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Engineer Deconstructs Literary Criticism
DNS-and-BIND writes "This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
In eleventh grade, I wrote my term paper on The Hobbit. Part of the assignment was to provide literary criticism of the work. I cited sources that stated how JRR Tolkien HATED allegory and reading deeper into works and therefore claimed I didn't need to provide any literary criticism of the Hobbit. My teacher bought it and I got an A. Tolkien rocked because he felt literature should be taken at face value.
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
Happens all the time in meetings everywhere. The boss says something totally wrong and the room is silent.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??
A: An offer you can't understand.
afterwards I'd wondered if we were talking the same language.
The first case was with a techincal support representitive with a large company that had migrated alot of their after-hours support staff off site. (The company rhymes with Crisco, the off site location rhymes with blindia.)
I'm not in any way being critical of the country of origin, and I _know_ this person was speaking in english...but we weren't talking the same language. Curiously, his emails were completely understandable...it was the verbal conversation I couldn't grok.
The second was a meeting of high level Government IT staff, and some other members of government to discuss centralizing Internet services. Things were going well as we all introduced ourselves and stated what we wanted to get out of the collaboration. Then a lady came to the floor and spoke very eloquently for a good five minutes.
I have no clue what she said.
I asked about her afterwards and it turns out that she was a) a lawyer, b) an elected representative, and c) a manager.
Pretty much a lit crit Trifecta!
Naturally the group dissolved after a few meetings when it was determined it was too little too late and the existing issue too complex to put in one box.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
I've always wanted to throw one out of a plane over China, and yell after them as they plummet to their death: "how are you finding that Far-Eastern Gravitation?"
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The article says:
"Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself."
In soviet russia, perhaps.
Baz
That paper used lots of big words and I didn't understand it at all, so it must have been written by really smart people!
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Choose software engineering, then. There is no known defence against the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" counter attack.
Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
You're absolutley right. 90% of the patients I treat are total crap. They could have easily called a cab for their day old cough and sooner be in the ER, than called 911, get up from bed, unlock the door, crawl back into bed, and wait for the medics to find them in bed as if they are really sick.
90% of all the craps you take in you lifetime are also crap, the other 10% being explosive diarrhea, which is just really latin for brown water.
What's the point of this post? Well like 90% of all slashdot comments, it's crap, that will soon get moderated by people who waste their time modertaing crap!
Holy crap, that's alot of crap! We're swimming in it like a sea, which by the way....
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I remember an odd line in that book. At one point, reference is made (at least in the edition I was reading) to a "slime green volume". Since it's such an odd description, I inevitably began to wonder if it was a misprint, for either "lime green" or "slim green". Then I wondered if it could be an intentional misprint. Then I wondered if it wasn't a misprint, but was deliberatly placed to make the reader wonder about this. Then I thought about how clever the translator must have been if it was intentional. Then my head exploded.
Before becoming a software engineer I got a bachelors in psychology. While in college I went to a conference on phenomenology. I had taken a couple courses on the subject and thought I had a handle on it. However, the first speaker I went to was completely incomprehensible to me. Try as I might I could not put more than three sequential words of his together into anything that made any sense. At first I questioned my intelligence, but eventually I came to the conclussion that it was all a bunch of blather.
Standing next to me (it was standing room only) was a hot chick I had spoken to prior to the talk. She was looking up at him like he was the most brilliant man alive, making little nods and short buzzing noises of agreement. I wanted to have sex with her, and this led to my moral transgression.
After he was done speaking she gushed about how brilliant he was. Deep down I wanted to ask her if she could explain what gave her that impression, but instead I agreed with her. My little head was doing the thinking. I even spouted back some of the junk he had said in order to try to impress her.
No...I did not end up having sex with her. She went off to join the groupies surrounding the speaker, and I was left alone in my shame. I had helped to perpetuate the BS.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.