| Title |
Excerpt |
Author |
Date |
Total Comments |
Recent Comment |
| The Assault of History; or, more questions about Faulkner |
Did I ever say I understood Light in August? I must have been drinking. On a latest read the novel seems to me more extraordinary, profound, and deeply confusing than ever. |
Sean McCann |
03/15/07 |
0 |
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| Life Under Late Capitalism |
The assignment my six-year-old got in his first grade classroom: Complete the story of the duckling and the alligator. His response: The alligator ate the duckling and the alligator lived happily ever after. The grade his teacher gave him: Check plus. And a smiley face. |
Sean McCann |
03/08/07 |
5 |
03/09/07 |
| A distinctive kind of spiritual exercise |
So, you were perhaps wondering what the “moment of theory” was? In the most recent issue of Critical Inquiry the unusual Ian Hunter proposes an unconventional answer. It can all be summed up quite easily Hunter claims. What was at stake was a cultural-political battle in the humanities academy in which… |
Sean McCann |
03/02/07 |
10 |
03/08/07 |
| Does Anse Bundren Love His Wife? |
I have the good fortune of teaching Faulkner this semester, which means I get to re-read a lot of wonderful and puzzling books. To my mind, As I Lay Dying has always been the most mysterious of the lot. The Sound and the Fury may be the more evidently virtuoso performance,… |
Sean McCann |
02/22/07 |
7 |
03/08/07 |
| Neo-functional? |
Does Walter Benn Michaels’s Trouble With Diversity offer, as Brad says, a neo-functionalist account of the relation between affirmative action and economic inequality? Though I have to admit that it sometimes sounds that way, I don’t think so. |
Sean McCann |
10/08/06 |
11 |
10/17/06 |
| Especially for America |
Walter Benn Michaels makes some harsh comments about “liberalism” and says still worse about “neoliberalism.” But he doesn’t belabor a definition of terms. More significantly, he doesn’t go to great lengths to clarify the connection that everyone rightly recognizes as his central contention—and the one most open to challenge: that there’s… |
Sean McCann |
10/02/06 |
5 |
10/03/06 |
| Déjà Vu All Over Again |
The recognition that . . . [x] theory is a sadly neglected subdiscipline of philosophy began with an experience of déjà vu. As I plowed through my shelfload of bad . . . [x] books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if… |
Sean McCann |
05/25/06 |
8 |
05/31/06 |
| Heartless, Heartless, Heartless |
I finally got a chance to read an essay plugged by Ray some time back, Debbie Nelson’s “The Virtues of Heartlessness: Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and the Anesthetics of Empathy”. It’s an excellent essay—eloquent and persuasive and refreshingly free of academese. (Disclaimer: I’m a friend and long-time admirer of Debbie.) The… |
Sean McCann |
05/10/06 |
7 |
10/26/06 |
| On the Origin of Interdisciplinarity--a cost/benefit model |
Just came across a passage I thought might make for a good follow-up to Scott’s Darwinian origins of jargon post. Actually, I don’t really have a particularly good reason for mentioning the passage. Just thought it offered a memorable analogy, packaged in the pleasantly astringent prose style that used to characterize… |
Sean McCann |
05/03/06 |
4 |
05/05/06 |
| Radically Universal? |
Here’s an interesting article by for fans of Language (once L = A = N = G = U =A = G = E) poetry--Oren Izenberg in Critical Inquiry on “Language Poetry and Collective Life.” Caveat: I’m not a fan myself, nor am I especially educated about the material. I don’t… |
Sean McCann |
04/17/06 |
52 |
04/27/06 |
| Time, or Too Late, to Kill the Ph.D Octopus? |
Over at POTUS, a fine group blog by some top level American political historians and political scientists, eminent historian Alonzo Hamby has two informative posts (scroll down for the first) about how graduate education in history has changed. The capsule summary: it’s gotten longer and a lot more uncertain. Hamby has… |
Sean McCann |
03/29/06 |
18 |
11/20/07 |
| How German Is It? |
A question for film noir buffs. What do you make of frame narrative in The Killers? Frame is not quite the right term, but I hope you know what I’m talking about—that part of the movie dedicated to the effort of insurance investigator Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien) and detective Sam Lubinsky… |
Sean McCann |
03/27/06 |
6 |
03/29/06 |
| Who Speaks for the Monolith? (Cue, Zarathustra) |
