{"id":3528,"date":"2009-10-02T11:04:49","date_gmt":"2009-10-02T15:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=3528"},"modified":"2009-10-02T11:04:49","modified_gmt":"2009-10-02T15:04:49","slug":"re-celebrity-scholars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/","title":{"rendered":"Re: “Celebrity Scholars”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sokal_article\"<\/p>\n

Responding to Russell Perkin<\/a>:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

We seem to be living in an age of sharply diminishing returns when it comes to literary scholarly relevance<\/em>, let alone “celebrity.”\u00a0 The “public scholar” is a curio now,\u00a0a quaint\u00a0holdover from an earlier age — when someone like Frye, for example, could boast\u00a0of talking over the heads of\u00a0his peers\u00a0to the general reading public, and quip that while he believed in\u00a0scholarly “rigor”, he was always concerned it might become “rigor mortis.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

The turning point\u00a0seems to have been\u00a0the mid to late 1990s when the\u00a0market in academic\u00a0incoherence\u00a0was reaching its surreal height, and notoriety took the place of celebrity.\u00a0\u00a0First there was the Sokal hoax<\/a>. Physicist Alan Sokal (above)\u00a0strung together some poststructuralist gibberish in a paper with the all too familiar sounding title,\u00a0“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, which was then duly\u00a0published in the journal Social Text.\u00a0 <\/em>In announcing the hoax, Sokal said of his fraudulent\u00a0paper that it was merely “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics” made by postmodernist academics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At about the same time, the journal Philosophy and Literature<\/a><\/em> was holding\u00a0its annual Bad Academic Writing <\/a>contest, whose eminent\u00a0winners included Judith Butler<\/a>, Homi Bhabha<\/a> and Frederic Jameson<\/a>.\u00a0 Here is editor Denis Dutton<\/a> explaining the purpose of the competition:<\/p>\n

The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself \u201cprofound\u201d or \u201cmoving\u201d not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is this year\u2019s winning sentence, by Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler, from an article in the journal Diacritics<\/em>:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What seems to underlie this kind of\u00a0phenomenon is a contempt for the non-specialist reading public, and that contempt has been returned.\u00a0 Whenever you hear the banshees at Fox News howling about an “America-hating liberal elite,” you\u00a0can be\u00a0pretty sure\u00a0the kind of people\u00a0they have in mind.\u00a0Universities are now mocked on the right as “islands of repression in a sea of liberty,” which of course is an ugly lie, but it’s a lie with\u00a0just enough\u00a0truth in it to gin up the anger\u00a0on all sides.<\/p>\n

In fact, it’s hard not to wonder\u00a0whether the current sharp\u00a0rise of demagoguery on the right is the result of the decline of the public scholar.\u00a0 Frye called the university the engine room of society.\u00a0 In what used to be\u00a0known as\u00a0the Humanities at least, the engine has been hacked at with crowbars for the last\u00a0thirty years\u00a0by self-declared iconoclasts and comfortably tenured revolutionists.\u00a0 It may be that the steadily waning\u00a0influence of this generation of scholars will have to collapse in on itself completely — the way the old Soviet Union did — before something better can take its place and a scholarship with a wide general audience can re-emerge.\u00a0 Until then, maybe the best we can hope for are quasi-academic polemicists, like Naomi Klein<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Responding to Russell Perkin: We seem to be living in an age of sharply diminishing returns when it comes to literary scholarly relevance, let alone “celebrity.”\u00a0 The “public scholar” is a curio now,\u00a0a quaint\u00a0holdover from an earlier age — when someone like Frye, for example, could boast\u00a0of talking over the heads of\u00a0his peers\u00a0to the general […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-criticism"],"yoast_head":"\nRe: "Celebrity Scholars" - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Re: "Celebrity Scholars" - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Responding to Russell Perkin: We seem to be living in an age of sharply diminishing returns when it comes to literary scholarly relevance, let alone “celebrity.”\u00a0 The “public scholar” is a curio now,\u00a0a quaint\u00a0holdover from an earlier age — when someone like Frye, for example, could boast\u00a0of talking over the heads of\u00a0his peers\u00a0to the general […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2009-10-02T15:04:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/10\/sokal_article.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"460\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"276\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Michael Happy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Michael Happy\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Michael Happy\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#\/schema\/person\/666be62a4e8014df67296baeeaf4db95\"},\"headline\":\"Re: “Celebrity Scholars”\",\"datePublished\":\"2009-10-02T15:04:49+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\"},\"wordCount\":706,\"commentCount\":5,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/10\/sokal_article.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Literary Criticism\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/10\/02\/re-celebrity-scholars\/\",\"name\":\"Re: \\\"Celebrity Scholars\\\" - 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