You Have Much to Learn, Young One
So, I'm teaching Literary and Critical Theory, as I always do in the winter, and yesterday was finishing up my patented Galloping Tour of the History of Criticism from Aristotle to the Late 19th Century (have I mentioned how much I hate the quarter system lately?) and got into the part of my spiel about the dangers of being slavishly adherent to any one theory overall. (This is the point where the B.H. likes to chant, "It's a tool, not a school," which is funny, except that a lot of the time it IS a school...but I digress.) Spoke of the difficulty, sometimes, of "forcing" a critical reading on a particular text.
"Yes," chimed in one of my favorite students (an active member of last quarter's brilliant 18th-century lit class), "because isn't it true that sometimes, the material just...isn't there? I mean, like, for instance: you couldn't do a feminist reading of The Hobbit."
[Pause...]
"Ohhhh REEEEEEAAAALLLLYYYY..." said I.
Internets, I buried him.
Took less than five minutes. Binary oppositions and presence/absence FTW.
"Yes," chimed in one of my favorite students (an active member of last quarter's brilliant 18th-century lit class), "because isn't it true that sometimes, the material just...isn't there? I mean, like, for instance: you couldn't do a feminist reading of The Hobbit."
[Pause...]
"Ohhhh REEEEEEAAAALLLLYYYY..." said I.
Internets, I buried him.
Took less than five minutes. Binary oppositions and presence/absence FTW.