Lamont also believes that literary studies are more contentious than sciences. This brings to mind the history of genetics (is that scientific enough as a field of study?) in the USSR. A group of biologists felt so strongly that their scholarly vision was right that they got Stalin to execute a group of geneticists and jail the rest of them.
But no, of course, real scholars can never be as contentious as the “deprofessionalized” and “lacking rigor” (Lamont’s terminology) literary scholars.
I’m currently rereading a book that came out a long time ago, in 2001, called THE LIAR’S TALE. It was very big in the USA, I believe, perhaps one of those listed on the New York Times best seller of books (do I have that reference right?)
Anyway, the author just really, really hates postmodernism. It’s not like he hates it with nuance, but in a basic, crude fashion. He maintains it is fanciful and immoral. But then he begs the question as to what is not fanciful and what is moral. It’s really not so self-evident as his own rhetoric would imply, especially by virtue of his very strong stance against this movement. Although he makes one or two historically-based arguments about what he thinks is going on when movements develop, he falls back on a rhetorical appeal to gender differences, ultimately. At least that his how I read him. He literally says that Descartes thought that to embrace the truth was “manly and strong”. So by implicit contrast, postmodernism would be feminine and frail, not unlike Eve in The Garden being deceived by a duplicitous snake. This kind of appeal to “common sense” is common in books written around that time. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate makes the same implicit argument: science is masculine and ought to be respected, but social engineering is a project of the left and is silly because, biologically, we’re just not “like that”.
USA intellectuals, it seems, really need to learn to make an argument that does not implicitly and surreptitiously appeal to how American Christians have learned to evaluate gender. What these writers do is very predictable and intellectually fraudulent.
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“USA intellectuals, it seems, really need to learn to make an argument that does not implicitly and surreptitiously appeal to how American Christians have learned to evaluate gender. What these writers do is very predictable and intellectually fraudulent.”
– Oh God. SO TRUE. I have an angry post scheduled for tomorrow morning that is precisely about this. People seem to experience an orgasmic sense of joy when they manage to fit in reality – any reality – into the gender binary. Their eyes glaze over and they start breathing faster. AND IT DRIVES ME UP A WALL.
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It means they have a short cut to understanding everything and don’t need to deploy a brain.
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Because they don’t have a brain. There’s nothing to deploy.
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Yeah. Do you ever read books in such a way that you get a lingering aftertaste from them? Some books seem very rich and others that had seemed full of content when you read them end up leaving you with a sensation of emptiness? I’ve always evaluated books this way, by whether they leave me feeling enriched or mentally flattened and American “intellectual” books leave me with a sense of nothing.
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I feel like my brain sinks into a deep fog when I read this type of book. There is no thinking in it, just vapor.
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I read those books not for their analyses, but in a meta- sense, to gain a better understanding of the writer’s cultural context and the mode of thinking. It may seem as if I’m reading them for their content, but that is almost never so, although occasionally they have a bit of content. But I do differentiate strongly between books that have real food in them and those that don’t. Marechera’s writing, for instance, has real food, although those who despised him stated otherwise. They say he was just eclectic, but they do not see that he was taking fabrics and designs that originated in other cultures and wrapping them round his form so that they created a snug fit with his own extremely complex situation and emotional states. He wasn’t just randomly appropriating. He was doing jazz, and redesigning. Because I can understand that, I can feel enriched. But others see only the external form. They can’t enter the writing holistically.
I think Americans enter gender-based writing more easily, as it strikes notes that are familiar to them. They feel the writer must be their friend or at least on their side. But if you don’t take the basic gender symbolism for granted, the writing seems flat and alienating.
In any case, as you can see, this all has to do with deep subjectivity, which is culturally engendered moreover. Now the Yankees will say they have no subjectively driven .. anything. They are purely objective (they say), reading things just as “they are”. But I say this is a closed perspective that denies them a lot of knowledge and self-awareness. They need to get deeper than this boring gender thing they’re stuck on.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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