2 Jan 2004 16:24
Re: can of ring-worms
Timothy Burke <tburke1 <at> swarthmore.edu>
2004-01-02 15:24:47 GMT
2004-01-02 15:24:47 GMT
> >Put simply -- and here's that promised can of worms -- while I >probably agree with Timothy in his assessment of the analysis found >in some (much? most?) of the ongoing LOTR thread, part of MY >dissatisfaction with those analyses is not that they represent a >fundamental problem with cultural studies: it's that they're not >really examples of cultural studies in the first place. > Back from travelling. I agree with Gil here to some degree, but not completely. As I noted in my first post, I don't think what we've seen in the LOTR discussion is typical of any of the work I personally would characterize as the core "canon" of cultural studies, the works that I think prototypically set out its various methodologies and disciplinary outlook. But I would say that there is an associated tendency that follows in the wake of the canon that resembles, at greater length and with some degree of greater scholarly sturm und drang, the sins I described in my initial post. It's a problem that I run into a lot, and of course, so does everyone else: what exactly represents or typifies a particular body of scholarly work? On some of the weblogs I participate in, we've recently been talking about the problem of "bad writing" in critical theory and literary criticism, and several participants have legitimately observed that there is a kind of trendy, superficial, and largely contentless sort of scholarly writing that is improperly being taken as a synecdoche for all literary criticism or critical theory. I think that argument is correct, but at the same time, I think it's being used by some to dismiss the critique of "bad writing" altogether, or to argue that the tendency is non-existent or(Continue reading)
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