Derrida

[Anonymous No.3020644]

At a lecture about English literature education a few days ago, the speaker (an Oxford poetry professor) accused Derrida and deconstructivists (alongside the treatment of creative writing as an academic study) of damaging it by reducing everything to 'texts'. Is there any truth to this? Is Derrida worth reading, or is it all academia ladder-climbing tosh as he said?

[Anonymous No.3020650]

In short...

>Is there any truth to this?

Yes.

>is it all academia ladder-climbing tosh as he said?

Yes.

[Anonymous No.3020657]

Could you elaborate a little more on his argument? What you've said doesn't really mean anything.

[Anonymous No.3020658]

What did he think of poetry as if not a text?

[Anonymous No.3020677]

>>3020657
You obviously havent read anything by Derrida.

[Anonymous No.3020682]

>>3020658
A work, which is a continually evolving and changing piece.

[Anonymous No.3020686]

>>3020657
I didn't fully get it either, which is why I'm here. Part of it seemed to be the idea that Derrida's work has led education to move away from 'the cannon' and focus too highly on contemporary literature, because they are deemed to be more relevant, and excessive focus on the idea that 'there's no subjectively good lit so we can put anything on the syllabus'. Every time he mentioned literary theory, he said "quote - unquote", if that is any help to the mindset he was in.

>>3020658
He kept saying 'a poem is a poem'. That is, not a representation of anything else.

[Anonymous No.3020695]

>>3020682

You're just being difficult.

>>3020686

I get the syllabus part in relation to the issue of things being "texts." That if I can get something out of analyzing an ad as a text, I can include it in my course. I can see how he can feel that is damaging to poetry, but does he really think we are in danger of having a significant number of people thinking there's no difference between Paradise Lost and, say, Half-Life?

[Anonymous No.3020696]

>>3020686
At first I thought he was some kind of shithead, but he's right about that

[Anonymous No.3020706]

Derrida's work was certainly destructive in that sense, but he's still worth reading, if only to understand why it happened.

[Anonymous No.3020716]

>>3020695
He seemed very worried at the introduction of a creative writing a-level that "claims to have no overlap with English Lang. or English Lit. a-levels". I had wanted to ask him just how serious a threat he saw that, but I didn't have time to wait behind.

[Anonymous No.3020720]

>>3020706
>>3020706

This.

His work isn't "wrong", it just isn't useful.

[Anonymous No.3020724]

>>3020716
Creative writing courses are the worst. Literally everything you learn in them is wrong

[Anonymous No.3020735]

>>3020650
This.

[Anonymous No.3020743]

>>3020720
Not only that, but his Derrida's work has some rather unpleasant consequences. And "umpleasant" is a word that rings way louder than "true" in some circles.

[Anonymous No.3020745]

>>3020743
his (Derrida's)*

[Anonymous No.3020761]

>>3020743
>has some rather unpleasant consequences

like what?

>>3020720
how is it not useful?


is he typical nihilist scum?

[Anonymous No.3020765]

>>3020761
Like the author's opinions not being more valid about his work than any other's. After you write it, it's text and it stands on itself.

[Anonymous No.3020767]

>creative writing as an academic study
why would you do that?

[Anonymous No.3020769]

>>3020765
well then i'll keep my work to myself haha fuck derrerp WHAT NOW?

[Anonymous No.3020774]

>>3020765

That was Barthes.

[Anonymous No.3020790]

>>3020677
I have read Derrida. Not sure how much I really understood. Care to explain?

>>3020686
Well, Derrida's work was only a part of a very big move to politicize humanities, and in recent years this has especially been cultivated to foster media literacy (the lack of it-- suckers aren't being born every minute now, they're being trained every second) as a growing concern.

I think he has a good point in regards to Derrida's textual semi-nihilism, but ultimately it's not a danger, it's a nuisance.

[Anonymous No.3020796]

>reducing everything to 'texts'

So what?
Does he even know what text implies? I think it's rather beautiful.

[Anonymous No.3020803]

>>3020796
>beautiful nihilism

[Anonymous No.3020804]

The entire activity of deconstruction is just ideological masturbation. There's no legitimate intellectual pursuit here at all. Try being a conservative or a liberal in an English literature department and see how far you get.

[Anonymous No.3020805]

Derrida is hardly in any way nihilistic. Deconstruction is probably one of the least nihilistic ideas ever invented, in fact

[Anonymous No.3020807]

>>3020805
In fact, I think only the idea of God beats it

[Anonymous No.3020812]

>>3020804
>Try being a conservative or a liberal in an English literature department and see how far you get.

