How to Title an Academic Essay: Everything and Its Discontents

Reading through the recently arrived copy of Theory's Empire, I stumble across John Searle's essay on "Literary Theory and Its Discontents."  "My oh my!" I said to myself, "What ever does this strange title mean!"  I understood the first term.  Everyone knows what "literary theory" is and can define it, in its totality, in a sentence or two.  But "its discontents" had me baffled.  I'd never heard or read this particular infelicity before, so I thought I'd Google Scholar it and see what turned up. 

(One-fourth of a second later...)

"MY OH SHEEP-FUCKING MY!" I said. 

Quietly. 

"The pastor told me all about modern society and its malcontents, but I didn't realize that we lived in a world of 6,090 discontents."  But nothing and no one, it appears, is content with much of anything these days.  Not globalization, postmodernity, sexuality, virtuality, assimilation, identity, cloning, technophilia, popular education, oligotrophication, philosophy of science, stabilization, Italy, narrative, aging, the mind, hysteria, standardization, the modern university, separation, culture, postcolonialism, paternalism, feminism, femininity, privatization, centralization, symmetry, modernization, ethnocracy, the good life, residential disinvestment, liberalism, treatment, economic growth, creativity, innovation, psychotherapy, economic nationalism, psychosocial changes, collaboration, the new historicism, electoral reform, work, family law, feminist discourse, diversity, whiteness, content, representation, realism, democratization, rationality, tourism, cultural integration, Islamic feminism, the intelligent body, the idea of community, Anglo-America, alcohol education, peace, curriculum, new urbanism, "new urbanism," expansion, biotechnology, development, "non-racialism," chartalism, multilateralism, savagism, progress, compressed modernity, secularism, ecofeminism, New Labour, geography, investigation, the Australian legend, bioprospecting, difference, public memory, cultural studies, the good life, medical authority, wish fulfilment, French civilization, physicalism, etc., etc., etc.

Comments

[David]

I myself am often discontent with Italy. I'm especially upset because ever since they switched over to the Euro, we've had to stop stocking the household bathrooms with ten-thousand-lira notes, which, even after the currency-exchange fellers took their cut of 'em, were still far cheaper than toilet paper. Plus they had all these funny pictures on them, and I am told-- frighteningly-- that the Soviets actually /regarded the lira as hard currency/. Which says a lot about the rouble, but I digress.

And, uh, this is all from a dimly-remembered childhood trip to Italy. We use TP here. Honest.

[Stephen]

Don't forget "Peptic Ulcer and Its Discontents." Now that's something to be discontent about.

[The Only Ray Davis]

If you could dream up a title that started "Queering the" and ended "and Its Discontents", man... you'd have it all....

[ben wolfson]

Queering the Discontents Considered Harmful.

[Anon.]

I believe the reference is to Sigmund Freud's _Civilization and Its Discontents_, an extremely popular and influential psychoanalytic work published late in Freud's career. As an academic who, it seems, works on 20th century literature, your ignorance shames both you and your profession.

[Some Guy Named John Bruce Who Doesn't Understand Irony]

Yes, I agree with you anon. Acephalous needs to bone up on his pop-quiz level liberal arts scholarship. Good God, what is he teaching our children?!?! That Dickens wrote Crime and Punishment? That the Sun revolves around the Earth? Shame on you, Acephalous, shame, shame, SHAME!!!

[A. Cephalous]

Who's this Sigmund Freud? I've never heard of him.

[Miriam]

I propose "Disco(n)tents." Postmodern parentheses + 70s entertainment. Retro chic, and all that.

[A. Cephalous]

Since the commenting alternatives have fallen to 1) defending the absurd proposition that I've never heard of Freud or 2) proposing progressively more absurd variations of "and its discontents," I'm opting to stick with #2. Building on Miriam's suggestions, I'd throw my support to "Queering The Last Days of Disco(n)te(na)nts," a bruising analysis of Whit Stillman's later works, in which the same-sex housing arrangements are queered to reveal that there really is something sexy about Scrooge McDuck.

[Alex Leibowitz]

Maybe Searle meant that literary theory has no content, only dis-content.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

No, Alex, with feeling, no...