High and low culture are equally fascinating, but you can’t just do one or the other. You must do both.
- Mark Gerard Lawson
This may be the single most important advice not just for those producing culture but for those interested in and practicing the discipline of Cultural Studies. (And, of course, we should add that [...]
The Dialectician’s Guide to Cultural Studies and Totalization
Day 435: AY!
Wow, I’ve been really bad at this whole blogging thing as of late. (I mean even worse than usual.) I have been insanely busy and practically spent every day in its entirety at coffee shops writing. I’m just finishing an article (which I will be sending out tonight). Also, I hope there will be some [...]
Day 420: The Universal
A while ago I promised to return to writing about issues of critical theory. Yet, I have barely done so. In fact, I have barely blogged as of late. I am not sure why. There is a lot of stuff going on, but most of it is too mundane to bore people with. I am [...]
Day 399: I Need To Vent
Not a lot. Just a little bit. About academia. Nothing dramatic happened. I was just a little upset by a number of talks I recently attended (well, upset may even be too strong–disappointed, rather).
I went to see a Franco Moretti lecture (on the history of the novel). Verdict: terrible! Bad, bad old-school literary scholarship and [...]
Day 398: Materialist Epistemology
Consider the following sentence:
“Only those who transform reality (material and social) are able to gain knowledge of it.”
What’s wrong with this? (And, to up the level of difficulty, what is wrong with it, if you do not want to let go of the following: Hegel, Marx, the dialectic, the material formation of (self) consciousness)? [...]
Day 394: White Folk
People have been talking about this blog quite a lot–even in academia, which is why this entry may be quite fitting:
There are some entries that are rather haphazardly put together, but a number of them are witty and entertaining. Enjoy.
Day 359: Mad Crocs and Other Forms of Advertising–Crikey!
If you’re like me and drink a lot of coffee to stay awake, you may also run into the occasional upset/cramping stomach. In order to fight this, I have been increasingly turning toward energy drinks as a substitute for late-night coffee–works just as well for keeping up energy and alertness during all-nighters, yet spares you [...]
Day 347: It’s Bakhtin Time!
Yes, it is true: the dialogic imagination is in the house! (Maybe, if we’re all really lucky and keep our fingers crossed, the dialectic may even stop by–that is, as long as the dialogic does not deteriorate, as is common, into the logic of the carnivalesque).
Ok, enough pseudo-comedic references to weird Russians. The point of [...]
Day 341: Multiethnic Literature
This semester I am experimenting a bit with alternative teaching and writing formats in my course on Multiethnic Literatures of the U.S. I have created a course blog that will be (at some point–hopefully) pretty much completely student-run. Students are signed up as contributors/authors and will post short responses, as well as longer critical essays [...]
Day 338: Mediations Journal
I will also quickly do my part to advertise the grand inauguration extravaganza of the second series of Mediations, the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. Issue 23.1 is a dossier of contemporary Marxist thought from Brazil. Mediations is published bi-annually. The Fall issues are dossiers of non-U.S. material of interest; the Spring issues are open submission [...]
