"And, as we examine our collective historiographic conscience, we might take note of the Marxist and pseudo-Marxist attempts to read, sometimes perceptively but more often with self-defeating rigidity, the economic doctrines of Karl Marx into the still mysterious creative desires of humanity ( Read more... )

Well, this isn't "academic," exactly -- more like a book review of a pop philosopher. But, look, people, this community's too quiet.

So here's a fine squib thrown into the Thomas Friedman toilet bowl: "... this is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked ...".

From WAKSLER, Frances. C. (1986) Studying Children: Phenomenological Insights. Human Studies, 9, 71-82.

"An anonymous reviewer of Mandell's work (Mandell, 1984a) in a rather vituperative set of comments, saw her claims of children's competence as self-evidently erroneous and as evidence of her incompetence. The reviewer asserted, without ( Read more... )

Somehow, finding snarky reviews is almost too easy. This one is quite nasty, though.

Genesis A, by A. N. Doane, reviewed by Edward B. Irving, Jr. in Speculum 55:1 (1980), pp. 104-106.

Unfortunately Professor Doane labors under the handicap of several major assumptions that consistently distort his presentation of this long biblical paraphrase. (...) ( Read more... )

From The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, lecture VI:

Heidegger's critical judgments on "das Man," on the dictatorship of the public realm and the impotence of the private sphere, on technocracy and mass civilization, are without any originality whatsoever, because they belong to a repertoire of opinions typical of a certain generation of ( Read more... )

I hope it's ok to include an attack on a long-deceased person, as I could not resist musicologist Susan McClary's quote on Beethoven:

The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the ( Read more... )

'It has been said of Beowulf itself that its weakness lies in placing the unimportant things at the centre and the important on the outer edges. (...) I think it profoundly untrue of the poem, but strikingly true of the literature about it.'

(J.R.R. Tolkien, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics")

A quickie from Malise Ruthven's "The Mormons' Progress":

"In a subsequent theophany, on September 21, 1823, Joseph claimed to have been visted by an angel named Moroni (a name that Mormons tactfully refrain from rendering in its adjectival form.)"

The following excerpts are from a book review by David Dumville of Kim McCone and Katharine Simms (ed) Progress in Medieval Irish studies. The review is in Peritia 11 and most of the review is attacks so it is worth reading the whole thing. I can only give excepts here.

The book in question is based on the conference, and right off the bat, Dumville ( Read more... )

I think my favourite example of Academics going on the offensive was when Professor Terry Eagleton revised the preface for Ideology: An Introduction and stuck the knife firmly into Kingsley Amis's corpse and into Martin Amis's chest.

'A racist, anti-semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals. Amis fils has ( Read more... )