Random thoughts from my regular job: Lit-crit bull-shit

[much much later update, as in no longer blogging update:
I just exchanged a few emails with Ms. Eoff, and she makes clear that she was a graduate student at the time the quote below was written and was herself frustrated at the academic culture requiring this kind of writing. I apologized to her in private and do so again here. All other individuals derided on this blog remain derided.]

"William Gibson's Virtual Light: The Conversational Construction of Chevette Washington," by Amy K. Eoff:

Femininity is a social construct. Science Fiction is a literary construct. In William Gibson's "Virtual Light", femininity and science fiction intersect in the person of the protagonist Chevette Washington. Chevette is a woman built of words. A feminine, literary construct in a science fiction novel. The writer, the narrator, other characters, and Chevette herself employ words, specifically conversation, to build her physicality, personality, and selfhood. Chevette Washington is both a personality and an act of discourse to examine. I apply both speech act theory and conversation analysis to "Virtual Light", arguing that William Gibson endorses and advances the concept of total personhood proposed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her famous 1892 speech "The Solitude of Self"...

This passage just forced an end to my workday due to the contusions I suffered as head repeatedly met desk. Normally when I mention my job here, it will more likely be in reference to propaganda and obfuscations found in history, economics, political science, and similar fields (i.e. the productions of Chomsky's "New Mandarins"), but I had to highlight this because it demonstrates two particular things I loathe about lit-crit. A) I find it far more likely that Professor Eoff "endorses and advances the concept of total personhood proposed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton" than I find believable the proposition that Gibson's cyberpunk is based on the speeches of 19th century feminists.* B) How can one make one's living working with literature and still manage to write in such a stultifying manner? That's the opening paragraph for crissakes!

* [added later] Not that I necessarily wish to abuse the "concept of total personhood"** and perhaps an argument could be made that Gibson's writings, or at least his creation of Chevette Washington as "both a personality and an act of discourse" echoes Stanton's views. But "endorses and advances"? Puhleaze. What I'm saying is that lit-crit is far too often an excuse to advance whatever the politico-cultural agenda of the academic may be rather than any thing that actually may be found in the text. I mean, sure, one can always find multiple meanings in texts, dependent on the receiving audience, the temporal and cultural contexts, yada, yada, yada, but it hardly means that every bit of meaning later readers can extract in order to advance towards tenure was consciously intended by the author and, contra academe, the intentions of the author remain important for assessing a book.

** Of course one might want to assess Stanton's "concept of total personhood" against comments such as this: "With the black man we have no new element in government, but with the education and elevation of women, we have a power that is to develop the Saxon race into a higher and nobler life." [emphasis mine] (From Ishmael Reed's criticism of the Clintons' racist-tinged Obama bashing, which I recommend while simultaneously reserving the right to bash Obama as a cog of the imperialist machine. Yes, not as bad as either of the Clintons, but his identical voting record with the NY Senator on funding the war and his comments on the campaign trail concerning military actions against Iran and Pakistan leads me to suspect that his relative lack of warmongering enthusiasm*** is only due to "lack of experience.")

*** Shockingly suggesting, for example, that dropping nuclear bombs on small terrorist camps in ostensibly allied countries--camps no doubt unerringly identified by that ever-reliable creature operating under the nom-de-guerre of the "US Intelligence Community"--might not be the wisest course. Hillary used this blindingly-obvious-to-all-but-the-most-monstrous observation to suggest that Obama was not ready for imperial prime time: "Presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," Clinton said. "Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons"****

**** What? You would prefer endless parentheticals?