TripWillis

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

I think my favorite of all time was "New York's hottest new club is '...KEVIN?...' located in an abandoned warehouse on..."

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

Exactly. Can we start a petition to ban Harold Bloom and his multiple gradcafe accounts?

1) "Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead." -- Well, I will apparently be the first person working in x studies to tell you that all those "dead" theories are actually residual, a la basically every sub-field of inquiry since 1920 and WAY before that, too.
 
2) "We have this thing in English..." -- who is "we?" Presumably you and fishbucket? "...where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought." Straw men, everywhere! Again, who are these hypothetical people who take theory and enclose it as dogma? I don't know them. You'll have to introduce me. I think you'll find that with people who take an interest in x studies or theory y that the process you describe is no different. I am interested in the genealogies of certain themes and ideas that I tend to privilege in my research; I find this approach works better for me than a strictly period-based approach. I assure you though that the cart does not come before the horse (no animal studies pun intended).
 
3) "I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing" -- What do you know about animal studies/posthumanism besides what you've read off of a wikipedia page? Further, it's not that anyone needs these categories, nor takes them to be metonymic for an entire field of inquiry -- they're just convenient discursive taxonomies and ways of theorizing how one might begin to talk about or operate on these issues. Apparently, this is the most offensive thing in the world to you, that people who are mutually interested in a topic might congregate around a field of inquiry and (gasp!) have events and teach classes and god forbid publish! THE HORROR. ENGLISH IS RUINED.
 
4) "serfs" -- Revealing.
 
5) "in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified" -- I think you're misunderstanding how theory works, and again, I have no idea what graduate level scholars you're talking about because I've never met them. Do you also have a problem with studying themes in literature?
 
Edit: Little known and unrelated fact -- Foucault anticipated and welcomed posthumanist discourse in 1966's The Order of Things. It's an interesting path of influence; it's not at all without precedent or rigor.

Thestage, that was such a beautiful metaphor. Seriously why aren't you writing books already?! Leave these serfs to post on their forums, and go crank out your novel!
 
It really does seem like a lot of these "new" movements are just rebranded, renamed, slightly dumbed-down versions of old theories and concepts.

Which is another way of saying it is a specific permutation of general postmodernist theory. Which is interesting, because everyone working in X Studies is always quite fond of telling me that postmodernism is dead.

You are describing a paradigm in which "post" is the key concept, not "humanism"--and certainly not "post-humanism"--and yet delineating a field in which certain foundational concepts are immutable, taken as the structure of a field simply by the act of naming the field (see: Derrida on "the proper," etc.). Whether or not this is a "contradiction" is irrelevant, because the philosophical backbone here does not admit of the immutable logical invalidity of contradiction, or, in fact, of the episteme that would privilege any or all of those three words. That is the entire point of the philosophy. I need neither animal studies nor posthumanism-in-literature to tell me about culture and enthnocentrism, relativity and the phenomenological human condition, transcendental philosophy and the episteme, because those ideas predate, preconfigure, and outstrip the bubble of scholarship to which you are appealing. Naming a field neither closes it nor makes its rules or its existence something that must be acknowledged as intellectually valuable. We have this thing in English, where actual thinkers, artists, or scholars come to a certain topic as a matter of course, as something that they treat along the road of their philosophical or methodological development, as a means of funneling or actualizing specific patterns of their thought; and then others walk down this now paved road, they see the scenery along the roadside--and they stop. They construct spectacular edifices around this scenery, and then they no longer move. While poor old Diogenes wanders around the countryside, they live in castles. The path is lost in the haste to codify some field around a specific instance of its development, and then that field is cultivated by serfs who do not have knowledge of or interest in anything but the crops they are pulling out of the ground. So that instead of looking at "how literature enacts questioning" at all, or what is even meant by that question, by literature, language, questioning, etc., as concepts or as principles that organize our intellectual being; in short, instead of developing scholars capable of living up to literature, we invent some little nook wherein we get to talk about animals in Victorian literature or what could possibly be gay in Dante: a theology, and turn our discipline into category bingo, into the work of finding X in Y, where the instances of those variables are deified--where it is possible to talk of "what is hot in English"--but the structure of the act, of X and Y qua X and Y, are treated as grotesque monstrosities. All the while, there is no intellectual common ground through which to see a forest as anything more than a series of trees--let people do as they like! We invent problems in the name of politics. Which is, you'll note, preposterously backwards.

