Phrases I uttered in grad school
A) "The real romance in Patton is the one between Patton and Rommel."
B) "Judy Garland appeals to gay men because her persona emphasizes the constructedness of identity and gender."
C) "At Disneyland, you get Milan Kundera's concept of kitsch at the level of the hyperreal."
D) "It was a society devoted to maximizing the efficacy of the performative utterance."
E) "Personalised embodied narratives foreground the particularity of the everyday." Okay, I didn't say that one, and I'd like to think I never would have.
F) "Lolita is a great novel."
Sometimes I lie awake at night and wince . . .
By the way, all but B were spoken in an academic setting, and no one batted an eyelash at any of these pronouncements except one, which proved fairly controversial. Any guesses as to which one that was?
B) "Judy Garland appeals to gay men because her persona emphasizes the constructedness of identity and gender."
C) "At Disneyland, you get Milan Kundera's concept of kitsch at the level of the hyperreal."
D) "It was a society devoted to maximizing the efficacy of the performative utterance."
E) "Personalised embodied narratives foreground the particularity of the everyday." Okay, I didn't say that one, and I'd like to think I never would have.
F) "Lolita is a great novel."
Sometimes I lie awake at night and wince . . .
By the way, all but B were spoken in an academic setting, and no one batted an eyelash at any of these pronouncements except one, which proved fairly controversial. Any guesses as to which one that was?
posted by Kate Marie | 2:17 PM | Permalink
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5 comments
5 Comments:
F was controversial because Lolita encourages us empathize with a patriarchal, controlling man as he preys sexually upon a girl.
Nabokov's kind of a dead white male, too, isn't he?
Besides how can you call a novel "great" without appealing to some canon -- and we know where that leads.
You should have said, "The one really being seduced here is the reader, who is being manipulated to collaborate in her own sexual degradation."
Bingo!
Oh, man. Flashback to my first semester of graduate school: I'm in a Victorian literature seminar with around fifteen other students. Nearly all of them, even the guys, write theory-based papers about race, class, and gender in Middlemarch or Jane Eyre. I write an interdisciplinary paper on 19th-century medievalism. Everyone thinks I'm nuts.
At the time I assumed that I was insufficiently mature to appreciate the wonders of politicized literary theory. Time and hindsight have since led me to the opposite conclusion.
If my experience is at all typical, they only thought you were nuts for being courageous and reckless enough to write about what interested you. You were the *mature* one, as I'm sure you've realized. And I'll bet yours was the best paper of the bunch.
I think I wrote two sincere papers (well, one paper and one essay) during my truncated graduate school career. The rest was cynical, insincere garbage. Really, it sometimes makes me sick to my stomach to think of it. Oh, my God ... the paper I did on Jane Eyre and The Turn of the Screw! I threw in Foucault, the panopticon, the "male gaze." I wish I could apologize to Charlotte Bronte and Henry James.
And it's not that that kind of reading is incapable of being interesting or valuable. My utter insincerity made it worthless. [I'm not saying the sincere ones weren't sometimes garbage, either. What am I saying? Anyone's guess, at this point.]
In the final analysis, I was a sheep, and I have no one to blame but myself.
Last year, I dug out some of the worst papers I wrote as a college student and began distributing them to my own students. I find they're more receptive to editorial criticism (and less inclined to BS) when they see some of the arch, deceptive nonsense I attempted to put out into the world. I figure it's a slightly better form of public penance than wearing sackcloth and kneeling in the snow.
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