Tuesday, 05 July 2005

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Blogger Bloggers & Academic Niceties [cross-posted over yonder.] As most of the Valve’s contributors are holed up in the places they hole up when deadlines press (West Hollywood), I thought it’d be a good time to discuss procrastination. Academic writing’s Pretty Hard, Dammit; procrastination’s so easy I can do it while I write the very words you’re reading. I’ve two points to this post, and I may even get around to them both, so here goes: First, I’ve noticed that the majority of Blogger bloggers blog anonymously. (If you browse the rolls over at, say, Bitch Ph.D. you’ll find an almost one-to-one correspondence between platform, Blogger, and anonymity.) Why would thoughtful and intelligent bloggers wish to remain anonymous? I could understand if the point of your blog were to document the daily stupidities of the undergraduate population at the university of your employ; but if you’re discussing academic matters in a civil, appropriately academic tone, I don’t see the point of anonymity. Am I a naive future-litigant and/or professional adjunct? Should I consider, as I jested earlier today, stuffing the cat back in the bag? (Lest anyone think I’m the least bit literal, I assure you I am not.) If I had to guess, one reason for the culture of anonymity is that it provides the freedom to discuss non-academic or strictly professional matters more frankly. (E.g. You wouldn’t solicit advice on whether to accept an offer from another institution or discuss your personal, medical, mental &c. issues if you blog under your actual name.) But I don’t trust what I hazard. On principle. Sound principle. I welcome your input. Second, I mentioned academic civility earlier, which is something I’ve earmarked for a future post--or possibly series, as I adore series--but want to mention, briefly, now: Wallace Martin’s “Literary Critics and Their Discontents: A Response to Geoffrey Hartman"--not to be confused with John Searle’s contribution to Theory’s Empire, “Literary Theory and Its Discontents,” although both essays partake of a phenonemon I’ve discussed before--opens with a thumpingly generous account of the debates about the new “style” of argument in literary studies (circa 1977) favored by J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man and the rest of the “Yale group.” “The brilliance and variety of the criticism produced by the Yale group not only deserves to be recognized,” Martin argues, “it demands to be challenged, for if it is merely accepted without radically changing the kind of criticism produced in this country, the acceptance has been too easily accomplished and their critique of traditional critical assumptions has been evaded” (398). Missing from this statement, as Appiah argues in “Battle of the Bien-Pensant” (from Theory’s Empire), is the “outlandish rhetorical inflation, [the] storming-of-the-Bastille bombast brought to bear on theoretical niceties” produced by the contemporary “intertwining of academic and social agendas” (446). These pleasantries can be pushed too far, as happens in Murray Krieger’s evaluation of Derrida in “Poetics Reconstructed: The Presence vs. the Absence of the Word": It is probably a mistake to press Derrida’s brilliantly chilling analysis of...

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