Archive for March 5th, 2009
of the devil’s party: nu milton
Jonathan Bate gives us something strange to think about in his review of Campbell and Corns’s John Milton: Life, work, and thought:
Campbell and Corns discover a Milton who would have been at home in the corridors of New Labour power or in the managerialized modern university.
Strange for me to think about today, in light of my recent post on bureaucracy, and further as yesterday I taught (twice!) Coetzee’s Disgrace, which from the title forward plays out the story of an old-school lit prof (and student seducer) in self-consciously Satanic resistance to, yep, the managerialized modern university in the wake of “the great rationalisation.” Hmmm….
hoaxum
Perhaps one of the most comforting ways to think of the current crisis, if you’re an academic in the humanities with some or lots of investment what we call “theory,” is that it is a giant, real world Sokal hoax, except one written collectively but especially by the Sokaled themselves, and that has exposed the so-called “discipline of economics” as a self-spinning, jargon-laden fraud.
Their journals should be defunded, their tenureships revoked, and I hope that their TIAA-CREF accounts have been well and truly emptied, those guys.
Red asses not yet red enough, here, at the NYT.