I don't follow.

[Anonymous No.3020829]

Derrida is an annoying shit and like someone said above, deconstruction is just masturbation.

Useless.

[Anonymous No.3020848]

>>3020829
>masturbation
>useless
haha no
I currently have about a serving spoon of an argument against this in my hand

[Anonymous No.3020855]

>>3020829
>>3020804
>i've never read derrida but i heard somewhere his books are really dense and esoteric and have you heard about the SOKAL AFFAIR? what a bunch of hacks the blue drapes are just blue drapes authorial intent is all that matters i don't really understand what the words deconstruction, post-modern, or post-structural mean and can't be arsed to learn anything new so i'll just say its leftist nonsense hemingway was the best author ever anime is the greatest. foucault was a bitchmade faggot anime literally rules my life

[Anonymous No.3020868]

>>3020855
Mentioning anime is literally always funny, no matter the context.

[Anonymous No.3020883]

>>3020855
I've read/studied excerpts of Derrida along with subsequent essays about his work.

And anime is garbage.

[Anonymous No.3021304]

>>3020855
The Sokal Affair was relevant then and it's relevant today, and it's going to stay that way no matter how many times you guys can declare it off-limits for discussion.

[Anonymous No.3021310]

>>3021304
>implying anybody was actually hoaxed.

[Anonymous No.3021314]

>>3020644
>At a lecture about English literature education a few days ago, the speaker (an Oxford poetry professor) accused Derrida and deconstructivists (alongside the treatment of creative writing as an academic study) of damaging it by reducing everything to 'texts'. Is there any truth to this? Is Derrida worth reading, or is it all academia ladder-climbing tosh as he said?

Derrida fled the room crying, and fell to his knees shouting "Only semantically encoded literature in the form of documents are texts, written by an Author whose identity and internality are central to the correct interpretation of meaning."

The poetry professor stood up and the entire colloquium praised the hermeneutic method and close reading of texts. The Spirit of the Age flew into the room and landed on a copy of JC Ransom (1941) _The New Criticism _ where upon it shed a single epigram.

Derrida proceeded outside where he stepped in front of a taxi.

BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT
ps Character and Plot

[Anonymous No.3021327]

>>3021304
It's not relevant.

Sokal was published on the merit of his credentials alone, not the substance of the article.

Hoax implies that it was published because people were fooled into thinking it had a quality that it didn't. It isn't a hoax, it was published for a desirable quality that it definitely had: a popular author with a track record of well received articles.

[Anonymous No.3021341]

>>3020686

>Part of it seemed to be the idea that Derrida's work has led education to move away from 'the cannon' and focus too highly on contemporary literature, because they are deemed to be more relevant

If that happened, it was because of a misunderstanding of Derrida. A pretty gross misunderstanding. The idea of deconstruction is ahistorical in this sense (but not in other senses).

>and excessive focus on the idea that 'there's no subjectively good lit so we can put anything on the syllabus'.

Two things:

1. That first clause doesn't logically follow into the second.

2. No one has ever claimed there's no such thing as subjectively good literature. That's nonsense.

Who was this professor? He seems to barely understand what he's talking about.

[Anonymous No.3021344]

>>3021304
>>3021327

The Sokal affair is continuously relevant—idiots publish shit in non-peer reviewed journals all the time.

[Anonymous No.3021354]

>>3021344
All kinds of journals - including scientific, peer-reviewed journals - publish/don't look over tons of terrible articles.

It is not unique to cultural studies (as Sokal made it appear)

[Anonymous No.3021371]

>>3021354
Yes, but in the case of Sokal's tripe he stalked a new non-peer reviewed journal dedicated to publishing any old crap that came along specifically as an experiment. This is the equivalent of me founding the International Journal of Speculative Physics and publishing TIMECUBE in it; and, then using this as a stick to beat Nature with.

[Anonymous No.3021383]

>>3021371

golfclap.png

[Anonymous No.3022139]

>>3021341
Peter McDonald of Christchurch, Oxford

[Anonymous No.3022148]

>>3021341
http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/college/profile/academics/peter-mcdonald

please keep in mind there's obviously going to be slight distortion from his actual view and my interpretation of his expression of it

[Anonymous No.3022180]

> Is Derrida worth reading, or is it all academia ladder-climbing tosh as he said?

