Concerning the Fine Line Between Literary Criticism and Rank Paranoia

It's not so fine.  Bad readings often resemble paranoid ravings because the critic draws specious connections between irrelevant topics.  Ninety-two percent of Pynchon criticism never escapes the paranoid orbit of his novels for a reason.  When you inform someone his analogy borders on criminal infelicity—e.g. the presence of shoes in the novels of Jane Austen and Kathy Acker represents an irrational fear of hormiga brava and thus constitutes an implicit indictment of European imperialism—the ideal response would be a frank acknowledgment by this person that the intensity of his research may have skewed his perspective. 

"I have read too closely," he should admit.  "I sound like a belligerent wino."

Under no circumstances should he declare his professional credentials authorize the paranoid ravings of a belligerent wino.  Which brings us to the case of Priya Venkatesan.  Those who seek background or a serious discussion of Venkatesan should consult Margaret Soltan and Timothy Burke.  I simply want to register my disgust with her pedagogical and interpretive skills.  From her interview with The Dartmouth Review:

TDR: There is one specific incident where I heard from one of the girls in your class who was pretty outspoken, and one day she hadn’t spoken for a while and you said, “Could we have a round of applause for this girl, she hasn’t spoken in ten minutes?”

PV: She was probably the most abrasive, the most offensive, the most disruptive student. She ruined that class. She ruined it. She ruined it. That class actually had a lot of potential, there were some really bright kids there, but every time she would do a number of things that were very inappropriate.  [...]  Then what happened was, I was lecturing on morals and ethics and she just gave me this horrible look, and I was pretty disturbed. I just said what is going on here? The problem with [girl x] is that she can’t take criticism. She can’t take the fact that there is something wrong with her work. Now, some people are like that, a lot of people are like that, unable to take criticism, but the fact of the matter is that I have the PhD in literature, I make the assessment if someone has talent for philosophy, literary theory, and literary criticism. A student might say, well, the hell with you I’m still going to become a literary critic, I had to do that, there were people who criticized me while I was a student, you’re not a good writer or whatever, but I said well I’m still going to go ahead with my goals, but I never made any personal attacks on them or made life difficult for them or was rude to them. I just did the socially acceptable way of dealing with criticism, and [girl x] is the kind of student who does not know the socially acceptable way of dealing with criticism. She thinks the way to go about doing it is to go to my superior or to try to undermine my ability to teach the class. One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen [Chairman of Dartmouth's Writing Program] was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No.  No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.

TDR: Yes, okay, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.

PV: I’m kind of making this leap because this is the kind of subversiveness that was going on in that environment. That [girl x] would ask how many t’s are in Gattaca and that Tom Cormen would respond, “two T’s” as if I had no grasp on tenure track.  But with [girl x], something’s going on with her. I’m not a doctor, but she’s not all there.

First, encouraging the class to applaud a student's silence is appalling.  That the students later applauded when one of their number challenged her claim about the benefit of Enlightenment science for women is not, as she would have it, a sign of unconscious racism, but an indication that they'd been paying attention.  She created a classroom in which the silencing of certain opinions demanded applause, and only complained when her silencing brought down the house. 

Second, the interpretation of Cormen's direct response to the [girl x]'s direct question is a masterpiece of irrationality.  For it to work as a reading one must believe the student knew "TT" refers to "tenure-track," otherwise Venkatesan had no cause to list it among the further annoyances of "[girl x]."  The odds that a freshman knows what the abbreviation "TT" means are long.  The odds that [girl x] intended to provoke Cormen's response are longer.  The odds that Cormen responded to [girl x] with a wink and a nudge are longer still. 

The only way Venkatesan's reading might obtain would be if "Gattaca" were spelled "Gataca" and Cormen had just presided over Venkatesan's review.    Then I might buy it. 

That said, I'll close with a bit of advice for The Dartmouth Review.  Publishing unedited interview transcripts to make her sound more unsettled?  Not cool.  Everyone sounds like a lunatic when their speech is transcribed directly.  Just ask Errol Morris.   

Comments

[John Emerson]

You people are all crazy.

[Ahistoricality]

Publishing unedited interview transcripts to make her sound more unsettled?

