Labs, you seriously can't blame all of literary criticism for Eagleton being a douchebag. There's a good reason why no one but stupid first-years likes LT:AI.
no, of course I don't. But he's a particularly egregious example who happened to hit me at the right time.
I went to a philosophy conference once where a comp-lit person gave a paper on Lacan and Hegel -- for whatever reason, she handed out a bibliography before giving her paper, and Eagleton was one of her primary sources (apparently because Lacan is hard to read -- but if so, you're a fucking comp lit person and can read whatever you want!). Anyway, the quality of the paper can easily be guessed.
Shorthand clues are necessary, but I'd love it if that conclusion could have been double-blind tested.
How bad, how derivative, that paper was, compared with others. The study (obviously not worth doing) would submit the same paper with and without the bibliography that "gives it away."
Was just looking around at blogs mentioning T.E. and found this (I'm not going to link, but you can probably google it):
At the after party (wine, cheese, crackers and fruit, of course.) Tom introduced me to Eagleton. He's a warm, cordial man (for someone the Prince of Wales once referred to as "that awful Terry Eagleton"). A mop of short grey hair and stubble. He tilted his chin up a bit and looked at me under his spectacles. We talked about New Orleans a bit and about the time he got to sleep in Madonna's bed when he was in New York (unfortunately, she wasn't in it at the time). I told him that I really loved his memoir The Gatekeeper , which is one of the funniest, sharpest and most satisfying anti-autobiographies I have ever read. It's so, so good.
Okay, the dirty jokes and Oxbridge philosophy should have driven all the lurkers off, but you blew it by mentioning Snakes on a Plane. Prepare to crash.
I understand they are doing reshoots on Snakes just to add gore, dirty words, and nude scenes in order to push up to an 'R" rating. Now that is fan service.
NPR just did a segment on Snakes on a Plane; the announcers' tone almost exactly matched the kind of meta-post-irony I've been seeing around the web.
The whole Snakes on a Plane frenzy is reminding me vaguely of going to see Blade II in the theater with a whole bunch of French special effects techies. On the way out, the deeply committed Goth was disappointed: "It just didn't have the emotional depth of the first movie." I still feel bad about how funny this is to me.
It was pretty bad, regardless. Apparently Lacan's theory of subjectivity is the opposite of Hegel's, in three ways. Yippee!
Goedel, like the Nash of Nash equilibrium and "A Beautiful Mind", was apparently schizophrenic. His wife was apparently a nearly-illiterate woman whose cultural life focused on garden gnomes. There have to lots of good jokes there.
And yet Tim calls ME crazy.
When lyric poets go crazy, science/math types smirk and gloat. But there are plenty of crazy science/math types too.
Based on what I read in Mirowski, Nash was crazy when he did his productive work too -- at some level, a real solipsist.
Yeah, but Mirowski was a little shit.
What's unfortunate about sleeping in Madonna's bed without Madonna in it? Are there those who are attracted to her? I thought she was like Barbra Streisand and Carol Channing.
Expand on that, Ben. Maybe we can ruin the thread for everyone else.
His work is based almost entirely on tendentious secondary sources and he's clearly motivated primarily by envy.
There's a tremendous amount of stuff in his books, and your statement that he's clearly motivated primarily by envy is clearly pulled out of your butt. And in any case, that is not a valid argument.
I wish that Mirowski wrote and organized his books differently, but even so I've found lots of interesting stuff.
In truth I have no idea who Mirowski is.
Well, I guess we can't ruin the thread then. Damn.
RE 18
I just read this after your first comment and the whole time I was thinking "w-lfs-n is right".
What's unfortunate about sleeping in Madonna's bed without Madonna in it?
Sleeping in Madonna's bed without Madonna: classic. Sleeping in Madonna's bed with Madonna: terrifying.
I don't like what he writes at all, but I can confirm that Eagleton is indeed a warm, cordial man (or was back in '88 when I met him).
What I most remember about the encounter is him eagerly singing a humourous song about writers and poets in the canon to the tune of "Pomp and Circumstance" , and it was pretty amusing at the time.
But now that you mention it, of course it's totally in the style of Monty Python.