« What to Get Your Media Mogul for Christmas | Main | Dirty Trackback Tricks »
December 21, 2003
Marxist Literary Critics Are Stealing Our Jobs!
Via George, I came across Winston's Diary, a blog by "a job seeking graduate student [of literature] who will remain anonymous until tenured, rejected, or so sick of academia that I leave it." Winston, as George points out, discusses his concern about the "dreaded Theory question" at MLA interviews, implying that this question essentially amounts to a subtle way of determining a candidate's political leanings. Winston then notes that his conservative tastes will prevent him from getting a job:
According to “the rules,” potential employers aren’t supposed to be able to ask you about your politics. But, given the highly politicized nature of theory, how can the theory question not constitute a question about politics? If I start talking about I. A. Richards’s influence on my work, I reveal myself as a literary conservative. And if I talk about A. C. Bradley’s influence on my reading of Shakespeare, I think that makes me a literary paleo-conservative. Whereas if I mention Foucault, or Said, or Derrida, I’m a fellow traveler.Leaving asied the fact that hundreds of capable job candidates (with a variety of political leanings) will not get jobs this year because of tight market, Winston's arguments seem to follow a familiar, recognizable pattern that tends to simplify what English professors do in a remarkably politicized way. Reducing Foucault, Derrida, and Said to political equivalents neglects some of the political differences between these thinkers (yes, I know that Said was inflenced by Foucault, but there are certainly differences).
Winston's entry on the MLA program also engages in some of the same scare tactics. He carefully selects three panels (out of several hundred) in order to illustrate his claim that MLA has become too politicized. Winston's major point is that none of these panels appear to be about literature or language, which is, of course, a major assumption given paper titles such as "Writing the Self: Reading United States Imperialism" and "Merely Reading: Cultural Criticism as Erasure of Labor" (my emphasis), which both appear to have at least something to do with language. Don't they?
Posted by chuck at December 21, 2003 12:39 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.wordherders.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.fpl/1171
Comments
This is a nice post, Chuck. This particular version of the conservative critique also puzzles me for its ability to hold simultaneously two contradictory positions:
1) Theory is a sign of politics, and thus automatically excludes conservatives.
2) English professors are paper radicals, who unthinkingly espouse radical positions but who actually are unspeakably bourgeois ("But Fredric Jameson has a big house! And a *nice* car!")
I guess that an adherent of the reductive account would say that this is no contradiction, but rather a sign of the ineradicable hypocrisy of academics. But it's only hypocrisy if you grant the premise, viz. theoretical readings of literature automatically reflect politics.
Posted by: Jason at December 21, 2003 10:44 AM
Am I the only who finds it hilarious that a post entitled, "Marxist Literary Critics Are Stealing Our Jobs" gets hit with spam offering jobs?
Posted by: Jen at October 26, 2004 1:25 PM
I might actually save this piece of blog spam. Probably not, but, yeah it is kind of funny. The same thing happened when I wrote a review of Jim Jarmusch's "Coffee and Cigarettes," but with spame for online tobacco sellers.
Posted by: chuck at October 26, 2004 1:30 PM