Sort of. I remember Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory as the shorthand guide to all that theoretical hoo-ha we were supposed to insert into our English Lit papers. Eagleton's book was popular because it distilled Lacan, Foucault, et al down into basics. A clever and pressed for time grad student could grab Eagleton, flip through and pick a likely theoretical suspect, figure out how to work him or her into a thesis concerning Faulkner, and go directly to the theorist only to grab a couple of sound bites to lend authenticity to the essay. Wham, bam, here's your theory, ma'am, and thanks for the A on my "clever and insightful" work. Except the work was nothing more than distillate of a distillate, which is to say, pretty dang weak.
Now Eagleton's issued forth with a follow-up, After Theory, which I believe I may actually purchase and read, because according to this article, Eagleton has recognized that:
Students today, he asserts, are engaging neither with history nor with post-structuralism. "What is sexy instead is sex," he announces, in the first chapter, on "The Politics of Amnesia": "Quietly spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies." Cast adrift in the stormy currents of postmodernism, they prefer to focus their energy on "the history of pubic hair" or the evolution of Friends, a trend that Eagleton regards as "politically catastrophic".
I'm sure that Professor Eagleton and I probably don't share a lot of ideas politically, but he's right, at least about the catastrophic part. I'm more of the opinion that the catastrophe of studying pubic hair in a literary context occurs because such studies destroy literature as a legitimate course of study, not because they no longer further some political cause. Erin O'Connor recently opined on this very issue, stating that:
I do think that the academic English department is committing slow, unwitting suicide. I do think that it is only a matter of time before budget-conscious administrators realize that at many schools, particularly at elite ones, there is very little, if any, actual "English" being done in English departments, and that there is thus no clear rationale for preserving English departments as such. If the people who work in them can't agree that literature is their purview, and continue to craft themselves as incoherent mishmashes of off-topic hyperspecializations (sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, material culture studies, and so on), then they are asking to be merged and consolidated with other disciplines. Under the guise of a largely irresponsible and anti-intellectual "interdisciplinarity," a great many English departments are making forceful arguments for their own dissolution.
And ya know what? It's already starting.
Back when I was a college student (universities had yet to evolve) it was received wisdom that to benefit from a college education you needed an IQ of at least 115.
There was one young woman in the class where I heard this, a solid 'B' student, who immediately went out and got proof she had an IQ of 105; to this day, she remains my model for intellectual integrity.
But Joanie Boeckel Sullivan (may her tribe increase) aside, anyone with an eye towards the bell curve and a knowledge of how many people are going to college can't help but notice that there are apparently college students out there today with IQs of around 90.
Vietnam caused a lot of men who wouldn't otherwise have been interested in being professors to get PhDs in order to keep their student deferments; and exploding government funding of colleges in the late '60s gave them employment as the colleges expanded to suck in the money; and the colleges expanded by taking in students who hadn't the brainpower to keep up with the older curriculum.
Combine money for the asking, faculty whose first concern wasn't for their fields of study and a sufficiency of dumb students and you have majors in 'basketweaving'... which, incidentally, used to be a perjorative but is now, according to my wife who Knows All, an actual major at some schools.
Personally, I'm waiting for the first school to offer a major in prostitution; I can only imagine the fight over which department gets to teach it.
Posted by: ManFromPorlock at October 16, 2003 05:59 PMI think a major in basketweaving would be a definite improvement from some of the courses now offered. It might teach respect for skill and real work. And it would involve working with something other than words.
Posted by: David Foster at October 17, 2003 12:23 AMEagleton describes what sounds to me like materialists who've taken the 'death of god' literally.
What are we to do with our burgeoning population of non-blue collar, non-servile consumers, who must have some way of interacting with the money economy? These people refuse to serve but demand payment to support an addiction to consumer goods.
Posted by: robert at October 17, 2003 03:29 AMI believe there's a college in Australia that offers a degree in strip tease. I'm not sure if there's a prostitution major, however. Entertainment arts? Applied sex education?
Posted by: Joanne Jacobs at October 17, 2003 04:49 AMUnfortunately, Eagleton was one of the people who was spiking the punch bowl so he can't now complain that the revelers are dead drunk. It sounds like he's in the same quandry as Stanley Fish or, worse, Jacques Derrida.
Posted by: David at October 17, 2003 09:54 AMManFromPorlock: I predict there will be a major in prostitution in the near future, and it will be offered by one of the Seven Sisters colleges as an empowerment study. The program will fold after one semester when it is discovered that men want prostitutes who don't look chicks from the softball team. [rim shot, boos from audience]
Thank you - good night everybody! You've been a wonderful audience!
Posted by: ccwbass at October 17, 2003 10:40 AMHey, Big Arm Woman! I think this is the most appropriate thread for this quotation that I've been meaning to get to you. It's from "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence," by Geoff Dyer.
Dyer's book is about his attempt to write a biography of Lawrence, and the many ways he procrastinates. It has the potential to be twee and utterly self-absorbed, but I didn't find it that way at all, I loved every minute of it.
Anyway, the passage is this:
"Hearing that I was 'working on Lawrence,' an acquaintance lent me a book he thought I might find interesting: A Longman Critical Reader on Lawrence, edited by Peter Widdowson. I glanced at the contents page: old Eagleton was there, of course, together with some other state-of-the-fart theorists: Lydia Blanchard on 'Lawrence, Foucault, and the Language of Sexuality' (in the section on 'Gender, Sexuality, Feminism') . . . I could feel myself getting angry and then I flicked through the introductory essay on 'Radical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence' and became angrier still. How could it have happened? How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up *teaching* it, writing about it? . . .
. . . I burned it in self-defence. It was the book or me because writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everyting they touch."
Out of Sheer Rage, page 100-101.
Hmmm, I see a few writing infelicities in this passage now, but the pure enjoyment of the ideas is more than enough to carry me through!
If there is a better location for this quotation on your site, please move it.
--Nancy
Posted by: Nancy2784 at October 21, 2003 11:32 AM