At 11:05 pm 21/8/01 +0100, Matthew Francis wrote:
>Overreacting slightly? First, I'm an academic myself. Second, my partial
>agreement with Josephine's remark was hardly meant as a serious attack on
>the profession, more as a pleasantry.
Maybe I was overreacting. But I hear all too much anti-academic talk in
Britain as it is, and hearing the same from an academic only makes it more
depressing. I'm sorry if I misread your pleasantry, genuinely: and I should
remember that such misreadings have been a feature of e-mail lists since
I've been online. But it wasn't exactly clear where you were coming from.
Further, extrapolating a tendency from one seminar and a paper still
doesn't ring true to me. I just haven't seen any evidence of anything more
sinister than a new branch of academic research. My sister's doing a degree
in English and Music in Leeds where they study Mythologies in first year,
and she wrote a really interesting paper 'in a Barthesian style' on mobile
phones, but she also got to study a lot of literature. If you want to talk
about the postgrad community, that's different, but that doesn't seem to
affect the undergrad syllabus too much.
I didn't think you were spoiling for a fight. Neither am I. I get annoyed
when generalisations _seem to be_ or _are_ made, particularly (predictably)
when they get close to the bone. I know e-mail lists have been badly
affected by fight-spoiling types, I had a back and front channel 'debate'
about this with Kent Johnson a while back on subsub, but there should still
be space for people to express disagreement, annoyance, exasperation. There
are some virtuosos on this very list, and I mean that in the nicest least
fight-spoiling way. Up the polemic, as Beckett nearly said...
best,
Malcolm
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