Your Scholar or Theorist Mt. Rushmore

[intextrovert]

Contemporary Theory:

 

Sara Ahmed

Judith Butler

Judith Halberstam

Elizabeth Grosz

Also, the OOO crowd... (Harman, Meillassoux, Brassier, Shaviro, etc.)

 

"Minor" Theorists:

 

Husserl

Heidegger

Merleau-Ponty

Foucault

Deleuze

Any advice on where to start with Elizabeth Grosz? I've been meaning to read her forever but she's one of those people who's written zillions of books and articles so it feels overwhelming or impossible to figure out what's important. Have a recommendation for one that's a good intro to her?

Oh, and to play this game:

Contemporary:

Bruno Latour

Henri Lefebvre

Kaja Silverman

Timothy Morton

(Honorable mentions: William Cronon, Donald Davidson, Donna Haraway, Steven Shapin)

Historical:

Bergson

Whitehead

Dewey

Spinoza

[Two Espressos]

Any advice on where to start with Elizabeth Grosz? I've been meaning to read her forever but she's one of those people who's written zillions of books and articles so it feels overwhelming or impossible to figure out what's important. Have a recommendation for one that's a good intro to her?

Oh, and to play this game:

Contemporary:

Bruno Latour

Henri Lefebvre

Kaja Silverman

Timothy Morton

(Honorable mentions: William Cronon, Donald Davidson, Donna Haraway, Steven Shapin)

Historical:

Bergson

Whitehead

Dewey

Spinoza

 

I like your list here, though I must admit to not having read many of these thinkers.  I'm curious: what are your areas of interest/prospective areas of expertise?

[intextrovert]

I like your list here, though I must admit to not having read many of these thinkers.  I'm curious: what are your areas of interest/prospective areas of expertise?

Ha, yeah, I hadn't read any of them (except for maybe tiny bits of Lefebvre and Morton) before I got to grad school, either! I'm a modernist, but my interests within that are in spatial/environmental/ecocriticism and epistemology/science studies (STS). Latour is really STS's main guy and writes about political ecology (The Politics of Nature), Lefebvre is contemporary spatial theory's progenitor (The Production of Space), Silverman thinks about relationality in a way I'd call ecological (Flesh of My Flesh), Morton is an ecocritic (Ecology Without Nature). Cronon is an environmental historian, Davidson an epistemologist, Haraway and Shapin are STS.

All this theory is helpful to know, but now that I'm reaching dissertation stage I'm also trying to extract myself from it a bit and think about my primary texts more - at a certain point theory can just send you down a rabbit hole if you make it central, when really it's just supposed to be a tool to help you frame and talk about what you're actually writing about, and which to me feels more "real."

[w/ love & squalor]

front of the mountain:

Bruno Latour

Donna Haraway

Elaine Scarry

Jane Bennett

 

hidden behind rock face:

Barthes

Deleuze

Foucault

Freud

 

But if I had my choice, I'd put four texts on the face of the mountain instead of people: Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," Latour's Aramis, Scarry's The Body in Pain, and Bennett's Vibrant Matter. Those are underneath everything I think.

[La Boca del Pozo]

Kenneth Burke

Aristotle

John Dewey

Wayne Booth

[ZacharyBinks]

Mine are constantly evolving but right now it would have to be:

 

Judith Butler

Michel Foucault

bell hooks

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

[SleepyAlligator]

Marx

Benjamin

Deleuze (& Guattari)

Melville

[ProfLorax]

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

!!!!!

 

If you end up at Ohio State, do you plan on working with Brenda Brueggemann? OSU's Disability Studies program is what drew me to their English Department. 

[ZacharyBinks]

!!!!!

 

If you end up at Ohio State, do you plan on working with Brenda Brueggemann? OSU's Disability Studies program is what drew me to their English Department. 

 

I'm not sure! My main focus is Victorian lit and queer theory, but I've recently become very interested in disability studies, so I will definitely be taking a class or two when I can! I'm also considering making it one of my secondary research interests. I'm glad to see someone else is interested, too! I know that OSU has a great program.

[gr8pumpkin]

What a wonderful topic.  Jean-Philippe Rameau, Heinrich Schenker; and Allen Forte and George Perle strangling each other.

[back2black]

1. Butler

2. Sedgwick

3. Foucault

4. Barthes

Honorable Mention: Mulvey

[davidipse]

On 3/4/2014 at 11:07 PM, back2black said:

2. Sedgwick

 

Did you consider Steven Meyer at WashU?

[MedievalMadness]

Ooh now, this is a fun thread.

1. Roland Barthes

2. Joseph Campbell

3. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Eileen Joy gets an honorable mention)

4. T.A. Shippey

[arober6912]

1. Foucault

2. Bakhtin

3. Freire 

4. Benjamin

 

Hon. mention goes to Bhabha 

[bgguitarist]

Mine is shifting all of the time, but:

 

1. Gilbert & Gubar (I know this is sort of cheating, but just imagine them as twins conjoined at the head, okay?)

2. Nancy Armstrong

3. Pamela Gilbert

4. Foucault

[ComeBackZinc]

I don't have a "top four" but I know Anne Ruggles-Gere at Michigan is one of mine. A brilliant scholar in so many ways. She really has shown how you can do research from across different traditions and genres-- empirical, theoretical, political, cultural, historical-- and synthesize them into an exemplary career. An inspiration for me.

[ExponentialDecay]

1. Me

2. Me

3. Me

4. Derrida is dead, but if he weren't, I'd totally do him.

[graphgraphe]

I have assembled a team of which I am very proud.

 

1. William Empson 

2. Susan Sontag

3. Lucretius

4. Randall McLeod

[smg]

Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Shukin

[hypervodka]

Hutcheon, Heidegger, Sedgwick, Hall (or, I should've written, S. H. H. H.)

[Strong Flat White]

N. Katherine Hayles, Arthur Kroker, Brian Massumi, Walter Benn Michaels.

[queennight]

Viktor Shklovsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida!

[sillyrabbit]

Jasbir Puar, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, David Eng

[__________________________]

1. Me

2. Me

3. Me

4. Derrida is dead, but if he weren't, I'd totally do him.

rofl, Derrida, as old white french dudes go, was sexy as hell. A certain charm about his writing style that melts my heart. In a very homoerotic and slightly masochistic way. Like he's beating Western tradition, and your brain, into a bloody pulp and then stopping for a second every once in a while to wink at you with his pretty domineering eyes. He's a weird looking bastard but I'd let him deconstruct my drawers any day.

Also, I can't believe it hasn't been said already, but I think this thread should take a new direction. Mount Rushmore being the white-male-supremecist act of colonialist ideological terror and phallic worship that it is, I invite us to unpack this notion of a "Theorist Mt. Rushmore."

[1Q84]

Jasbir Puar, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, David Eng

 

Whoa! Are you me? I'd add Judith Halberstam in the place of Benjamin, personally. And the two Gayatris (Spivak, Gopinath). Oh and Lisa Lowe!