Face uphill battle.… Read the rest
All entries by this author
Museum Employees Fined for Blasphemy
Dec 16th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonOrganizers of ‘Beware: Religion!’ exhibition were found guilty of arousing religious hatred.… Read the rest
All About Reassuring the Community
Dec 16th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWriter expressed doubt about gay adoptions on BBC chatshow, was investigated by cops.… Read the rest
Women Forbidden to Use Public Transport
Dec 15th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonWomen in northern Nigeria forbidden to ride on motorbike taxis; religious marshals enforce the law.… Read the rest
Mistake to Hop on Islamist Bandwagon
Dec 15th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTrendy government is prepared to pursue communalist policy redolent of colonies. … Read the rest
Alternative? Alternative?
Dec 14th, 2005 6:13 pm | By Ophelia BensonA little more on the Chronicle’s newsflash that Theory is hardly at all very much influential or mandatory or orthodox any more.
Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, Ian Duncan, a professor of English and the department’s chairman, reports via e-mail that “postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing” while New Historicism “does not exert the hegemony it did 20 years ago, although I think it’s fair to say it’s been digested by many of us and maintains a strong presence.”
And yet a lot of wacko people go on saying that Theorists seem to be interested in everything but literature – it’s staggering, isn’t it? Why would anyone think that? When postcolonial, national/transnational, race and … Read the rest
Can’t Contextualize Any More
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonFor Holocaust denial by a head of state, the usual apologetics won’t work.… Read the rest
Pamuk to go on Trial for ‘Insulting Turkishness’
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonHigh-profile prosecution has caused a stir in Brussels.… Read the rest
Political Islam a Challenge to French Secularism
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonTheocracy rears its head again.… Read the rest
Chris Mooney Reviews Tom Bethell
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonBethell takes the political right’s ‘war on science’ to a whole new level. … Read the rest
Ahmadinejad Calls Holocaust a ‘Myth’
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonCalls for Jews to move to Alaska.… Read the rest
Munira Mirza on Race Awareness Training
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonDiversity training may reinforce the sense of difference between people.… Read the rest
Hitchens Remembers Gene McCarthy
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonMcCarthy’s 1968 campaign is one of the best correctives to the stupid cult of the Kennedy family. … Read the rest
‘Theory’ Such Old News, Says CHE, Yawning
Dec 14th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonThen gives pile of quotations showing opposite. Very ironic, very theoretical.… Read the rest
Theory? What Theory? Where?
Dec 14th, 2005 2:42 am | By Ophelia BensonThis article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is hilarious. Oh, Theory is so over, what empire, it’s all fragmented, what a silly fuss everyone is making, it says. Then it offers a comment backing up the claim.
… Read the restFirst, theory has become so much part of the literary profession that one needs to have some familiarity with the “isms,” no matter which (if any) one embraces most closely. Being labeled a theorist does not advance a career the way it might have 10 or 15 years ago, but theoretical naïveté is a luxury that few aspiring professors can afford. James F. English, chairman and professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in an e-mail message that while “it’s
Never Offend
Dec 13th, 2005 8:02 pm | By Ophelia BensonAnnals of Thought-crime. Orhan Pamuk goes on trial on Friday.
… Read the restMy crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”…Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country…If the state is prepared to go to such lengths to keep the Turkish people from knowing what happened to the Ottoman Armenians, that qualifies as a taboo. And my words caused a furor worthy of a taboo: various newspapers launched hate campaigns against me, with some right-wing (but not necessarily Islamist) columnists going as far as to say that I
German Officers Knew About Holocaust
Dec 13th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAccording to newly revealed transcripts of conversations between captured generals.… Read the rest
Where Are the Big Questions?
Dec 13th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonIn the philosophy and history departments, for two.… Read the rest
‘Publicly Denigrating Turkish Identity’ is a Crime
Dec 13th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonAngry nationalism sees freedom of thought as a Western invention.… Read the rest
When Did Lit Crit and Aesthetics Break Up?
Dec 13th, 2005 | Filed by Ophelia BensonInterpretation is the revenge of moralism upon art.… Read the rest