I am still on strike. But Samia recommends Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? She says:
“Has Feminism Changed Science?” by Dr. Londa Schiebinger is a wonderful book that kinda changed my life. It covers the birth and life of the Western scientific establishment with a focus on female participation and the role of gender in shaping knowledge…. Sorry, I have to plug that book every chance I get. If there is anything I’ve learned over the past few years, it is that SCIENCE IS GENDERED IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. It is advertised, portrayed and performed as a mostly male, extremely individualistic, ever-objective pursuit. I think this is why so many (not all!) male scientists have trouble seeing the inequities.
Meanwhile, I have two articles by William Deresiewicz on literature, literary theory, literature departments and how, according to him, we are killing ourselves. In one post-Graff article, he says in part:
[T]he profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers. This is also unprecedented. However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession’s internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake….
…This is a profession that is losing its will to live….
…The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.
In “On Literary Darwinism,” he says:
In literary studies in particular, the last several decades have witnessed the baleful reign of “Theory,” a mash-up of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense.
Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation–not exactly the highest of mental virtues–rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural “difference,” is dead set against the notion of human universals.
Theory has led literary studies into an intellectual and institutional cul-de-sac, and now that its own energies have been exhausted (the last major developments date to the early ’90s), it has left it there.
Everyone is invited to comment on any of this, and/or to suggest further books and articles on the states of our fields.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Well, it had to be said. Never in my lifetime has there been so much crappy sentimentalism in art, literature, and politics as there is today. The worse it gets, the more people run around affirming themselves and putting favored quotes, slogans and mottos on their fridges and blogs. Women are especially prone to this whistling in the dark.
On the other hand, theories that belong in philosophy departments have wormed their way into English departments where they have spoiled everyone’s taste in literature!
With Sontag, I am for tough mindedness, discriminating in favor of the best that has been thought and said and acknowledging things for what they are. Why does Keats’ poetry move me so much? Do I have to explain? Wordsworth said it in one word and an exclamation point: Imagination!
I don’t know when the soft-headedness started. This does not mean I side with grumpy professors who can’t get that novel about their interesting boyhoods published! It’s just that there is a tremendous amount of first rate stuff out there, and the theorizing about it is getting in the way of the pleasure of the text, producing great tedium in grad schools and among the professoriat.
Reaching back a bit: remember the fad for psychoanalyzing Hamlet? Scholars wasted years on that one! Why be searching for motives here? He is a very simple character, as all of Shakepeare’s characters are. Their situations are complicated. Lear is a perfect example of that, too. These are people with no self knowledge who simply act in elaborate plays. Instead of seeing what these plays are about we project ourselves into the characters, for are we not all noble creatures like them?
Well, this is turning into an essay. Best stop. BTW I loved that video. It captured the best days ever in Europe, the time between 1968 and Chernobyl. It was crowded, colorful, cozy, fun to live there. And we thought it would last forever.
As I said once a long time ago, the fight in academia is really about grants, jobs, and tenure. It’s too easy to get lost in the intellectual fads of the moment and forget that. And yes, the turn, the latest mode, is toward historicism and away from “theory.” I’d like to see people getting back to reading enjoying a broad selection of good literature in various languages, being true men and women of letters.
Yes. And there are people who are, although “the profession” doesn’t really let one. Although one of my former students, now a creative writing prof., seems to be allowed to develop that and to encourage it in hir students, so I tend to think D. gives at least *some* CW people short shrift (although I know what he is talking about).
Meanwhile I am in shock. Someone I was in high school with now has this blog:
http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/
and Clio Bluestocking is studying one of my ancestral homes:
http://cliobluestockingtales.blogspot.com/2009/06/douglasss-dad-or-more-questions-about.html
So those are some more articles of interest.
Hattie – just found your first comment. Yes, that video – from there era in which I most hung out in Europe, too.
Oddly it’s the same era in which that cozy sentimentalism started, though. I started college in 1974, a year after Pinochet took over in Chile and just a few months before our last plane left Saigon. The SF Chronicle in those days was full of propaganda on how people should get MBAs now and dress for success. Ronald Reagan was Governor … and the economic program for his presidency was being dreamed up.
In the lit biz, everyone had abandoned social consciousness and gone for deconstruction. I am convinced it is all interrelated because that kind of theory, when not well understood, is SOFT the way born again Christianity is. And I include postcolonial and other “political” theories in this.
Yeah. Oh, and I am off Facebook except for my relatives and face friends for now. Just a matter of cutting back on its all too addictive qualities, and also I am reading too much and it is starting to negatively affect my eyesight. Nothing personal!
I really loved that video. Well, you know how cozy that period was in Europe! I used to wake up in the middle of the night in the middle of Europe and think, we are all here, the cat’s indoors, it’s quiet, and we’re safe. Of course it could not last.
FB — no I don’t take it personally! I just beam stuff up there that is easier to beam there than here.
Europe — yes. I would threaten to travel around the US as I was there (I started doing it in the early 70s, mid teens) and my father would write these serious letters NO. A GREYHOUND BUS PASS IS NOT LIKE AN INTERRAIL PASS. LIVING IN EUROPE YOU FORGET WHAT IT IS LIKE HERE. 🙂
Yes. And my MIL was shocked that we let our daughter take a trip around Europe with a few of her school friends when she was 16! It was that safe. Of course it was not until years later that she confessed that they had gone to Morocco and she had driven them around, because she was the only one with a drivers’ license! Ouch!
For some reason I didn’t get a driver’s license as soon as I turned 16, although I could drive. That meant that I ended up at 16 and 17 having to drive drunken European teenagers around because although unlicensed I was at least sober. I am so glad we were never stopped by police. I did this in ES and I think I could have gotten away with it there, but I did it more in DK and I really don’t know, I think it could have been serious trouble.
And — hitchhiked around Morocco at 19 and 20. This I think was dangerous, too, or could have been, but it was OK. I don’t think driving would have been as dangerous, there was hardly any traffic and roads were not too bad.
It was hilarious. Started out hitchhiking in Barcelona at dusk, for some reason, holding a sign saying MALAGA. Got picked up by teenagers in a car they’d stolen from their parents because they were mad, and they were going to their aunt and uncle’s in Seville. We said, all the way to Seville, that’s great! And hopped on, got to Seville hours later, middle of the night, in pouring rain. Woke up to December sunshine — it had been cold in Barcelona but Seville was like Santa Barbara. Gorgeous day. On to Malaga by bus or train, I forget, ferry to Melilla eight hours eating all this amazingly high quality produce and cheese we had bought for nothing in the public market in Malaga.
Landed at Melilla, walked and talked our way across the border with guards looking at our youth with some suspicion … got a ride to where we were going from some Dutch guys in a Land Rover, who were continuing on to Timbuktu.
I’m jealous.