This month’s honoree is a Duke literature course about video games.
I found myself going back to “The Simpsons” for illustration, even though the last time I did that it gave Alex “Bigfoot” Jones a fit. I trust you’ll agree with my decision to use the particular “Simpson” allusion I chose.
I also expect you’ll have little trouble spotting all of the rhetorical devices I identified as “particularly favored by academics to lend the air of legitimacy to pop-culture classroom fluff”: the homage to classicism, the “scholar’s ellipses,” the labored paradox, the barrage of silly questions, question-begging, and the inevitable social-guilt redirection. The terms are explained within.
