Obvious but not obvious

[owl_of_minerva]

Here's a question for you all: name a text from your field/discipline that is ABSOLUTELY STANDARD and EVERYONE READS IT by at least their first or second year of grad school or so, such that you forget that most folks outside your field/discipline probably haven't read it (or haven't read more than, say, a brief excerpt or so). Do you find it

Comments

[ceciliaj]

I was so jealous of The Body in Pain that I took it out of the library yesterday. It is amazing, and I also looked at On Beauty and Being Just, which is super amazing as well.

I liked this passage:

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

[pauldeman2pt0]

I was less impressed by On Beauty and Being Just.

Sadly, I feel that there's been a decline with Elaine...

I don't know.

[ceciliaj]

Yeah, I'm not sure how strikingly original it was, but it was really enjoyable to read. It didn't strike me as "theory," really, but more as literary criticism.

[owl_of_minerva]

That's a nice passage.

[elricmelnibone]

In my field, I think it depends on the sub-field. I can't think of any one standard text everyone reads, or that I think everyone should read. But maybe that's because it's early.

Oh, and I love telling people that Elaine Scarry and I attended the same PhD program, though separated by a few years.

[max_ambiguity]

I can think of two essays and one textbook that I pretty much expect everyone in film studies to have read, but I never forget that people outside my discipline haven't read them. I'm not sure if it's because film studies is too small, or too new, or just too "not serious," but I really don't expect others to have read these:

Andre Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image"
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, "Film Art"

[ceciliaj]

I was thinking of that Benjamin for English, too, but I wasn't sure. Like Elric, I think it depends on subfield.

[elricmelnibone]

Best I can tell, what one reads is often dependent on where one does graduate work. In my MA program, everyone read Derrida. In my PhD program, nobody did. I suspect that programs may tend to work with a core, something that's more or less organically developed and then becomes standard for that program.

[pauldeman2pt0]

There is an entire canon that is absolutely standard [tm], but my field is so obscure that I also never expect anyone outside of it to be familiar with absolutely any of the aforementioned absolutely standard [tm] texts.

Are you just reading Elaine now???

I remember finding her for the first time in 2005, when I was researching for my M.A. thesis. She rocks. And I am actually about to start re-reading The Body in Pain shortly, because my paper for the 2008 MLA convention in San Fran is on "cruelty" in NAME OF POEM HERE (the panel is called "Name of Panel"), and in the poem all words derived from "cruel" are embedded in stanzas which describe, in painful detail, the infliction of physical violence / wounding.

Note: Edited to remove all references which might otherwise directly identify me. I just realized that this post is public. ;)

[owl_of_minerva]

Yep, publicarama.

I am just reading Elaine Scarry now! I remember you and gradx speaking of her work fondly, so I've had it on my theorysanta list twice, and thanks to the theory fairy received it a little while ago.

Part of the reason behind this post was that it seems that she's really, really well known, but with my philosophy blinkers on I didn't know about her work at all, and without the theorycrew I might never have really heard of her.

[pauldeman2pt0]

That's an extremely poor, watered-down understanding of her actual argument.

Also, LMFAO.

[pauldeman2pt0]

I just noticed that you tagged this entry with 'ps cocks.'

AHAHAHAHAHHAA.

LOVE. YOU.