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?"

Comments

Wow, this is *old*

[EnVisiCrypt]

This text is several years old, at least. In fact, the wayback machine puts it at about 5 years old.

Come on guys, you know this is really, really old.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Walter Wart]

A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.

Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Jerf]

I was going to RTFA you, but I note Sokal's followup has not been linked yet. In it, he makes the following statement:

Of course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?

Perhaps this will resolve your misunderstanding on why "no on seems to have made that argument"?

War as Text

[weav]

Anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", I recommend you borrow a copy and read the "War as Text" section about a lit-crit conference for which the protagonist is doing IT support. Dovetails nicely with the article, and is a real hoot.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[pilkul]

I find the article is actually hilarious if you take the time to struggle through the Big Words. My favorite passage is this one:

Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:

The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center.

It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something -- of a center starting from which an observer could master the field -- but the very concept of the game ...

Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.

Excellent post on USS Clueless (denbeste.nu)

[splante]

I'd just read the article in this post, after reading about it in this excellent post on the USS Clueless. In it he mentions some of the other articles linked in earlier comments. Definitely worth reading.

The posts on this site are written by a longtime techie Stephen Den Beste, but are not the usual techie subjects. I also like his Strategic Overview of the US war on terror in general, and Iraq in specific.

Also, more techie oriented, this discussion is about the creation of a Super-human Intelligence that's probably not what you'd think it is.

I read USS Clueless pretty much every day now.

Real Academics Reject PoMoLitCrit

[SmackDown]

I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.

Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky on post-modernism

[akuzi]

For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed

Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.

From Chomsky's comments...

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.