Roland Barthes famously announced the death of the author. This weekend, as thousands of professors and their apprentices mill about the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego, one might ask: Has theory succumbed to the same fate? … [T]heory’s promised political liberation never happened. Cultural theory, he argues, instead mutated into a free-for-all, where students now use Derrida to deconstruct ”Friends,” not to change the world – an outcome he calls ”politically catastrophic.” —Matthew Price reviews Terry Eagelton’s After Theory —The self-critic: The man who praised literary theory to thousands of students now wants them to bury it (The Boston Globe)
Hmm… if people really are using theory to critique “Friends,” does that not mean that critical thinking and deconstruction as a skill has penetrated enough people’s lives that theory has escaped the hallowed halls of academe and the dusty stacks of the library? And if so, is that a good thing? Eagelton is frustrated that graduate students who have the world-changing potential of Marxism at their fingertips are frittering their time away with playful language games, instead of doing something; they analyze the erotic body, but ignore the famished body.
I have always had difficulty with the moral relativism that reigned in my graduate seminars. In two short weeks I’ll start teaching a course on “Media Aesthetics,” so I’ll be wrestling with such issues (“What is beautiful? What is good?”) on a regular basis. (I’ve blogged about Richard Rorty’s pragmatism before.) Aestheticism has its own set of problems, but a dogmatic devotion to literary theory can be just as isolating.
Another corner building. Designed and textured. Needs an interior. #blender3d #design #aesthetics #medievalyork #mysteryplay
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Thanks for your thoughts, Mike. Yes, the purists lament that theory is being wasted on trivial texts. I am going to ask them to look at Chaucer and Shakespeare and some of the other classics. I flirted with the idea of doing The Lord of the Rings, but few students will have read the novels. This is the syllabus that I'm still struggling with... one of the best bits of advice I got while struggling with theory as an undergrad was that theory is not something you learn, as you learn facts and names from history; instead, it is something you DO. And if you choose to DO it on anime or comic books or music videos or novels, you can still come away better equipped to analyse the texts that surround us.
As a pop culture critic myself, I'm fascinated by this stuff. I blogged this book in Oct, but haven't been able to read it yet. But what I think Eagleton forgets is that cultural specificity applies to different generations, including his own, too. The kids of today are children of TV, intellectually raised by Sesame Street and Barney and the Tele-Tubbies. So Eagleton -- raised on Brit Lit -- is alienated by their interest in media texts, and lashes out at the theory that enables their critical analysis of it.
Anyway, good luck with this Media Aesthetics course! There's potential for this to be an extremely fun and fascinating course -- sounds like one I'd like to take myself -- but potentially a difficult one to teach to undergrads. Synthesizing theory into a class for sophomores and juniors is a challenge; at times it can be demoralizing. I am shocked when I hear my students say they've never even seen Star Wars, let alone a Marx Brothers film, let alone the nightly news. How to teach aesthetics to students who haven't seen enough "art" let alone "media"?
I did a Google search on "Media Aesthetics Syllabus" just to see how others were teaching this sort of class, and the range of differences is amazing. Lots of freedom to interpret the class title -- you might find it liberating. Sounds like you're really researching the philosophical side of the coin. I'm sure that they get a lot of that in Lit Crit, if they take it (journalism students probably don't, however). If I were teaching this course, I gotta tell you that goal #1 would be to get students more practice in seeing how form sometimes invisibly shapes content ("context" -- cultural, historical, and not "morally relative" -- sometimes dictates the form, of course, which is where "aestheticism" might come in overtly...). Like, looking at how the structure of a TV show differs from a film which differs from a novel -- perhaps all different versions of the same "content" (like, say, THE DEAD ZONE -- which appeared in all three media) and discuss why that's okay for TV and okay for film and okay for the novel. You could as easily apply Rorty's pragmatism as teach it!
Anyway, I'm blathering as I sip my morning coffee. I look forward to hearing how this class goes, whether in your blog or in the hallways, Dennis!