*cough* I knew that. :leaving:Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Printable View
*cough* I knew that. :leaving:Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
That's not my point. She was clearly drunk, and she clearly exaggerates the story. One: her roommate was his student, and somehow he visited his student as usual, not exactly as if he invited himself over. He also brought a present, which is common when invited to somebody's house.
It's easy to see a situation where they say we should do something socially, and they say, how about dinner, and he says, Ok! I'll bring a nice bottle that we can enjoy. It's assumed also that she probably was drinking enough of it too - let's be honest. The vomiting from a fat guy touching one's leg without alcohol seems particularly weird. Maybe she was drunk beyond belief, acted strangely then vomited and started accusing him and things, and then he felt she acted strangely.
The general problem with the account is she published it twice with quite contradictory facts which she later dismissed as her own nervousness or whatever. My general guess is she most likely got tired of being an "all talk" feminist without much sexual trauma or anything and, upon seeing her reputation disappearing and her sales dwindling looked for the closest thing she had to a sexual harassment experience. The real point is simply that she more or less led him on, as made more clear in her first published work on the incident (not so much in her essay "The Silent Treatment").
I mean seriously. The worst thing she could dig up, assuming all is true, is that a drunken professor made a sexual advance at her (though somehow I always suspected him of sexual impotence for some reason). What she failed to discuss, I guess, in her piece is, after the so called thigh grabbing - something Bloom completely denied anyway - he backed off and didn't pursue things. That is, a drunk man somehow in a sexual tense situation ended with a hand on a girl's thigh (note, not breast or down her blouse or anything), and when she cooled, he left, and presumably took a cold shower.
All being true, I think there are far worse things than that. After all, she makes clear how she dressed to impress him, and put on perfume and everything - that is, she made herself desirable so he would like her, then turned cold when he did.
Either way, she is a third rate scholar of nonsense and conspiracy theories. It is perhaps useful to suggest that she dismissed the sexual assault charges against one Wikileaks founder as politically motivated nonsense, and the girls should have just said no and gotten over it. It seems interesting to hear that opinion from someone who held a 21 year grudge over a man making a move, and then leaving when declined.
Take a look at this for instance:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/...lyn_friedman_a
Your version is plausible, JBI, but it is untrue that Wolf was "clearly" drunk or "clearly" exaggerating. I'm unaware of another version of Wolf's story in which she contradicts herself (although I have no reason for disbelieving you). IN fact, I know next to nothing about the entire incident except that I vaguely remembered it, and googled it because of the thread about Harold Bloom. However, the New York magazine version directly contradicts JBI's version of the incident, in the following ways:Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
1) "Bloom suggested that he come to the house I shared with one of his editorial assistants and her boyfriend. At dinnertime." This was AFTER Wolf had unsuccessfully tried to get meetings with him, because she was supposedly doing an accredited independent study course with him. There is nothing in the article (that I saw, I stopped reading after a couple of pages) that suggests he was "visiting his student as usual".
2) Wolf was 20, and probably couldn't legally buy alcohol, although many 20-year-old college seniors are fairly experienced drinkers. It's certainly possible that a couple of glasses of sherry went to her head, and that would explain the vomiting, but she was not "clearly drunk", based on the story I just read. So JBI's "maybe" is possible, but not probable. MY guess: a 20-year-old senior who had been trying to corner her famous professor into reading her poems all semester would be a little careful not to over-indulge.
3) Do you have a link to the "contradictory" published version? If so I'd like to see it (although we may have spent too much time already on a 30-year-old, minor "sexual encroachment" incident).
4) I agree with JBI that there are "far worse things" than a hand on the thigh, although Wolf's contention that the meeting was professional (her professor was coming to dinner to look at her poems, as was his professional duty) makes that inappropriate. IN addition, if Wolf is telling the truth, we can probably assume that this wasn't an isolated incident, and that Bloom made passes at other students, some of which were probably successful.
