Stanley Fish Chaps My Ass; Or, Is There A Course in This Course?
Stanley Fish first came to my attention as the professor of a course entitled "Is There A Text in This Class?" which was most remarkable for its stupidity. He has since come to represent everything silly about taking postmodern or deconstructionist thought to its logical conclusion. After running Duke University's English Dept. into the ground he departed and is now ensconced at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is teaching the following course: The University and the Public Sphere: Public Intellectuals and Their Social Influence.
Course description, anyone?
Course Organization
This course is organized around a "contested concept," a concept the definition and shape of which are in dispute. The phrase "public intellectual" is often encountered in conversation and in writings, but no one quite knows what the category includes, or who are and are not its members, or if there is a strong connection between the flourishing of public intellectuals and democracy, or if the age of the public intellectual is over, or if it ever began, or, if it did begin, whether or not it was and is a good thing. (Or if you can read this giant stupid sentence without committing suicide.) Was Socrates a public intellectual? Was Shakespeare? Moliere? Francis Bacon? Thomas Jefferson? James Madison? Jonathan Swift? Goethe? Byron? Oscar Wilde? Disraeli? Walt Whitman? Daniel Webster? Frederick Douglass? Carrie Nation? Woodrow Wilson? Lenin? Churchill? Gary Wills? George Will? Charlie Rose? Mohammed Ali? Robert Redford? Ralph Nader? Al Gore? Rachel Carson? Margaret Mead? Gloria Steinem? bell hooks? Regis Philbin? John Lennon? Bob Dylan? Sting? Bill Maher? Hilary Clinton? Stephen Ambrose? Homer Simpson? If some of these are and others are not, what are the criteria? If all of these are, is "public intellectual" a real category or just a label we apply to people we've heard of? Would you want your children to grow up to be public intellectuals? Would you hire one? To do what? Is public intellectual a career choice? Can you get a degree in it? Is there a market for it? Does the country need public intellectuals? For what? What good are they? Have they been of any use in the aftermath of September 11th? Are they important enough to serve as the focus of a course?
Could we have more questions? Could the list be longer, and perhaps lend an air of "studious inquiry" to a course that appears to have been pulled out of your ass because you just HAPPENED to write an article for Harper's on this same theme and you'd like to increase your profile as a Public Intellectual by requiring it as reading? More pertinent questions, to my mind are:
Why do you still have a job? And, when will universities realize that pointless sophistry isn't really furthering the cause of intellectual development?
Posted by Big Arm Woman at October 17, 2002 07:30 AM