Let's just give them their own department. In a basement somewhere. A damp basement.
Gah. Yes, please. Although the non-sciences view of your wackos is mostly Doc Brown from Back to the Future, so they're winning the PR war already.
Part of the problem is that literary criticism is a deeply insecure subject. We're pretty new as a discipline, and we don't have a set methodology that everyone (or even anyone) can agree on. So, instead of actually doing literary criticism, a big chunk of us seem to have branched off into incomprehensible, poorly-written prose that thinks it's heralding the revolution. There's a great deal of science- and philosophy-envy in the defences, too - "it's not bad prose, it's just very technical terminology, and scientists use all this jargon so why can't we?". Or, "You don't criticise Kant for his bad writing, and Kant's very difficult for a non-specialist to read!" Well, yeah, but scientists are using that jargon for something, and philosophers judge Kant on his content rather than his prose.
There's some concern 'round these parts that the very abstract lunatic fringe of theory, and the very negative image it's (deservedly) got, might be responsible for a lowered opinion of the Arts & Humanities among everyone else. I've also heard people suggest it as the reason for the shrinking monograph market in the Arts - if everyone knows we say idiotic things and can't write worth a damn, why are they going to buy our books? I don't know if it's directly responsible for either of those, but it's certainly not helping.
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Date: 2006-01-20 11:35 pm (UTC)Gah. Yes, please. Although the non-sciences view of your wackos is mostly Doc Brown from Back to the Future, so they're winning the PR war already.
Part of the problem is that literary criticism is a deeply insecure subject. We're pretty new as a discipline, and we don't have a set methodology that everyone (or even anyone) can agree on. So, instead of actually doing literary criticism, a big chunk of us seem to have branched off into incomprehensible, poorly-written prose that thinks it's heralding the revolution. There's a great deal of science- and philosophy-envy in the defences, too - "it's not bad prose, it's just very technical terminology, and scientists use all this jargon so why can't we?". Or, "You don't criticise Kant for his bad writing, and Kant's very difficult for a non-specialist to read!" Well, yeah, but scientists are using that jargon for something, and philosophers judge Kant on his content rather than his prose.
There's some concern 'round these parts that the very abstract lunatic fringe of theory, and the very negative image it's (deservedly) got, might be responsible for a lowered opinion of the Arts & Humanities among everyone else. I've also heard people suggest it as the reason for the shrinking monograph market in the Arts - if everyone knows we say idiotic things and can't write worth a damn, why are they going to buy our books? I don't know if it's directly responsible for either of those, but it's certainly not helping.