I wouldn't call Wolf a "scholar". She is a cultural critic who has written best-selling books. Certainly she had a motive for exaggerating her claims about Bloom: the story supports the notion of Wolf's feminist-glamor-girl desirability as well as her victim hood. I also agree that it seems strange to hold a grudge for 20 years (although she claims she doesn't really hold a grudge, and writers are tempted to write stories that will interest readers). Nonetheless, her position about Julian Assange seems to make her MORE believable, not less. I read the interview you linked, and Wolf seems to be saying that women are responsible for saying, "No" clearly, and that the Swedish government's response to dubious rape claims is wholly out of character with Sweden's usual treatment of these cases. I don't know whether this is true -- but it seems irrelevant to her credibility about Bloom, whom she is not accusing of any crime. As is whether she is a first-rate, second-rate, or third-rate scholar.Quote:
Either way, she is a third rate scholar of nonsense and conspiracy theories. It is perhaps useful to suggest that she dismissed the sexual assault charges against one Wikileaks founder as politically motivated nonsense, and the girls should have just said no and gotten over it. It seems interesting to hear that opinion from someone who held a 21 year grudge over a man making a move, and then leaving when declined.
Take a look at this for instance:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/...lyn_friedman_a
Wish I had a pound for every time a female drunk or sober had grabbed me by the thigh!
What do you mean that literary theory has been pretty much extinguished? To be honest, I hope you are right - I'm just curious what you mean by that.Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI
What do so many Litnet members have against literary theory? I admit to knowing next to nothing about it. I read Claude Levi-Strauss when I studied anthropology, and I've read a fair amount of literary criticism, but not much literary theory. However, I was looking at the free Yale University English Lit. courses today, and they have one called "Introduction to Literary Theory". I was thinking of reading it. Here's a link:
http://oyc.yale.edu/english
By the way, I read the course on Modern Poetry a few years back, and I thought it was excellent. I think all the courses are introductory courses, so they may be old hat to those who were Literature majors or grad students, but the rest of us can probably learn something from them. I know I did when I read the Modern Poetry course (you can read transcripts of the lectures along with the assignments, or you can look at and listen to the video. I chose the former.)
Speaking only for myself, I find Theory a bit ... postering, and putting on airs.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecurb
Yale does some amazing online courses, their courses on Dante and Milton, and Modern Poetry, especially the YouTube lectures I have found utterly invaluable.
I just read the first lecture in Paul Fry's "Introduction to theory in literature" course. I found it fascinating (being a literary theory neophyte). Fry speaks directly about the hostility to literary theory that I sometimes see at Litnet:
Many Litnet posters seem hostile to literary theory in much the same way: it seems a threat to the canon of which they are so enamored (witness the endless lists of "greatest" books). Perhaps others see a familiarity with theory as a threat to their own status as well-educated and discriminating readers. I'm not sure.Quote:
During the same period when I was first teaching this course, a veritable six-foot shelf of diatribes against literary theory was being written in the public sphere. You can take or leave literary theory, fine, but the idea that there would be such an incredible outcry against it was one of the most fascinating results of it. That is to say for many, many, many people literary theory had something to do with the end of civilization as we know it. That's one of the things that seems rather strange to us today from an historical perspective: that the undermining of foundational knowledge which seemed to be part and parcel of so much that went on in literary theory was seen as the central crucial threat to rationality emanating from the academy and was attacked in those terms in, as I say, at least six feet of lively polemics. All of that is the legacy of literary theory, and as I say, it arises in part from the element of skepticism that I thought it best to emphasize today.
I'm going to go ahead with the course -- and perhaps start a new thread based on it (although the first text -- "Tony the Tow Truck" -- is unavailable online, and it may be a hassle reading the homework).
Another intriguing bit in the first lecture is:
It appears that Literary Theory is, in part, interested in the relationship between language and consciousness and language and thought. I guess I'll find out as I continue with the course. If other Litnet members are interested, I'll start a thread about the course. Here's the link to the text version of the first lecture:Quote:
I think the sort of skepticism I mean arises from what one might call and what often is called modernity--not to be confused with Modernism, an early twentieth-century phenomenon, but the history of modern thought as it usually derives from the generation of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes. Notice something about all of those figures: Shakespeare is preoccupied with figures who may or may not be crazy. Cervantes is preoccupied with a figure who is crazy--we're pretty sure of that, but he certainly isn't. He takes it for granted that he is the most rational and systematic of all thinkers and raises questions about--since we all take ourselves to be rational too--raises questions about just how we know ourselves not to be paranoid delusives like Don Quixote. So that can be unsettling when we think of this as happening at a certain contemporaneous moment in the history of thought.
Now Descartes, you remember, in his Meditations begins by asking a series of questions about how we can know anything, and one of the skeptical questions he asks is, "Well, might I not be crazy?"
http://oyc.yale.edu/transcript/451/engl-300