Posts Tagged ‘Herland’
Monday Morning Links!
* Mary Karr Reminds the World That David Foster Wallace Abused and Stalked Her, and Nobody Cared.
* They Revealed Harassment Claims Against a Professor, and Were Disciplined.
* The Real Free-Speech Crisis Is Professors Being Disciplined for Liberal Views, a Scholar Finds.
* Millennials Are Way Poorer Than Boomers Ever Were.
* America’s teachers on strike: ‘We are done being the frog that is being boiled.’
* The think piece doesn’t so much diminish art as render it wholly incidental. The mere existence of a work—and the contemporary proliferation of work after work after work—is enough to justify the think piece. The fundamental problem with so much contemporary criticism is that the prospective critic is structurally encouraged to not care, to treat the value of one-or-another book/TV episode/movie as wholly irrelevant to the task of writing about it. Sontag wrote that desperate, interpretive searches for meaning constitute “the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius.” (One thinks of Henry James’s yearning lit-crit protagonist.) The think piece effectively inverts this formulation. Now it is more common to see genius (or perhaps “genius,” the work of people who, to nip a phrase from the controversial and cuttingly mean critic Armond White, “think they think”) pay compliments to mediocrity. The clarity of critical judgment alights on every rotten movie, grating pop singer, or paperback book written for awkward adolescents alive in the throes of their protean horniness, and dissolves, ultimately, into a sprawling field of meaninglessness. It’s not that, following Sontag, erotics has replaced bloodless hermeneutics. It’s that we’re now subject to soft, dopey forms of both. Enormously erudite and intelligent expositions about extremely stupid things have degraded both the standard for writing about serious things and the seriousness of those serious things themselves.
* Yeah, you better run: China bans Peppa Pig because she ‘promotes gangster attitudes.’
* University apologizes to Native American students detained on college tour.
* The man who cracked the lottery.
* Misreading the manufacturing statistics.
* A team of scientists undertakes an ambitious experiment which could change thinking about welfare.
* “In America, you can be too poor to die.”
* And if you follow me on Facebook, you know that I’ve been raving all weekend about Nintendo Labo. Believe the hype! It’s truly great. Like Calvin’s magic cardboard boxes came to life. It’d buy three more kits if they were available, and might eventually buy a second robot one so my kids can play the Vs mode….
What I’m Teaching This Semester
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I have two classes this semester I’m very excited about. First, I’m repeating my post-Civil-War American literature sophomore survey with some slight tweaks based on what seemed to work best last time; the one major change is the addition of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland to the syllabus.
Second, I’m debuting my NEH “Enduring Questions” course Cultural Preservation, which in addition to being a bit out of my usual wheelhouse offers a more flexible and student-research-focused pedagogy than I’ve typically offered (as well as copious field trips and guest speakers!). It should be a blast. I’ve needed to wait to finalize much of the course schedule pending student availability for our trips, but the first four weeks of the course are up at the course blog.
After some reflection I’ve decided to scrap my original plan to lead with the thought experiment in chapter two of Red Mars (though we’ll be returning to some of its ecological questions later in the course) in favor of some metacommentary on the development of the course itself. So for Wednesday we’ll be reading my own grant proposal for the course, as well as Senator Jeff Sessions’s recent denunciation of this very grant. We’ll also read Natalia Cecire’s recent defense of the humanities as a counterpoint/antidote to Sessions…
Written by gerrycanavan
January 13, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with cultural preservation, enduring questions, Herland, Jeff Sessions, Marquette, metacommentary, Natalia Cecire, NEH, the humanities, what it is I think I'm doing