Tis the Season for Conference Wankery!

Totally OT, but Michael Dummett is dead. All hail Michael Dummett, probably the worst writer among the 20th century philosophical giants.

For those seeking less wankery and more information, there is this response to Fish:

http://tedunderwood.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/why-we-dont-actually-want-to-be-the-next-thing-in-literary-studies/

To the non-academic, the description of that stuff conforms to the view (not that I share it) that modern academia is nothing more than talk about work, preferably other people’s, as opposed to actual work of one’s own. Awfully meta, with it’s sessions on library organization and search. Yes, it’s important to know how things are organized but in these days of full-text search, how important is this interpretive or intercessionary function?

As someone who married into the humanities but whose own field worships at the alters of Science and Nature, I enjoy reading brief takedowns such as the ones you provide, but longer ones such as Mr. Fish’s and Yellowdog’s rarely get finished. Once the cream has been skimmed and the low hanging fruit picked (as Siva V. has done several times already), the argument seems kinda Oaklandy in a Steinian manner.

Actually, I like MLA. We’re not going to Seattle because getting there from the east coast is too hard and then TSA. But we’ll be in Boston next year, despite wankery (which won’t abate over the year).

Isn’t “Fish” a practical joke based on a David Lodge novel? The climactic scene is at the MLA, IIRC.

Still in academics, I avoid the national meeting when I can. The eye-rolls thing. Regional meetings and conferences (of my choice) — there are so many now! — and lots of money for visiting speakers make the national meeting unnecessary for most purposes (like catching up with friends). As does email. And more recently, cell phones (“long distance” phone calls were once, not so long ago, very expensive). Until recently, academic life didn’t know these rhythms. It interests me that people not that much younger than I take so much for granted — the world has changed so much, so quickly in just the last twenty-thirty years. Philip Swallow had no idea how far things would go. (Funny if Morris Zapp, Lodge’s Fish-like character, has become Swallow. Maybe inevitable, though. It probably happens to us all. Be warned.)
I’m kind of confused by this post and several others on CT I’d missed over the last week and have just been scanning (in the older sense). The humanities — moral philosophy and metaphysics, literary studies (including in foreign languages), history (including, e.g., the history of religions), books, with their type-sets and tangible pages (in contrast to Kindle and ipad texts): are these traditions so easily discarded? So readily over-ridden by econ and poli-sci and empirical sociology and digital texts? Is it really that simple?
Having spent too many hours last semester in boring meetings wasting time over Digital Humanities issues (if only, Tedra, they confined themselves to the important issues you mention), I’m not out of sympathy with Jeff’s NYT post, though reading it in isolation (I don’t read Stanley or other NYT blogs regularly), I don’t pretend to know whether I’d agree with Jeff or not on fundamentals. But I think it may be unfair to dismiss his post.

hermeneutics: it’s late and I’m suffering from SAD here in Seattle (and it’s still raining).

The phalanx of digital humanists has walked through the on-line Yellow Pages and cleverly put its finger on the same old shit. Film at 00001011. Or so I read the linked post as saying.

Of course, this post is the purest expression of academic wankery that you could imagine, of the “I’m too cool to play, so I’ll play by preening on about how I’m no longer playing” variety.

Either get back in or stay out. Trying to have it both ways is tiring, and of limited interest to anyone who isn’t personally involved in your own psychodrama.

Freddie, your comment is exemplary academic “I’m too special to listen to you” whining. It is of some interest to refugees from academia, though, so by all means, continue.

Isn’t “Fish” a practical joke based on a David Lodge novel? The climactic scene is at the MLA, IIRC.

Stanley Fish was indeed created in the image of Morris Zapp, with the aid of a time machine powered by Calvinistic temporal disjunction. (I saw him at the one MLA convention I attended, at the time of his political spats at UIC, and he was on typical form.)

The academic humanities are suffering attacks everywhere, and people seem to find literary criticism a particularly soft target. But I’m a bit surprised to see this site engaging in that kind of thing; Like Meredith above, I’ve noticed an anti-humanities turn in a few of the posts here in recent months, which I find deeply disconcerting. I’m sorry you apparently had a miserable experience in academia, Tedra; mine, though vexing in certain respects, has been worthwhile precisely because of the people, whom I’ve found on the whole to be passionate, diligent, and sensitive readers. Of all the people you might choose to mock, those of us who are trying to spend our lives teaching literature with very uncertain prospects ought to be pretty low on the list.

You can take the wanker out of academia; you can’t take the academia out of the wanker. The eye roll is a dead giveaway. We all do it.

Oh, JB, exactly how uncertain are your prospects?

Ya know, if Fish has no use for digital humanities, that’s fine — but why bother writing about it, in the New York Times, no less?

To the non-academic, the description of that stuff conforms to the view (not that I share it) that modern academia is nothing more than talk about work, preferably other people’s, as opposed to actual work of one’s own.

Yeah, cause taking the worst example of something and making it representative is so the way to go. No avenue of human activity could withstand THAT assumption.