In this case I sense you just don't know very much about animal studies and posthumanism, especially considering that asleepawake has already acknowledged one of your primary critiques (of something you obviously know nothing about) and you read right through it. This is either cognitive dissonance or you are a troll.
 
Humanism is also people talking for other people (see like everything ever written by Spivak for instance -- the fucking double bind!). Does that invalidate humanism? Is humanism a flawed methodology? Are you a troll?
 
Edit: Everything is representation. Get over it.

In this case I sense you just don't know very much about animal studies and posthumanism, especially considering that asleepawake has already acknowledged one of your primary critiques (of something you obviously know nothing about) and you read right through it. This is either cognitive dissonance or you are a troll.
 
Humanism is also people talking for other people (see like everything ever written by Spivak for instance -- the fucking double bind!). Does that invalidate humanism? Is humanism a flawed methodology? Are you a troll?
 
Edit: Everything is representation. Get over it.

Animal studies is blowing up.

thestage, Fishbucket, you guys are aware that you can study some things, and other people can study different things, and that's okay, right?

Humans write literature, and sometimes that literature is about insects.

I study literature. Insects don't write literature

humanities, dawg. I Believe In Human Beings.
In terms of literature, this is actually the most nonsensical thing you could possibly put in print.

Yes, all that new technology that we've developed to turn us into insects and allow us to communicate with aliens has really rejuvenated the humanities!

I made it official: I'm going to CUNY Graduate Center.

Perhaps a google docs might be beneficial here for a collaborative effort.
 
Anywho, I've accepted an offer at The Ohio State University (English PhD). 

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3) What does this have to do with the conversation besides trololololololooooooooooooooooo?
 
Another Don't Hate Classic ©.

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3) What does this have to do with the conversation besides trololololololooooooooooooooooo?
 
Another Don't Hate Classic ©.

Ehhh, too many authors after modernism have undergone some or another process of canonization. You would be hard pressed to leave out Beckett or Morrison, for instance. Nabokov to a somewhat lesser degree. Pynchon, Ellison, Wright, DeLillo, Roth, Pinter, various other odds and ends.

I think a lot of pop culture already is canonical (Mark Twain's novels, Shakespeare's plays, Uncle Tom's Cabin). I'm not sure I feel comfortable being as absolute about this.

At the risk of repeating myself: aesthetics can be (*is*) something more than dry, formal, irrelevant and a-political metrical scansion. If this is what people think "aesthetics" means than we're obviously failing to do/teach it properly. For an example of how people do excellent political/economic analysis while still taking the characteristics of art/aesthetics seriously, see: Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, György Lukács, and Ernst Bloch. To name a few. 
 
Sorry, I'm just really frustrated at the terms of this debate, and the (false) opposition between "caring about art" and "being politically engaged." I think it's total bollocks. I also think it's important to examine art's own internal categories and forms, for the same reason that a musicologist should look at rhythm, tonality, etc. That doesn't mean we look *only* at these things, and it doesn't mean "aesthetics" can be walled off from politics in some pure realm of the ether... no more than any other phenomenon can be taken in isolation. What it means is that we look at how art interacts with politics as art--or, again, that we take art seriously. Bertolt Brecht was obviously an incredibly politically engaged artist; he was also incredibly engaged with aesthetics, with the politics of form and the form of politics. Same thing with Walter Benjamin: look at his (wonderful) analysis of how the workings of commodification can be discerned in the most formal stylistic elements of Baudelaire, or for that matter at his analysis of the Trauerspiel. This is great stuff, with tremendous political resonance; it is also phenomenally good aesthetics.
 
 In short: art is a praxis, with its own immanent laws and lines of development. This matters.

Amen.