Let me follow Ray’s sublime post with a ridiculous one and offer the second in a series of trivial terminological gripes. (I assume you’ll be grateful that the complaints show up Brigadoon-like but once a year). |
Sean McCann |
03/17/06 |
19 |
03/19/06 |
| Passionate Indifference |
I recently had an interesting experience with an all but forgotten work of scholarship. The text was Leon Katz’s legendary 1963 doctoral dissertation on Gertrude Stein--The First Making of The Making of Americans. Katz is the cat who, following the discovery of Stein’s notebooks for The Making of Americans (found tossed… |
Sean McCann |
02/28/06 |
11 |
03/06/06 |
| Human, Not So Human: A Few Quibbles About Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees |
I love Graphs, Maps, and Trees. Who couldn’t? If you’re not dazzled by the erudition and the data set, how could you fail to find instruction and delight in the nimbleness of Moretti’s mind and the brio of his prose? But, love it thought I do, like Matt, Ray, and Jenny… |
Sean McCann |
01/19/06 |
52 |
01/28/06 |
| Against Respect |
As Henry Farrell notes, Walter Benn Michaels’s essay on “The Neoliberal Imagination” in the current N+1 is not to be missed. (Short version here.) Henry points out that Michaels’s essay is a brilliant rejoinder to the false meritocracy of the contemporary right. True. But it’s also of interest for anyone who… |
Sean McCann |
11/01/05 |
26 |
11/08/05 |
| Unpolitical Animals |
Via Brad DeLong, Christopher Lehman laments the low quality of American political fiction. Some of the details are wrong, but the big picture seems right to me. American lit loathes politics. hmmmm . . . either the permalinks are screwed up or I am. Scroll down to Willie Stark. |
Sean McCann |
10/18/05 |
35 |
10/30/05 |
| Tenure |
It’s not sex, but it’s one of those words that probably plugs directly into the limbic system. The news that Daniel Drezner has been denied tenure will no doubt be rocketing around the blogosphere, encouraging sympathy for Drezner and a variety of other emotions--anxiety among those who hope for but haven’t… |
Sean McCann |
10/10/05 |
16 |
10/13/05 |
| All Sorel’s Fault |
Mulling over Zizek’s absurd theory of revolution and Foucault’s fascination with “the enigma of revolt” I was struck by how indebted to Sorel they both seem and with the continuing purchase in the academic literary mind of Sorelian attitudes. |
Sean McCann |
09/28/05 |
106 |
10/10/05 |
| Political Spirituality |
I’ve been reading Foucault and the Iranian Revolution by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, and the picture it paints is not pretty. |
Sean McCann |
09/15/05 |
41 |
10/28/05 |
| Kabbalah to Nowhere |
In addition to being an impressive novelist, Coetzee looks to be a damn fine critic. A few months ago, he reviewed in the NYRB the whole corpus of Faulkner biographies. If memory serves, it was both a generous essay and one that took apart some of the superstitions of biography with… |
Sean McCann |
09/14/05 |
2 |
09/17/05 |
| Harmless History |
I think the first time The Plot against America came up here at the Valve was in a comment responding to Scott’s intriguing “Crypto-Communist Conflagration” post. Scott’s point, if I understood it correctly, was that the genre of “alternative history” fiction, like some versions of marxisant cultural politics, manages both to… |
Sean McCann |
08/29/05 |
2 |
08/30/05 |
| Lament for the Ad Hominem |
I’m sure my colleagues at the Valve and readers alike feel like Michael Corleone right now. Just when they thought they were out, I drag them back in. My apologies to all for an unwise post. I’ve disabled further comments and will disable comments to this post. I hope we can… |
Sean McCann |
08/08/05 |
0 |
|
| Hymns in Ad Hominem |
New evidence that William Pannapacker (as described here) leapt too soon to his air of mild disappointment. Alphonse van Worden suggests that complaints against Theory are a variant of anti-semitism. Mark Kaplan calls it stupid careerism and tainted by “a rightest agenda.” Jodi Dean adds that current criticism of Theory just… |
Sean McCann |
08/08/05 |
35 |
08/08/05 |
| There Be Monsters; or, Rosa Parks: Not Psychotic |
I hope that title grabbed you and will persuade you to ruminate for a second over a dry question or two: was Jacques Derrida an apocalyptic thinker? And, if so, why should we care? |
Sean McCann |
08/05/05 |
34 |
08/15/05 |
| . . . and Junky Aesthetics |
I just came across a long, elegant essay by Eric Griffiths about Burroughs in the July 22 issue of the TLS (archives for subscribers only). Though strikingly intelligent, it’s a disconcerting piece, apparently motivated by both thoughtful and sympathetic interest in the whole Burroughs oeuvre and by a stern sense of… |
