In this series I discovered that people know me so well that I can’t come up with the final question in the series. Nothing of interest came to mind. Now, however, I finally have our very last question, after which we will find out the winner. Here is the question:
We all know that I hate collective identities and refuse to join any of them. Except one. Which is this single collective identity that I not only acknowledge but am proud of possessing? (For one point).
And a supplementary question: Why? What makes this identity so much more attractive than others? (For 2,5 points.)
The answers for the previous two questions are under the fold:
My most favorite book ever in the entire world starts with the words:
“harsh homeland, the falsest, most miserable imaginable, I shall never return to you: with eyes still closed, it is there before you, enveloped in the blurry ubiquity of sleep and thus invisible, but nonetheless cleverly and subtly suggested, foreshortened and far in the distance: with even the tiniest details recognizable, outlined, as you yourself admit, with such scrupulous accuracy as to border on the maniacal.”
It is a novel by the greatest living writer on this planet Juan Goytisolo and it is titled Count Julian. It should be read in the original, of course, because there is no translator whose intellect, erudition and linguistic power can rise to the author’s level. I taught it in translation and it was good but not end-of-the-world phenomenal.
And the one I hate the most is the stupid, sexist, woman-hating Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirit. As my bad luck would have it, two of my students are writing their research papers on this stupid book, making me seethe every time they repeat the silly trope that this crap is somehow feminist. I’m sorry, but a female character falls pregnant as a result of being raped by people who torture her and she decides to forgive everybody, never look for the criminals who did this to her because now she has the only thing that can possibly matter to a woman – a baby? That’s feminist? Vomit, vomit, vomit.
My favorite novel in English is, of course, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
And my second favorite is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
And my least favorite is Mrs. Dalloway. Does anybody know why the English literature always gives the name Clarissa to its most pathetic, weak, whiny, and boring characters?
Clarissa's Blog 
Women?
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or feminist?
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Intellectual?
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Intellectuals never call themselves intellectuals. 🙂
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and they’re certainly not proud of it!
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Clarissa certainly seems to take a lot of pride in being part of the “intelligentsia,” whatever exactly that is.
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I was born into it, though, so it’s not a matter of choice. It’s more like a matter pf physiology. 🙂 🙂
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I think it has to be Jewish, or Hispanist. If I am allowed two guesses.
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I like Warren’s The Cave. I read it over and over again when I was a kid.
I also hate Allende. A blatant rip-off of GGM and the worst kind of “magical feminism.”
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I have to re-read Goytisolo very soon, because his is the best dismantling of tropes of Spanish identity / exceptionalism, in the book you mention as well as in Juan sin tierra and Señas de identidad. It is interesting that you have a robust attitude toward identity politics, rejecting all such identifications except one mysterious one, and that, at the same time, your favorite novel is one that tears down such politics.
Goytisolo’s attachment to Américo Castro’s theory, though, inscribes him in another narrative of exceptionalism.
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To be boringly obvious, you are an academic who is very proud to belong to the Academy.
Besides the lifestyle benefits you mention in other posts, no other identity allows you the ability to view and move through the world as you see fit.
The other identities everyone argues about and tries to slot you into some box of dogma and stereotype. Academics can be wildly different but still academics.
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To be boringly obvious, you are an academic who is very proud to belong to the Academy.
Besides the lifestyle benefits you mention in other posts, no other identity allows you the ability to view and move through the world as you see fit.
The other identities everyone argues about and tries to slot you into some box of dogma and stereotype. Academics can be wildly different but still academics.
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And your second favorite Spanish novel?
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I should add, from the list (as I remember it) I’m assuming it was Niebla.
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No, it’s Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Niebla was the very first novel in Spanish that I ever read and I hated it because I had never seen a modernist work of fiction before in my life and had no idea novels could be like this. 🙂 🙂
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I thought academic too (before reading Shakti’s answer). In addition to his great explanation, joining this identity lets you fight for future of academia (and your job in it).
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I’m going to suggest you are proud of your autism (there are not many identities you can possess, and ‘female’ has already been suggested).
I would guess you would be proud of it because autistic people are different, original, often brilliant in some extraordinary way and could never be classed as conformists. I think that would appeal to you.
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Since academic has already been said – an immigrant?
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Or even better, a polyglot. She revels in envy-hatred (the hatred of envy, that is) but if she envied anyone, it would probably be Sydney Bristow.
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The owner and operator of this blog.
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Hmmm. Perhaps as an intellectual or an academic or a teacher? Speaking for me personally, I get VERY angry when people insult university professors.
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I am going to guess autistic!
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Autistic immigrant tenure track academics?
I’d like to see the annual convention…
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“Autistic immigrant tenure track academics?”
– This is all pretty tautological. 🙂
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If I’m allowed three guesses they would be: an intellectual; Ukranian; feminist.
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Actually I think I was too broad, I think it’s
_Pregnant_ autistic tenure track academics.
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It’s a wickedly precise student who constructs an argument against pregnant autistic tenure track academics.
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You (or more correctly, I) forgot the immigrant part.
And it was that very precision that Clarissa had to acknowledge. No more will the vast pregnant austistic immigrant tenure track academiclobby hold us in thrall!
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I think I’ve read before how you like “progressive”, because its the absolute rhetoric opposite of “conservative”?
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Sexism in the border…
http://rabble.ca/news/2013/04/sexism-border-personal-account#.UVoWCqdRcWE.facebook
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at the
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A hint 🙂 : the question uses the word “proud.”
And there is a reason the second question is there.
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Has to be something you’ve worked hard for, rather than something that was bestowed on you by virtue of simply being born.
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Right! So definitely not something physiological.
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An academic, a teacher?
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If it’s not something you’re born with, then academic would be my choice. After all, one should be proud of the hard work it takes to get to that title!
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Identity: immigrant. Someone already said this upthread but I knew the answer already because you have said it befoe. It supersedes academic and Hispanist and so on in part because you would retain the immigrant identity if academia and Hispanism ended tomorrow but more importantly because identities like academic and Hispanist are among the kinds you refuse — not because you are not those things but because you dislike that groupy-group thing.
Why proud — well this is not the reason but let me point out in passing that it is somewhat harder to immigrate, twice, and acculturate and all of that, than it is to do the PhD and get a job, let alone do that in addition to these. Immigrant identity is porous and multifaceted, not cliquish the way nationalisms are; this is why it is not the same as the others proposed.
People are deluded choosing Jewish, you say you have little contact with that culture and that in terms of religion you identify as Christian. Bellamy’s guess, owner and operator of this blog, is very good though and maybe he wins.
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“People are deluded choosing Jewish, you say you have little contact with that culture and that in terms of religion you identify as Christian”
– Well, actually I am en embodiment of the culture, and as for religion, Jesus was Jewish. 🙂 But you are right, I wouldn’t be proud of my ethnicity. It is like being proud of my hair color.
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American?
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And I have no idea why English literature gives the name Clarissa to so many weak characters! I love Mrs. Dalloway but I agree that the title character is not very interesting. I haven’t read the only other Clarissa novel I’m aware of, that’s called Clarissa, but I’ve heard it’s about a boringly naive, weak and sheltered young girl who is trying to remain a virgin while this guy whose house she’s staying in tries to seduce her. Yawn.
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