Monday, 11 September 2006

The Very Best of Acephalous 2005

Best of acephalous 2005
YES, I'M HUMORING YOU

 

NARCISSISM UNLEASHED

appaumy

bebaste

loppard

placula

hymnicide

neoconocon

 

PEDANTIC, BUT EFFECTIVE

I.

GENERALLY

  1. The Prelude
  2. These Walls are Paper-Thin 
  3. Lindsay Waters Count 
  4. Contemporary Fiction & The Novel of Ideas 
  5. The Random Example Who is that Guy? 
  6. Book-Browsing & Bird Shit I Can't Believe I'm Telling You This 
  7. Mistaken Assumptions 
  8. With Nary a Whisper Blogging & Creature Comforts


II.

THEORETICALLY

III.

POPULARLY

IV.

DISSERTATIONALLY

V.

SERIALLY

THE STONING OF ADAM ROBERTS 

Part I

Part II

Part III

THEORY'S EMPIRE

 Deaf Culture

It's the Erudition, Dumb Ass

Fact Checking Fukuyama

LITERARY INTEREST

 Part I

Part II

Part III

 

YELLING FIRE IN CROWDED THEATERS (BECAUSE WHY NOT?)

  1. On Terrible Neologisms & Stylistic Inconsistency
  2. Rich on Wolfe
  3. Stupid, Cretinous Cancer Boy
  • PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE MOVIE
  1. Psychoanalysis as Idee Fixe
  2. How much more Lacan before Someone Resorts to Violence?
  3. Take Pill, Lose Memory, Gain Bliss
  4. The Iatrogenic Follies
  5. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious?  A Terrible Idea
  6. The Adaptive Unconscious?  Not a Terrible Idea
  7. Psychoanalysis is Dead!  Long Live—Wait, Nevermind
  8. The Power of Psychoanalytic Theory
  • THE PASSION OF DE LILLO
  1. DeLillo, Pillow. Pillow, DeLillo
  2. Sermon on the Mound
  • GENERAL RELEASE
  1. On Being Cowed by an Identitarian Critique
  2. Fighting Fire with—The Aisles! They're Both on Fire!
  3. Non-Eclectic Eclecticism
  4. Spake Heech or Honest Mistake?
  5. So Now You Care About Literature
  6. Aggressively Masturbatory Fiction
  7. Another Maginot Line?

"WRITING" THE DISSERTATION

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

 VERY IMPORTANT THING TO KEEP IN MIND: POSTS ON THE VISUAL RHETORIC OF FILMS AND COMICS HAVE THEIR OWN SPECIAL PLACE AND ARE THEREFORE NOT INCLUDED IN THIS LIST. YOU MAY FIND THEM HERE:

Sep 11, 2006 7:29:04 PM | Academia, Books, Commonplace, Dissertation, Evolution, Film, From the Archives, Literary Theory, Literature, Philosophy, Redefined, Television, Weblogs

4 Comments

Rich Puchalsky

Ah, memories. There's a lot of good stuff in this list, actually.

If I'm ever not quite as busy as I am now, I'm planning on doing a piece on On. Adam Roberts'_On_, that is.

Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 11 September 2006 at 08:58 PM

Dustin

Great stuff. However, in the "Yes, I'm Humoring You" section, all of the links from the Derrida comic on actually connect to the "woe unto ye beetles" Darwin entry.

Posted by: Dustin | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 12:44 PM

Dustin

Actually, it looks like a number of the links don't actually go to the correct post. It's not just my computer being screwy, no?

Posted by: Dustin | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 12:47 PM

Scott Eric Kaufmann

That was peculiar. I copied the HTML from the sidebar, so there was no reason it should've obsessed with particular links ... but no matter, as I've corrected all the links. They now all head in the direction I pointed. Thanks for alerting me to the foolish trust I put in Ctrl-V.

Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufmann | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 01:09 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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Some of the People, Some of the Time The new issue of Bookforum features James Shapiro's excellent review of Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars and Kenneth Gross's Shylock Is Shakespeare. As I noted last month, I've come to Shakespeare through the criticism. Instead of having my love of The Bard desanguinated by years of graduate study, I've acquired a taste for the man whose works inspired Dead Poets Society to inspire generations to hazard a thwack at the GRE Subject Exam in Literature in English.[1] Not only that, I've been inspired by the very works which earn Rosenbaum's ire: Had Rosenbaum finished up at Yale and landed an academic job (at a time when it was still possible to find one), he would probably have been one of those colleagues soured by the success of New Historicism, cultural materialism, and deconstruction. By the 1980s, Jonathan Dollimore's Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries had replaced Cleanth Brooks's reading of Macbeth on syllabi, feminists had shown how much earlier Shakespeare scholarship had ignored, and Irving Ribner's providential approach to the history plays had given way to Stephen Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V" and other brilliant readings. Initially, I thought "other brilliant readings" Shapiro's attempt to distance his position on the Dollimore/Greenblatt junta from Rosenbaum's. Two paragraphs later, I had to reconsider: Rosenbaum blames "Theory" for this turn of events, and his book is in part an attempt to persuade us that, in the end, Theory lost and Shakespeareans are beginning to cast off its shackles and once again celebrate beauty, pleasure, and ambiguity. This is wishful thinking. Theory didn't lose; its victory was so complete that we no longer need Theory with a big T anymore because we all do theory, though most of us do it without giving it much thought. I don't exactly disagree with Shapiro so much as question how complete that victory actually is; that is to say, I wonder whether the distinction drawn here between the New Critics and proponents of theory ever existed outside overheated rhetoric. But I digress. I want to focus on that "though most of us do it without giving it much thought," which strikes a similar note to the earlier "other brilliant readings." Are Dollimore and Greenblatt like "most of us" or do they actually produce "brilliant readings"? Do they do so because of or despite their theoretical sophistication?[2] That Shapiro continues by praising Rosenbaum's account of Shakespeare's recent editorial history doesn't help much; after all, sussing out the authentic Shakespeare is more paleographical than bleeding edge. He wants to find the middleground between materialism (cultural and paleographical) and close-reading, like the work destined to follow Linne Mooney's "Chaucer's Scribe"—discussed informally here, formally here—in which historicism wins a "victory" as complete as theory's. Still, he insists there's a place for idiosyncratic works like Gross' Shylock Is Shakespeare: Argument and speculation can only get you so far in pursuit of a character's mystery. So he...

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