humanities professors; Eagleton's beardedness touches on no fewer than four of her categories (I, II, VII, and VIII). His facial expression conveys the attitude of baffled good will definitive of the type; and his scuzzy clothes [recall Peter's elegant suit, typical of the sort of thing people wear for this feature] hanging loosely about him proclaim his commitment to physical comfort, and his disdain for bourgeois dressing up. When she was in college, UD routinely fell in love with men who looked like Terry Eagleton. How could that have happened? she asked Mr. UD, as they gazed together at the photograph. "You were ... unusual," he said. |