{"id":27425,"date":"2014-08-19T07:57:23","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T12:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27425"},"modified":"2014-08-19T07:57:23","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T12:57:23","slug":"academic-criticism-kills-everything-it-touches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/19\/academic-criticism-kills-everything-it-touches\/","title":{"rendered":"Academic criticism kills everything it touches"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the <em>LA Review of Books<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/essay\/kills-everything-touches-perils-studying-geoff-dyerdanel-marc-janes\" target=\"_blank\">Daniel Marc Janes<\/a> explains why so much academic writing &mdash; especially literary criticism &mdash; is so tediously dust-dry and boring:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>IN THE COURSE of this essay, I want to examine Geoff Dyer and his relationship with the academic establishment. The aforementioned relationship, I will go on to argue, has heretofore been an uneasy one, but the occurrence of a significant, apparently paradoxical event has provided the ideal research opportunity with which to conduct said examination. As I will reveal, this event \u2014 the organization of an academic conference in his honor \u2014 lays bare the manifest tensions in his work between a hostility to what he considers deadening academic analysis and a profound desire to get closer to his subject. The organization of my essay is as follows.<\/p>\n<p>I cannot blame you if you have stopped reading by now; Geoff Dyer certainly would have. To Dyer, this kind of prose \u2014 with its pathological signposting and life-sucking verbosity \u2014 exemplifies all that is wrong with the academic world. In a 2011 <em>New York Times<\/em> column, he eviscerates a work of criticism for precisely these reasons: the art historian Michael Fried\u2019s <em>Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before<\/em>, whose long-windedness trickles down from its title.<\/p>\n<p>But it is in 1998\u2019s <em>Out of Sheer Rage<\/em> that Dyer truly gets his knives out. The book describes his failed attempts to write a scholarly study of D. H. Lawrence. As he drudges through a <em>Longman Critical Reader<\/em> on the author, he finds himself increasingly angered by its contents: trendy theoretical titles like \u201cLawrence, Foucault and the Language of Sexuality\u201d and \u201cRadical Indeterminacy: a post-modern Lawrence.\u201d He wonders:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>How could these people with no feeling for literature have ended up teaching it, writing about it? [\u2026] writing like that kills everything it touches. That is the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are busy killing everything they touch.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In Dyer\u2019s mind, the academic conference may be the worst offender of all. He goes on to describe his horror on meeting an academic who specialises in Rainer Maria Rilke:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>You don\u2019t teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke! You turn him to dust and then you go off to conferences where dozens of other academic-morticians gather with the express intention of killing Rilke and turning him to dust. Then, as part of the cover-up, the conference papers are published, the dust is embalmed and before you know it literature is a vast graveyard of dust, a dustyard of graves.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the LA Review of Books, Daniel Marc Janes explains why so much academic writing &mdash; especially literary criticism &mdash; is so tediously dust-dry and boring: IN THE COURSE of this essay, I want to examine Geoff Dyer and his relationship with the academic establishment. The aforementioned relationship, I will go on to argue, has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[86,294,134],"class_list":["post-27425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","tag-criticism","tag-literature","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-78l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27426,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27425\/revisions\/27426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}