As soon as anything becomes involved with academia, it takes on an element of academia ladder-climbing tosh. You have to be willing and able to identify what elements of a thing are bullshit perpetuated for careerist / social reasons, and set them aside. It's not really that hard.

I think there's some truth to the guy's argument, but I also think there's some value to Derrida's arguments. It's a valuable way to think about things. Eh.

[Anonymous No.3022186]

>>3022180
So the point is that you can't generate results which possess disciplinary meaning from this argument, and instead equivocate?

[Anonymous No.3022192]

>>3022186
suck my dick

i don't have time for this mickey mouse bullshit

[Anonymous No.3022196]

>>3022192
I'm so glad you're working in a STEM field along with the engineers.

[Anonymous No.3022203]

>>3022196
sorry i "can't produce results with disciplinary meanings"

fuck academic disciplines

[Anonymous No.3022202]

>>3022192

[Anonymous No.3022225]

>>3020644
Funnily enough, both 'positions' are wrong. The poetry professor is an elitist idiot who is elevating the importance and value of written art in the universe in a self-deluding attempt at increasing the importance of his class and his life-work.

Derrida is basically right about texts being texts, and since that in itself is not an utterly incredible novelty, you don't have to read him, either. Derrida's method of 'deconstruction' is not new in any technical sense, it is just that his style is pretentious in a certain way that made it appeal to the humanities, and it is vague enough that everyone will be able to not actually question those values that they do believe in. All in all, Derrida is a completely uninnovative relativist who said more or less the same as every relativist ever, his specific allure is that he said it with a strong aura of intellectualism (by what thinkers and texts he refers to), and in such a vague way that Derrida can for you be just as radical as you want him to be. It's perfect, a giant box of build-your-own-philosophical-radicalism, with all the quotes you need to feel like a real Leftist. Suddenly your PhD about 18th century poetry isn't so useless, because you can read it in a way that deconstructs power, or the subject, or any other concept that you might want to chose as your own personal windmill in the quest of academic pretend-political writing.

[Anonymous No.3022236]

>>3022225
Except your sister disciplines think you're thumb fucking yourself in church while you're menstruating and refuse to have tea with literary criticism until it goes back on the pills.

[Anonymous No.3022237]

>>3022225
And to all others

Im just beginning to get into "existential" philosophy, mainly Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus, and am about to get into Husserl and Heidegger.

If I enjoy Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Camus so far, would it be a good idea to go into the other two? Would it also be good to go into Derrida and other post-structuralists (and structuralists)?

tldr; What is worth reading that came after Nietzsche if I enjoyed him?

[Anonymous No.3022241]

>>3022225
>Derrida's method of 'deconstruction' is not new in any technical sense, it is just that his style is pretentious in a certain way that made it appeal to the humanities, and it is vague enough that everyone will be able to not actually question those values that they do believe in. All in all, Derrida is a completely uninnovative relativist who said more or less the same as every relativist ever
That's a very long winded way of saying "I don't understadn deconstruction"

[Anonymous No.3022250]

>>3022241
Not him, but can anyone point out what is so special about deconstruction? I admittedly have not read Derrida but my brief reading on EB does not make it out to be anything particularly groundbreaking.

Quote via wikipedia:
>writing has been considered as merely a derivative form of speech, and thus as a "fall" from the "full presence" of speech

I'm pretty sure Marshall McLuhan and every media-conscious person of the past century said that, for example. Can anyone expound on why I would want to bother reading Derrida?

[Anonymous No.3022256]

>>3022250
Because everyone else in your department has and you don't have a strong enough personal sense of "bullshit" to simply snub them on this scholarly topic and continue to engage in critique, or hermeneutics or heaven forbid a discipline other than lit crit.

[Anonymous No.3022257]

>>3022250
>>writing has been considered as merely a derivative form of speech, and thus as a "fall" from the "full presence" of speech
>I'm pretty sure Marshall McLuhan blah blah blah
Derrida goes against that, which is partly why he's the darling of literature departments. So he argues that writing is not derivative of speech but its own thing, the only reason we privelege speech over writing is because of the "metaphysics of presence". Derrida wants to question this, and in fact that's what deconstruction is, questioning things we privelege due to the metaphysics of presence.

[Anonymous No.3022271]

>>3022256
Ha-ha, joke's on you, I am not a student and have no one to share the burden of try-hard intellectualism with!

>>3022257
Okay... I suppose that is a little more stimulating but doesn't sound like it's going to be on the top of my reading pile.

