Subject: Re: Beaver Coats Cloaking Section Men on the Web
From: Jim Rovira (jrovira@drew.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 20 2001 - 15:25:03 GMT
pretty good critique of some of the crap out there on the internet, but I
think it's a mistake to excuse English professors from section man-ism.
Franny's description of Lane as a "section man," one that "positively
ruins" the literature he's teaching, seems pretty apropos in a politically
correct, highly theorized academe. Today's section men are still in
literary studies, are still arrogant toward their subject matter, but are
just arrogant in a foucauldian/derridean/
feminist/marxist/queer theory sort of way...
Don't want to make the terrible mistake of assuming all scholars are
section men, but I think we should avoid the mistake of assuming all
scholars are not...
spoken like a section man myself :) -- which in F and Z is also a grad or
undergrad student who fills in for real professors when they're out of town
:)
Jim
Will Hochman wrote:
>
> TLM imagines Cecilia in a beaver coat and Franny wears one too...I
> picked F&Z up as my company on the train ride when I delivered a
> paper in pure section man style this weekend at the National Council
> of Teachers of English Conference in Baltimore. There's something
> about reading that story and being an English professor that really
> sings to me...enough so after I delivered "Tutoring/Teaching: How
> Thin the Post-Process Membrane" I boogied out of the conference over
> to Babe Ruth's house (now a museum) and bought a tin shaped exactly
> like Yankee Stadium and painted in perfect detail. When you open it,
> it plays "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." If a section man like me
> loves Salinger and baseball, there's hope...in fact I think the 21st
> Century section man isn't an academic at all. Lane's focus on and
> greed for literary recognition reminds me more of the current
> book/web hustlers who lack scholarly values but hope to "tap the
> market" and make some bucks. In other words, today's section men
> aren't even doing the literary work, they're just tuned into fame and
> greed. Although my paper was boring and unnecessary in terms of world
> piece or ending disease, I did accomplish a fair amount of ideas and
> placed them neatly in a practice-theory paradigm that may be useful
> for other writing teachers. I don't think my appearance at the
> conference or my absence is, in Holden's terms, a very big deal, but
> what I'm trying to say is that yesterday's section man is today's
> scholar, and today's scholar is almost angelic because we're rare
> birds and because we've been overtaken by shallow webheads. Don't get
> me wrong, I love the web, but how some people manipulate others with
> it, or get real phony with their web pages seems to me to be pure
> section man stuff, will
>
> will
> --
> Will Hochman
>
> Assistant Professor of English
> Southern Connecticut State University
> 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515
> 203 392 5024
>
> http://www.southernct.edu/~hochman/willz.html
>
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