Monday, January 13, 2014

More pushing back …

… Nothing More Timeless Than Ignorance by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

This year’s [MLA] conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.” 
How can anyone take someone who writes this sort of drivel seriously? And why would anyone think that persons trafficking in this sort of pseudo- discourse could even address let alone solve any of the world's  problems?

2 comments:

  1. Whatever happened to MLA's original concerns: literature, English composition, and rhetoric? This validates my decision to cease being interested in MLA (my former professional organization) way back in the late 90s.

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  2. And here is another rotten aspect of this: graduate students and tenure-seeking English professors bend over backwards hoping to have their papers accepted for reading at these kinds of MLA clambakes. So, you have to wonder about dim-witted people in the academy who wonder about the declining prestige of dim-witted English departments. It is all so clear.

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