Saturday, May 10, 2014

Snarf!







8 comments:

  1. OK, I laughed. I think he wasn't really trying on the engineers and linguists - should be able to get a couple minutes in, at least. But you'd have to try. 4 minutes is about right for smart sociologists.

    But is there really an outside to literary criticism that is not also, at the same time, an inside, a contradiction resolved by being sustained within a new synthesis along with its opposite, establishing a 'truth' evident as a new, yet past-contiguous thesis?

    (Seriously, read a little Hegel and Marx, and this crap is easy as breathing.)

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  2. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" was clearly the mic drop of this field.

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  3. Sadly, history is probably about 3-5 minutes. It'll take about that long for historians to realize that the person is actually ignorant, and not just espousing one of the many 'alternate interpretations'*, then politely find a reason to leave the conversation rather than pursue confrontation. Because the latter option often results in visits to the Dean,and lectures about making people feel bad.

    *The difference between historical ignorance and 'alternate interpretation' is often nothing.

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  4. OK - completely off topic, but not having the O'Floin's email address I have to resort to comment hijacking.
    The Pope today talked about what to do if an alien (Martian) asked to be baptized! Little did he know that he could have asked one of his faithful subjects as he is an expert on the theological needs of aliens.

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  5. Oops - here is the link
    http://en.radiovaticana.va/articolo.asp?c=798509

    ReplyDelete
  6. My brother showed the cartoon to an English teacher he works with and she had the following comment:

    The mimetic qualities embedded in the text below, which implicitly asserts the
    primacy of the individual self attempting to wrest agency from hegemonic forces
    through the application of ridicule, suggest that a post-post-Modernist
    appropriation of the semiotics of humor can attempt, by twining the linguistic
    and the visual poetics, to valorize an auratic perception; nevertheless, because
    it engages in the Saidian Othering which it purportedly decries, its claims to
    lucidity enforce the hierarchical segregations, not of the academy, but of the
    society in which it is embedded, thereby demonstrating the inevitability of
    critical ontology or at least the necessity of employing degraded structure-sign
    relationships to provide meaning.

    Or something.

    (I meant to shoehorn "vis-a-vis" in there somewhere, but ran out of time.
    Thanks for providing me with a laugh today!)


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    Replies
    1. That's pretty good. Really did miss the vis-a-vis, though.

      Many years ago, a sister in law was studying English at Cal, and I happened to pick up one her books. I could not believe my eyes - they weren't kidding? They inflicted this on innocent kids with a straight face? I didn't know to laugh or scream. I read a couple chapters, and was just flabbergasted. That was my first encounter with that level of academic insanity. Around the same time I went to business school at San Francisco State - like Cal, but less intellectually rigorous(!). Now, that was an experience - just padding the resume for crass monetary gain, yet hanging out at a school full of hyper-politicized loonies.

      Perhaps these experiences account for my dim view of these sorts of things.

      Delete
    2. post-post-Modernism.....

      sound like a recovery group for Comp. Lit. to me--trade in your black turtlenecks to enroll in the smoking & ennui cessation program! Retrain the muscles in your face to smile! Recall that you actually used to read for pleasure! When you reach the fourth step of our program, you will receive a free copy of the Chesterton work of your choice!


      But since I attended a diff. school (most likely), allow me to festoon that quotation, because it's not Really Serious without punctuation mischief in service to perceptual polyvalencies:

      The mimetic qualities embedded in the text below, which implicitly asserts the
      primacy of the individual "self" attempting to wrest agency from hegemonic force(s) through the application of ridicule, suggest that a post-post-Modernist
      appropriation of the semiotics of "humor" can attempt, by twi(n)ning the linguistic
      and the visual poetics, to valorize an auratic perception; nevertheless, because
      it engages in the Saidian Othering which it purportedly decries, its claims to
      lucidity enforce the hierarchical segregations, not of the academy, but of the
      society in which it is embedded, thereby demonstrating the in-evitability of
      critical ontology or at least the necessity of employing (de)graded structure-sign
      relationships to provide "meaning."

      Delete

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