Erin O’Connor at Critical Timber continues to expand on her discussion of conformity in the humanities. There are new posts here and here.

This is a large, rich subject, and one that has been under discussion for quite a long time, for instance in the pages of the late lamented Lingua Franca. William Kerrigan has an excellent essay on his enchantment and then disenchantment with Derrida and ‘theory’ called ‘The Falls of Academe’ in Wild Orchids and Trotsky. David Lehman discusses the displacement of literature by literary ‘theory’ in Signs of the Times. Helena Echlin describes the misery of being a literature graduate student at Yale in this essay.

But my professors look at me as if I am the village idiot. It tires me out listening to long sentences that sound like English but lack all meaning. And resistance isn’t easy. Where there is noparaphrasable meaning, dissent is impossible, because there is no threshold for attack. It is like trying to disagree with a poem by Mallarmé. (Without the poetry.)

Without the poetry indeed.

In general, students and faculty at Yale do not explicitly espouse theory, or particular theorists. But high theory, whatever its merits or demerits, has validated the use of jargon. People who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages. The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism…

It sounds very like an email O’Connor received last year:

Hipper-than-thou graduate colleagues literally smirked when I voiced my thoughts in class, then snubbed me in the hallway; professors dismissed my papers as naive and romantic. In a private meeting, one professor questioned me about my “evident resistance” to critical theory, which she described as a “problem.” Chiding me to “rise above the undergraduate level,” she encouraged me to adopt more “rigorous” critical approaches. When I asked her to elaborate, she reeled off a dozen theorists–Jameson, Spivak, Said, etc.–whose “sophisticated” analyses should “inform” my thought.

Oy veh – can’t you just hear them. Naive and romantic, indeed! But ‘critical theorists’ themselves are never naive, oh hell no, they’re the only sophisticated people on the planet, they are. Yes and offering up the same old dreary list of red-hot ‘theorists’ is all that’s required for ‘informed’ thought. Because Jameson hung the moon, and Spivak invented the wheel, and no one thought about power until Foucault came along. That’s one of the rich ironies of the whole thing, of course: the way a discipline that prides itself on being cutting-edge and hip and non-naive is in fact so remarkably sheep-like and suggestible and line-toeing. Read Mark Crispin Miller’s account of attending a lecture by Homi Bhabha. The acolytes he saw talking to his friend after the lecture, who were so overcome with admiration and yet so unable to articulate why and of what…How can we not suspect that we have a bad case of Emperor’s new clothes here? That they are all simply unwilling to be the ones to say ‘That just sounded like a lot of empty words being shoved around like so many tiddlywinks to me’? No, so much better just to go on assuring each other that it was all terribly sophisticated and rigorous, and simply accuse anyone who doesn’t agree of ‘resistance’ to theory. The trick served Freud well, after all; it got him an undeserved reputation as a brave and lonely iconoclast; so let’s all do that. How else are we going to get tenure?