Thanks for the input.

[Anonymous No.3022280]

>>3022271
It's better to read Heidegger and Nietzsche before Derrida, he's just pushed a lot earlier because it justifies lit departments analysing written texts without reference to spoken language. If you read anyone contemporary though, you're probably going to be pretty lost without knowing a bit of Derrida.

[Anonymous No.3022282]

>>3022271
>Ha-ha, joke's on you, I am not a student and have no one to share the burden of try-hard intellectualism with!
So, what you're saying is, you get to read Derrida—despite Derrida being shit—because you don't have to buy into peer pressure to read Derrida, despite the only reason being to read Derrida being peer pressure.

Also I wasn't describing students, I was describing colleagues.

[Anonymous No.3022284]

>>3022280
Huh. So where exactly is philosophy today? Is there still a analytical vs. continental divide? Is Existentialism of phenomenology still studied/discussed?

[Anonymous No.3022287]

>>3022284
>Is there still a analytical vs. continental divide?
No. There never really was, it was a way for "analytic" philosophers to pat themselves on the back.
>Is Existentialism of phenomenology still studied/discussed?
Yes, of course. Derrida is very strongly linked to both by the way.

[Anonymous No.3022290]

>>3022287
>Divide being an analytic gimmic

No way. Not disagreeing with you, but ive never heard of this. How did you come to this?

[Anonymous No.3022291]

>>3022280
I'm already familiar with them, which is why this seems relatively uninteresting.
>he's just pushed a lot earlier because it justifies lit departments analysing written texts without reference to spoken language
lel, okay. That explains a lot.

>>3022282
Yes. I don't have intelligent friends/coworkers either. :(

If it satisfies you I am planning on reading several smutty romanticism novels and the Vulgate first.

[Anonymous No.3022296]

>>3022236
I have no idea what you are talking about, but I appreciate the sentiment!

>>3022241
>>That's a very long winded way of saying "I don't understadn deconstruction"

Nope, not really. Double writing? Read the first Abhandlung of Zur Genealogie der Moral. Supplementarity/Pharmakon/Hyphen? Only seems remarkable if you are a ridiculously pious Platonist before reading Derrida. No one thinks that words have the static, stable kind of meaning that Derrida insinuates the necessity of showing to be inexistent. His example of the dictionary is hilariously bad, he is ontologizing the distribution of meaning in the text by grabbing the missing referent in Saussures conception of the sign and pulling on this string until the whole thing unravels. But instead of saying: "look, there was a mistake with the knitting" he says "look, pullovers are really just big random piles of string! There is no such thing as a pullover!" (okay, I went a bit overboard here, applying his method to the tertium of my metaphor... whelp).

Anyway, the metaphysical notion of identity and presence that Derrida argues against only exists in the minds of neurasthenic Idealist shut-in intellectuals in the first place. Yes, Platonism is bad, yes "The Word was God" is the source of our subjection under a sanctified, abstract model of rationality that has been accepted into a supposedly secular modern mode of thought (Humanism/Liberalism/Capitalism). However, there is absolutely no need to be a pretentious douche about pointing it out, and Derrida was hardly the first person to address any of this.

[Anonymous No.3022297]

>>3022291
It does, but it saddens me that you're wasting your theorist reading time on Derrida. I guess I'll just have to wait for lit crit to clean its own stables.

[Anonymous No.3022299]

>>3022148
>Hobbies
>Cooking

Sounds like a fun dude!

[Anonymous No.3022301]

>>3022297
>>I guess I'll just have to wait for lit crit to clean its own stables.

That is a truly herculean task... *wink* *wink* *nudge*

[Anonymous No.3022318]

>>3022296
>But instead of saying: "look, there was a mistake with the knitting" he says "look, pullovers are really just big random piles of string! There is no such thing as a pullover!"
Pullovers are piles of string though. Derrida doesn't, as it were, deny that it is a pullover either. And the idea that he is "unravelling" the pullover is a false one, the pullover would instead unravel itself, and in doing so show that there is no grounding idea of a it being a "pullover" over it being, I don't know, a "jumper" or "trousers" or a "flag". There is some transcendental idea of it being a "pullover" (the trace), mainly due to context. To add, viewing Derrida as opposed to the philosophy of Plato is ungrounded. He is opposed to the dialectic, in particular as proposed by Hegel. And as far as being similar to Nietzsche is concerned, that is family resemblance, what did you expect?