Sean McCann |
08/04/05 |
6 |
08/04/05 |
| Junk Aesthetics . . . |
Reading John’s posts about Vernor Vinge, John Crowley, and some of the problems of genre reminded me of a work of criticism I . . . well, cherish would be too strong a word. Thomas Robert’s study An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction is a book for which I feel a deep… |
Sean McCann |
08/04/05 |
18 |
08/23/05 |
| Culture, like booze (and still a public good) |
John Quiggin makes the excellent suggestion that we put away the romantic conception of art as “the immortal and transcendent product of individual genius, free from and superior to, all social restraints” and replace it with an older meaning of the term. let’s agree that in most areas of human endeavour,… |
Sean McCann |
07/29/05 |
39 |
08/09/05 |
| I Owe Stanley Fish an Apology |
Post in haste, repent at leisure. When, rushing out the house, I tossed up a response to Stanley Fish’s op-ed last week, I foolishly didn’t expect it to generate much discussion or that it would lead us into the deep waters John’s recent posts have been exploring. Nor did I give… |
Sean McCann |
07/26/05 |
4 |
07/30/05 |
| Fish Again |
Stanley Fish continues his domination of the public sphere with yet another op-ed in the NY Times today. It’s of interest in these parts because, in an unsuccessful effort to have something new to say about Supreme Court appointments, Fish makes heavy weather of the argument made by Against Theory. In… |
Sean McCann |
07/19/05 |
65 |
07/28/05 |
| Theory’s Empire--It’s the Institution Stupid |
A consensus appears to be developing among at least some of us talking about TE that the major issues are institutional and sociological. The problem (to the extent we agree there is one) is not any ideas particular to Theory, in other words, but the academic celebrity system, the tenure review… |
Sean McCann |
07/14/05 |
28 |
02/12/06 |
| Theory’s Empire--Wrestling the Fog Bank |
If you’re even slightly simpatico, you’ve got to feel bad for the editors of Theory’s Empire. There’s no more basic feature of “theory” in the literary academy than its committed antiformalism and its hostility to definition of any kind. Despite John McGowan’s suggestions to the contrary, there seems to be pretty… |
Sean McCann |
07/12/05 |
18 |
08/07/07 |
| A Golden Age of Literary Journalism |
Could ours be one? That unlikely thought was prompted for me by the recent arrival of two magazines (print, bigod!) in the mailbox: the July/August Atlantic and the annual fiction issue of The New Yorker. |
Sean McCann |
06/14/05 |
32 |
06/18/05 |
| Ferocious Goat, or the Decline of Political Invective |
Ayjay worries about the declining quality of web calumny and asks us to study the masters. Just came across this passage today, Eugene Debs on Teddy Roosevelt, January 1918: This political pet of the plutocrats, this bogus reformer, this shreiking charlatan, this raving mountebank, this crazy-horse of Oyster Bay ranch, this… |
Sean McCann |
06/09/05 |
7 |
04/26/09 |
| Like Explorers Who Have Returned From Some Distant Land |
Lots and lots of doubtful claims and many a quick and dirty generalization in this piece. But the big idea is right on. It’s been sometime since contemporary American lit spoke forcefully about class. To a considerable extent novels these days take place in a kind of all-purpose middle-class America, in… |
Sean McCann |
06/08/05 |
19 |
06/09/05 |
| Uncruel Beauty? |
John’s recent essay on chess and poetry, with its holbonic foray through Nabokovian territory, reminded me of a curious post I encountered over at Long Sunday --a zizekian rival to the Valve and a home of frequent commenter cult rev. The subject of the post is the classic association between cruelty… |
Sean McCann |
06/07/05 |
18 |
06/11/05 |
| The Temptation of Content |
I so rarely agree with Stanley Fish that when I do I wonder how it happened. Fortunately, Fish’s op-ed in today’s NY Times occasions no concern. On first reflection, it seems a classic Fishism--provocative, counterintuitive, and on consideration . . . still totally unconvincing. Fish’s case today is that writing is… |
Sean McCann |
05/31/05 |
8 |
06/08/06 |
| Existentialism without Authenticity (and vice versa)? |
Anyone out there already read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Ethics of Identity? If so, is what Carl Elliot says in his American Prospect review (subscription required) possibly accurate? One crucial aspect of making a life involves shaping one’s own individuality. Appiah suggests that we have inherited two rival visions of what this… |