Yeah, and my habit is usually to correct misspellings and simple errors when quoting people, especially when quoting people I don't like.

But they can't win. Either they look like thugs taking cheap shots (which they probably were, though she did grant the interview) or she could accuse them of editing her words to her disadvantage.

You can't beat a conspiracist by taking the high road: they'll always find a way to make what you do an attack. Quote them? Unfair. Edit them? Biased.

I do like the equation of hypersensitive literary criticism with raving absurdity: I'm sorry to say that it crystallizes thoughts I've had about some fairly tendentious readings for years.

[flowbear]

I read a message board post by a Dartmouth review staffer which claimed that she insisted the interview be published with as little editing as possible -- I guess, so her hard, gemlike truths could shine through the haze of media corruption. There are so many baffling moments in there (Lyotard "invented the term" postmodernism?). But I think you've actually stumbled upon a great idea for Morris's next project.

"My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not."

Errol Morris turns his gaze from offshore detention and torture centers to the faculty lounges of humanities centers in his quest to steadily troll through the seedy, unseemly underbelly of American society.

And the emails she sent out to let the students know they were going to be named in the lawsuit? Holy cow.

[Rich Puchalsky]

On the one hand, they're obviously taking shots at someone they want to get rid of (Venkatesan). On the other hand, she's obviously a really bad person, based on the quoted remarks about her student. In an extension of the legal principle of "bad cases make bad law", I predict that everyone is going to have something to say about this case, each person finding support for whatever general societal hobbyhorse they rode in on, and none of it is going to mean anything.

[John Emerson]

In my case, it just shows that you people are all crazy. Bad law, maybe, but fun.

[Richard Scott Nokes]

Uh, dumb question here: Is "TT" as an abbreviation for "tenure track" purely an invention of her imagination, or is that the slang used elsewhere? This is the first time I've ever heard that abbreviation, though "T&P" for "tenure and promotion" I've heard many times.

[Karl Steel]

I find this whole thing pretty distressing. Everyone I know has worked with/encountered crazy people in all manner of professional environments, including professional environments where the entrance bar is set, as the cliché goes, pretty high. This situation, however, will be used to argue for the unique silliness of the humanities...and then I note, as one of the comments at Soltan did, that Priya Venkatesan got her BA at Dartmouth in 1990. That's precisely the environment that might make a non-white person utterly nuts.

Not to excuse her, however: it's not *that* hard to do a working definition of postmodernism. And the incoherence of the reasoning above, even had it been edited, is/would be appalling: because of her degree, SHE's uniquely capable to block the gate to higher education in the humanities, whereas when she was a lowly undergrad, she bucked the system, man.

Pathetic, and I mean that in the sense of pathos.

[Karl Steel]

Nokes, I first encountered the abbreviation in the medieval academy newsletter.

[JPool]

I've seen TT as an abreviation mostly online, and occasionally in print. I've never heard it used out loud. But, as others have pointed out, that entire exchange, as Venkatesan described it, is bizarre. While it's clear that she had no idea how to manage classroom interactions and that this student was, to some extent, fucking with her, the behavior of her faculty observer (supposedly preempting her answer to the student's question, not following up with her afterwards) also raises questions either about the accuracy of her account or the way that department was run.

What bothers me most about this whole thing is that on the one hand you have someone who, by all appearances, seems to be breaking down in a very public way and on the other the swirl of uses and projections that that public break down (or at the least, very poor behavior) can be put to. I don't know what part if any of the train wreck between Venkatesan and her students was based on her race or gender, but not a small ammount of racism and sexism has come out in response to her case. Right away the commenters over at UD started psychologizing Venkatesan as a bitter old spinster and I've read others use her allegation of racism to indicate the hysterical nature of all such allegations within the academy. All of which is to say that Rich is right about societal hobbyhorses, whether they are psot-modernism, the academy or racism/sexism. But the horses chosen and the way they get ridden and responded to is also revealing and disturbing.

[Jon H]

"I've seen TT as an abreviation mostly online, and occasionally in print. I've never heard it used out loud. "

Any day now she'll be adding Audi to her suit because their car offends her.

[Adam Roberts]

I'm with Emerson on this one. My mind, she is boggled.