Today’s Wall Street Journal had an interesting piece in its Leisure & Arts section by James Seaton entitled “Truth Has Nothing to Do With It: Is Theory going out of fashion in American universities?” A snippet:
A half-century ago theorists in departments of literature debated such topics as the relation of scientific truth to the sort of truth made available by great literature. Now that topic is no longer raised, not because answers have been found but because the reigning consensus holds that “truth” is an empty concept, that there is no such thing as “literature,” let alone “great literature,” and that the meaning of any piece of writing ? or “text” ? is unstable at best. … Under the rubric of “cultural studies,” theorists claim to possess the key to understanding all sorts of human activity, from crime to colonialism.
This month’s Course of the Month provides a timely example of that from Duke’s Literature Dept. ? and readers are directed to read a previous Course of the Month selection from that same department, which hit many of the same points that Seaton did today.
This month’s winner provides a good demonstration of Seaton’s observation of literature professors attempting to understand all sorts of human activity ? specifically, girls’ activity ? by a theoretically limited, cultural-studies perspective. Get a load of this question-framing:
… If the body is sexed from the start, why does femininity have to be produced? Is the magazine makeover a prelude to plastic surgery? What sorts of futures do girls want? Can girls produce alternative futures? What would they look like? …
These are only some of the questions this seminar will take up …. [W]e will look into the process by which childhood and adolescence were distinguished from adulthood and then at the complex social, cultural and economic pressures that combined to produce the figure of “the American girl” as a subject of visual, literary and marketing interest. From there, we will proceed to examine the development of material and popular culture targeting girls, at Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, movie magazines, at Seventeen, Barbie, Judy Blume, Weetzie Bat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, at Sassy, Jane, and Bust.
Other “texts” include “diaries, decorated rooms, zines, websites, music, … girls’ friendship networks, their girlfriends,” and other “kind[s] of cultural production.”
Just wait till you get to the part about how the course proposes “to make sense of all this.”