Sean McCann |
05/30/05 |
12 |
05/31/05 |
| Worlds Known and Unknowable |
Recently read Edward P. Jones’s justly celebrated novel The Known World. The book, for which Jones received the Pulitzer last year, initially got a lot of attention because of its portrayal of free black slave owners in antebellum Virginia. But while much was made by the first reviewers of a fact… |
Sean McCann |
05/25/05 |
6 |
05/26/05 |
| The Ozone Crackle of Bad Intentions |
The blogosphere, let’s face it, is ruthless. And we must like it that way. Even around these genteel parts, there’s been more letting off steam than improving the sensibility. Some noble among us have taken a harder road and praised the good. (Ray, Daniel, Lawrence, Amardeep, my hat’s off to you.)… |
Sean McCann |
05/16/05 |
4 |
10/10/05 |
| New Accomplishments in Reproductive Technology |
The charge has been made that the Valve doesn’t know what it wants to be. Not being able to decide among literary organ (yeccch!, my wife says) or blog, or something else, it flounders around like Barnum’s fiji mermaid. Fair enough. I like that kind of jambalaya myself, but I can… |
Sean McCann |
05/11/05 |
2 |
05/12/05 |
| File Under Unsurprising |
So, the new essay component of the SAT looks not quite what it was promised to be. This is not exactly a shock. I spent some time teaching composition in a large public university system that made heavy use of mass administered entrace exams. I wouldn’t say they served no purpose,… |
Sean McCann |
05/05/05 |
8 |
05/08/05 |
| An Undisciplined Discipline? |
A few days ago in a thread that followed one of my posts, Jonathan and the admirable A. Cephalous got into an interesting debate about disciplinary distinctions. (See their posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) Though the issues got a full and frank airing, I think they’re too… |
Sean McCann |
05/03/05 |
29 |
05/08/05 |
| Writer in Chief, a bleg |
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the home of the prodigious Matthew Yglesias about presidential government, American style--its plusses and more obvious minuses. Yglesias’s point is that most emerging democracies don’t seem to be interested in adopting an American constitutional system (bicameral legislature, separation of powers) and prefer parliamentary… |
Sean McCann |
04/29/05 |
36 |
05/03/05 |
| Critical Terms To Be Lined Up Against A Wall And Shot |
There was a tv commercial a few years back in which a sidewalk vendor sold people chattering wind up dolls that repeated single inane phrases. The buyers then had the delicious opportunity to stomp the dolls to bits. ("we can still be friends, we can still be friends, we can still… |
Sean McCann |
04/25/05 |
34 |
03/24/11 |
| Attention Must Be Paid |
I love Amardeep’s long quotation from Johnson. It makes me want to abuse the privileges of the blogger and repose a question I asked in the long thread that followed on John’s Barbarians post. Somehow, I got passed over. Technical glitch, I suppose. The question I want to ask people like… |
Sean McCann |
04/22/05 |
8 |
04/23/05 |
| Look Ma, No Theories (or, No Taste) |
I’ll bet I’m not the only to have an ambivalent reaction to the kind of thread that developed from Daniel’s Disinterest Hats post--not the post itself, but the extended discussion that followed. (Confirmation. No sooner did I write that sentence than I flipped over to the Valve main page and saw… |
Sean McCann |
04/15/05 |
11 |
04/18/05 |
| You Have to Trust Someone |
Is there any doubt that historians will some day consider the 10 years or so flanking the recent turn of the century and regard it as an astonishing acme in the art of TV? What will they call it, the age of HBO? I’ve only just seen the first handful of… |
Sean McCann |
04/10/05 |
8 |
11/14/09 |
| Termite Attack! |
While we’re talking high and low, Sanford Schwartz has a fine essay on the inimitable Manny Farber in the current New York Review of Books (subscription only, alas). Farber is the eccentric critical wonder famous for his early (’40s-’60s) defense of the “B” movie and for the legendary distinction he invented… |
Sean McCann |
04/07/05 |
2 |
04/08/05 |
| Lamentation Ahead |
Don’t get me wrong. Saul Bellow was a great writer. But the near obeisance he managed to generate among his admirers always rubbed me wrong and makes me now feel all snarky, in this most inappropriate of moments--when we can expect much high-minded grieving among the literary journalists who apotheosized him.… |
Sean McCann |
04/06/05 |
13 |
04/06/05 |
