• theorizing

Susan Sontag's 1963 NYRB review of his Structural Anthropology. I think it may be time for that joint UT-TAMU conference on the legacy of structuralism.

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• incitement

A dreary description of the slogans of the tea-partiers yesterday. No Republican is willing to condemn any of these. The Right is taking its political theory from Carl Schmitt rather than Edmund Burke. Meanwhile, if you want to see their murderous inclinations close up, check out the comments on yesterday's Fort Hood shootings on Free Republic.com Thought-experiment: would there be calls for internment camps had McCain/Palin been elected?

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• rhetoric and poetic

TO A WAVERER, Bertolt Brecht

You tell us
It looks bad for our cause.
The darkness gets deeper. The powers get less.
Now, after we worked for so many years
We are in a more difficult position than at the start.
But the enemy stands there, stronger than ever before.
His powers appear to have grown. He has taken on an aspect
of invincibility.
We however have made mistakes; there is no denying it.
Our numbers are dwindling.
Our slogans are in disarray. The enemy has twisted
Part of our words beyond recognition.

What is now false of what we said:
Some or all?

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• allegory
• theorizing

My reading notes on Fletcher's Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode are attached as a word file, in case they might be of use to anyone. The section on psychoanalysis may be of use to some folks down the road in Austin.

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• rhetoric of religion

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• theorizing

"[W]e are prone to fall under the spell of our own intellectual heritage. . .[for] it is easy to become bewitched into believing that the ways of thinking . . . bequeathed to us by the mainstream of our intellectual traditions must be *the* ways of thinking about them. Given this situation, one of the contributions that historians can make is to offer us a kind of exorcism." --Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics I, p. 6. This observation is especially true of our histories of rhetoric, methinks.

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• academic writing
• the profession

Oh, dear. I got: "The epistemology of post-capitalist hegemony opens a space for the discourse of linguistic transparency." Some recent articles I've reviewed for QJS seem to have been written using this machine.

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• pedagogy
• the profession

I realized the other day that I now feel perfectly comfortable and confident whenever I teach an undergraduate class. Yet I still feel vaguely incompetent every time I teach a graduate class. The norm for graduate classes where I went 30 years ago was usually that students did a lot of reports and professors never lectured. One professor actually grilled students on the assigned readings--this really worked, but I never found that this technique worked for me, inveterate people-pleaser that I am.

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• the profession

I'm sure you have noticed this in your undergraduate classes--women students on average get better grades, are more conscientious, and write better than men. The Worst Place in the World, where I taught from 1986-1994, already had problems with male applicants in the early '90's, and it turns out that now many colleges use a form of quiet affirmative action for men (now openly called discrimination against women). The federal government is now investigating. I don't know.

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• announcements

Cool.

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