[Anonymous No.3022342]

>>3022318
>family resemblance
But they are not in the same generation, I was pointing out that deconstruction is not new, its basic mechanism is a kind of critique that has been around almost forever. The distinctions you introduce of 'being unravelled' vs 'unravelling itself' are merely cosmetic, and I think you know that. The pullover I was talking about is Saussure's conception of the sign, btw, not a real pullover, or the concept of a pullover. The example of the dictionary is retarded because the sign exists in the brain, not on paper. In the dictionary, both the term and its explanation are a (respectively an agglomerate of) sign(s), Derrida uses it to show how meaning is deferred, but that is retarded because the dictionary entry for a word is not the sign of the word, it is precise just the signifiers being in relation to each other. The problem with Saussure is that the referential function is missing (or marginalized). From this lack of a connection to the outside of language, Derrida goes on to devalue even the importance of the signified (which is the 'unravelling' I was talking about: if there is no content that comes into language from the outside, there is no way of creating meaning beyond the negative difference. However, there is a difference between value and signification, at least in the translation I read, but I'm not sure in how far that factors into Derrida's reading).

[Anonymous No.3022352]

>>3022296
>the metaphysical notion of identity and presence that Derrida argues against only exists in the minds of neurasthenic Idealist shut-in intellectuals in the first place.

What's wrong with it? how is it bad and wrong and what are the benefits of not believing in it? fucking modern "philosophy" and its depressing bullshit

[Anonymous No.3022366]

>>3022342
>But they are not in the same generation
No, but there is a very clear influence going Nietzsche -> Heidegger -> Derrida. It'd be surprising if there were no similarities.
>I was pointing out that deconstruction is not new
It was, if you think Nietzsche invented you are mistaken.
>The distinctions you introduce of 'being unravelled' vs 'unravelling itself' are merely cosmetic, and I think you know that.
It is a very important distinction, as illustrated by Derrida's use of the reflexive "se deconstruire". Wishing it away will not change that. If you need a propee perspective on it, you'd have to tackle Heidegger and try to get his idea of being.
>The pullover I was talking about is Saussure's conception of the sign, btw, not a real pullover, or the concept of a pullover. The example of the dictionary is retarded because the sign exists in the brain, not on paper.
Are you actively trying to be an idiot? Insofar as that word on the paper is considered to refer to something out there, it is a sign. Just because signs can point to other signs doesn't mean the signs they point to aren't signs.
>From this lack of a connection to the outside of language, Derrida goes on to...
Derrida is not talking about "language" he is talking about "text". These are rather different things. It is a common mistake to confuse "signs" and "language" and thus "language" and "text".

[Anonymous No.3022376]

Is anyone else seeing the irony in debating the correct interpretation of Derrida?

[Anonymous No.3022378]

>>3022366
>>Insofar as that word on the paper is considered to refer to something out there, it is a sign.
Nope, it's not a sign, its a signifier. L2Saussure.

[Anonymous No.3022383]

>>3020724
This. In the context of a creative writing course, every good tip becomes a rule, and everything becomes deservedly harmful to writing, unless you expend abnormal amounts of energy just overcoming the very hindrance to your writing that a creative writing course presents.

[Anonymous No.3022922]

OP here. Found a transcript of the lecture, not posting it all but here's some of relevance:
>Some time ago – it is hard to say when exactly, but certainly by the time I was myself working as a postgraduate student in the mid-1980s – departments of English found literary evaluation to have become an embarrassment. What was then called – rather grandly, and very misleadingly, in retrospect – ‘literary theory’ was generally holding centre stage, and one of the many effects of this was to undermine the idea of what was called a literary ‘canon’ – books, that is, which it had been felt were important ones to know about, written by authors who were (or had once been) people of flesh and blood, living with others in a number of actual and knowable points of history. ‘High’ theory – roughly speaking, that of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his followers – always struck me as being ‘high’ only in so far as it was thoroughly intoxicated by its own counter- intuitive and counter-literary abstractions; and in due course, it became ‘high’ in the way that meat is high as it goes off; but its one solid achievement – its decisive blow for the worse to the culture of learning – was to reduce all kinds of literary works to mere ‘texts’ in Universities. One ‘text’ was as good as another for the purposes of what was known as ‘deconstruction’; and poetry, in line with this, was simply another kind of ‘discourse’. To pretend otherwise, one was told again and again, was to be party to a discredited system of illusions, in which cultural control was masquerading as ‘value’. (Nobody ever asked, of course, why the theorists of that time were so obsessed with control and the structures of power; but a number of third-rate 1980s deconstructionists were to prove themselves dab hands at institutional manipulation and control as they rose through the academic ranks later on.)

