And that's why I avoided it.

UCLA's Russell Jacoby is one of my favorite historians.

It would take a scholar of prodigious energy and inexhaustible masochism [writes Jacoby in New Republic] to document the extent to which the professoriate, decade after decade, remains thunderstruck by the most basic insight into the historical reality of life and thought.

Now you know why.

Comments

[dr.e]

Sounds like a good PhD paper!

[Peter G]

That was an entertaining read. If I had ever regretted giving up my love of English literature as an academic pursuit that article provided a sovereign and permanent cure. Even back in the late seventies it had all features of a circle jerk without the possibility of a happy ending. And so it was.

[Peter G]

I have to thank you PM. I had not visited these arid deserts of thought for some considerable time. So long, in fact, that I was not even aware of the existence of persons such as Homi Bhabha or the concept of Post-Colonialism and its' associated jargon. I know now that I could never have made it academia. What I have always admired about the English language is the power to convey lucidly ideas, facts, emotions with poetic grace. Yet in the hands of academia these are apparently are faults to be despised. I was particularly piqued by my readings on Post-Colonialism as a vehicle for literary criticism as it related to the colonization of a whole field of study and the creation of dense and impermeable ramparts of language by which lesser mortals are kept at bay. We are all subalterns now. How ever did Jacoby survive? Are there any of his works you would particularly recommend.