If Lentricchia and Said have joined, the revenge of the emeriti may not be so regressive after all.
Category: Flashback
Fashionable nonsense has been with us since the time that prehistoric man first transcribed Of Grammatology on to the walls of the Lascaux caves. Here we cast an eye back at some historical highlights.
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Whither Irony?
‘In the clamorous and bloodstained souk of the world…people still go unrepentantly on looking out for good lives’
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Dawkins on Maynard Smith
‘John does know more mathematics, more physics and more engineering than the average biologist. But he also knows more biology than the average biologist.’
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Vikram Chandra on the Cult of Authenticity
Don’t essentialize Indianness, but you’d better get the Real India right.
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Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
What is the difference between genuine inquiry and the sham and fake variety?
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‘Without a theory, you can’t meet the people.’
Miller wonders why ‘unavailing Latinate neologisms’ convince so many people that something profound is being said.
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Deep, unconscious anti-science bias.
Scientists are humorless nerds, and crop circles and crystals are more fun.
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Frank Lentricchia takes it all back.
‘When I grew up and became a literary critic, I learned to keep silent about the reading experiences of liberation that Iād enjoyed since childhood.’
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Barbara Forrest on The Wedge at Work
How Intelligent Design Creationism Is Wedging Its Way into the Cultural and Academic Mainstream
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Martin Gardner looks at a Center for nonsense studies.
Dowsing, homeopathy, Tarot cards and their relevance to mental health professions, and, of course, alien abductions.
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Livid Quietism on the Right
‘The anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious.’
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What we need is a robust universalism.
‘There is nothing sacrosanct about any culture or religion’s rituals. Cultures are neither monolithic, unchanging, nor without internal critique and resistance…’
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Scott McLemee on Orwell
Prose as a window-pane opens onto a reality that is solidly and visibly ‘out there.’
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Frederick Crews on Freud
‘the claims of psychoanalytic theory are not interpretations but determinate propositions about how the mind regularly works’
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The Impact of Religion on Children’s Education
Azam Kamguian on what the anti-secularist backlash has done to education.
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Gangsta Rap Culture Not Such a Good Thing?
Education has been portrayed as ‘white’ – what use is it when strutting the streets?
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Yale as a Place Where Language Goes to Die
Helena Echlin on the misery of being a PhD candidate in English and American literature at Yale. She has to stifle her urge to write ‘eh?’ in the margins, discovers that obfuscation is de rigeur, and that people who talk nonsense are now looked upon not as sloppy thinkers, but as sages.