Thursday, 21 December 2006

A Žižek Limerick

There once lived a man named Žižek,
Whose prospects were middling to dreck.
Then he got real turned on
Watching Trek, Wrath of Kahn,
His next ten books will be about Shrek.

Dec 21, 2006 3:55:25 PM | Academia, Literary Theory, Philosophy

24 Comments

Luther Blissett

But Karl, Zizek *is*, after all, a notorious sweater. Sure, I'm going all biographical, but isn't the true radical a conservative? (And isn't that just the sort of bullshit Zizek peddles?)

Posted by: Luther Blissett | Friday, 22 December 2006 at 09:06 PM

Scott Eric Kaufman

And isn't that just the sort of bullshit Zizek peddles...

...says the guy who convinced me to re-read The Sublime Object of Ideology last year.

Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Friday, 22 December 2006 at 09:09 PM

ben wolfson

Scott, I don't think your limerick would be improved, really, if you took "ten" out of the last line. Forcing the emphasis on "to" and off of "dreck" in "to dreck" is, to me, jarring and unwelcome and bad yucky (that's a technical term). It seems like you just need a feminine rhyme there. (cf.) Similar thoughts apply to the last line, with or without "ten". It's just a disaster, an unmitigated disaster. I'm sorry to have been the one to tell you.

Posted by: ben wolfson | Friday, 22 December 2006 at 11:32 PM

Karl Steel

But Karl, Zizek *is*, after all, a notorious sweater.

News to me! Then, Luther, your version is perfect.

Posted by: Karl Steel | Saturday, 23 December 2006 at 08:41 AM

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How to Open an Academic Essay, Part VIII: Ekphrasis Outside the second-floor bedroom of a small suburban mansion, dark clouds conspire in thunder. Rivers will swell, cattle drown, claps one. Gaudy Christmas sweaters will be drenched, another crashes. Unaware of the cumulonimbus cabal overhead, Scott slips into an overlarge black leather chair and prepares to study. The welt of its exaggerated box cushion wrinkles under his weight, revealing the richer shade of black the chair had been before the morning sun (which would have crawled the through east-facing window by now, were it not obscured by the chattering thunderheads) bleached its treated hide. So Scott reads, his left heel tapping the chair's tapered maple leg, his right elbow relaxing on its thick scrolled arm. His head lolls, resting briefly on the descending crest of its thick, upholstered back. In his left hand, he holds a copy of Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, open to a chapter entitled "Manifest Domesticity." It begins with a description of a white pioneer family in a small clearing surrounded by a dense, towering forest. The mother stands at the center of the picture, with her husband at her side holding his rifle, and her children at her feet, staring at a freshly killed deer. An open cooking fire, a crude log cabin, and a few stalks of corn complete the scene. (23) Kaplan's approach to academic writing appeals to Scott, who smiles at how cleverly she employed ekphrasis to set the scene of her argument. The critic of novels should be familiar enough—be it intuitively or theoretically—with the techniques of the novelist to use them as Kaplan has here. Why not draw your readers in, he asks himself, with the one thing you can be certain appeals to them? As if in answer, a vision of himself writing the first paragraph of this post appears before him. He reads his overblown prose and is disheartened by its forced archness, the way it wishes to be taken seriously but reeks of preemptive, defensive irony—tidy bulwarks against the possibility of suck—and remembers the old chestnut: Those who can do, do. Those who can't, write dissertations about those who can. Previous Installments: Part I: The Dawn of Man Part II, part I: The State of the Field Part II, part II: Killing All Fathers Part III: The Historical Anecdote Part IV: The Self-Aggrandizing Personal Anecdote Part V: The Meta-Theoretical Apparatus Part VI: The Balinese Cockfight Part VII: The Modernist Newspaper Clipping
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