Originally Posted by
JBI
Not quite. I did a lot of work on literary theory, half as general background, half as assigned reading. I have, I would argue, read most of the major players, and am familiar with almost all of the big guns of criticism.
Anyway, when you deal with academics, they tend to try to groom you to fit their opinion. They seem to like the conversation, yet at the same time want you to see the world through their lens. They instinctively seem to have a desire to teach, and in the academic world, teaching is turned into quoting very easily.
So much so, I would argue, in the 90s everyone had basically read Foucault and others and they were required. Every chapter of a book needed to begin with a long post-modern epigraph. Theoretical lenses and gendered language (meaning, expressing the world in terms of phallus and vagina) became a must.
So, when I got my big starting kicks, I guess I was groomed to fit into that groove, especially by some of the Japanologists I studied under. The scholars of English I generally studied under tended to be historians for the most part not concerned with theoretical nonsense - a Spenser specialist, and Chaucerian, an Eliot authority, and a Canadianist. I had one professor from Berkley (a specialist on Joyce) lecture about nonsense, mixing in theoretical crap, and then ranting how she was not being rehired for the next term and that we should petition. The majority of my theoretical background actually came from professors in their late 30s, who seemed so preoccupied with their theoretical perspectives that they lost track of their own work - it became reading Foucault in Salman Rushdie, or Edward Said reads Jamaica Kincaid.
I think my big break seems to have come from the Eliot specialist, who really groomed me, I guess, and a historian I did research under specializing in modern Korean History, and researching domesticity. He I think was the first person to tell me not everyone is a post-modernist, and not everybody subscribes to this theoretical stuff.
As for the chicks, well, for the theory girls, they all seemed groomed and ready to drop names whenever they could. They always seemed to smoke, pretend to be political, have dark senses of irony, and, ironically, have boat loads of money from their parents. It is a form of snobbery in the worst sense, these girls who would sit their ranting about the world and gender issues, meanwhile exploiting the system that their parents worked so hard to ruin. Who really cares if someone can understand Zizeck - he is not actually relevant outside of a very small community of a certain type of reader.
The historian girls are more fun anyway, they are far more down to earth, and they don't smoke. I am more interested in talking, or going out with women who I can talk to about something other than education-related, or theory-related material. In the end, the people one likes best are those they can get along with outside of a fixed environment. Theory people always seem to have something to prove, and offer the most bland form of conversation that makes you wonder if you are arguing with them, or their reading list.