[Anonymous No.3022928]

>Suddenly, the whole idea of a core of literary texts and genres which one needed to know before being in a position to exercise critical judgement was old news, and evaluation itself was taken as a sign of attachment to the corrupt manners of some quasi-Leavisite ancien régime. As the rebel lecturers of the 1980s matured into the tenured professors of the 1990s and after, with departments of their own to run, the wildest intellectual excesses of deconstruction went the way of ponytails and jeans; but the canon was gone – in the favoured critical language, it had been ‘put under interrogation’ (given the far-left European origins and affiliations of ‘theory’, this was either fatally unselfconscious language or downright sinister). With literature flattened into an unbounded landscape of ‘texts’, a loose kind of cultural history took root in English departments: this text illustrated that thing, and one’s history of choice could be traced through ever more involved labyrinths of the literary and what had once been the non- or sub-literary. ‘Literature’ (let alone ‘poetry’) had been replaced by ‘texts’. In a sense, a thousand flowers bloomed; but only in a sense, for we abolished any distinction between flowers and weeds – not to mention the dedicated cultivation of exotic flora made entirely from plastic.

[Anonymous No.3022930]

>Alongside all of this, or rather perhaps under its protective shade, a new academic subject was quietly being born, which would extend its reach quickly into school curricula. This was something called contemporary literature, and it was all too easy to define. ‘Literature’ was a word much bandied about in the promotion of all this; but it was a weasel word, for it had already been hollowed out, and was being used only for its surface effect. According to the circular logic (which no one by the 1990s any longer dared to question), texts being studied were literary because they were contemporary; literature, we were reminded repeatedly, could not be a matter only of dead works by dead authors, and these were contemporary texts; and it was somehow to be tremendously empowering for young people to know that living people wrote literature too, that because it was contemporary it was automatically relevant to their needs and interests, and that (here the cultural politics came in explicitly) this literature spoke from and about authorial personalities and identities which had often been marginalised in the past.

[But is it art? !!m1xxKTDNCw0 No.3022947]

Your lecturer sounds like a bit of a whiney prick to be quite honest, boo hoo let me read my (dead, white, male) 'literature' in peace and not have to consider anything apart from wonderful use of language in the established literary canon without challenging this structure (created by dead white males) and the problems with it.

I mean what's the problem here, oh boo hoo I can't be elitist with literature and heaven forbid excluded sections of society might get considered in the canon.

There are problems with deconstruction for sure, but your professor just seems to be moaning about damn lefties.

[Anonymous No.3022960]

>>3022947
>(dead, white, male)

are you being serious?

[Anonymous No.3022998]

>Every philosopher post-enlightenment is a fraud
Fact

[Anonymous No.3023001]

>>3022998
>every philosopher post-socrates is a fraud

*fixed

[Anonymous No.3023008]

>>3023001
>every philosopher is a fraud
*fixed

[But is it art? !!m1xxKTDNCw0 No.3023022]

>>3022960

I may be going out on a limb here and creating an unfair strawman. However, I doubt that the prof. cares too much for texts that consider the position of women and non-white people.

[Anonymous No.3023025]

>>3023022
Another extract for you, good sir.

>[Carol Ann] Duffy is a poet of very limited ability, whose writing depends absolutely on the grain of contemporary British society – if it were not able work with that grain, it would have nowhere at all to go.

[Anonymous No.3023053]

>>3023022
>I may be going out on a limb here and creating an unfair strawman. However, I doubt that the prof. cares too much for texts that consider the position of women and non-white people.

Should they get special consideration?

[But is it art? !!m1xxKTDNCw0 No.3023054]

>>3023025

well they're right about that

still seems to be suggesting that challenging society is bad in of itself

i'd be curious to know if they mention someone who goes against the grain and they value

also their opinion on say, wordsworth's preface to lyrical ballads

[Anonymous No.3023057]

>>3023054
What he is trying to say is that this poet "Carol Ann Duffy" is getting hyped because she's a woman.

Were she a white male, she wouldn't have gone nowhere. Get it.

[Anonymous No.3023060]

>>3023053
The question is really this:

Does the professor not care about the texts, because they were written by women and non-white people and anon cares about them disregarding that fact, or does anon care about them because they were written by women and non-white people and the professor does not care about them regardless of that fact?
Do