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John Holbo - Editor
Scott Eric Kaufman - Editor
Aaron Bady
Adam Roberts
Amardeep Singh
Andrew Seal
Bill Benzon
Daniel Green
Jonathan Goodwin
Joseph Kugelmass
Lawrence LaRiviere White
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Rohan Amanda Maitzen
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cover of the book The Trouble With Diversity

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cover of the book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?

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Tonight we’re gonna blog it like it’s 2666

On Meditation As A Western Practice

Human Rights, Empathy, and Literature

eBooks, Piracy, and Stockpiling

The End(s) of The Mill on the Floss

Howard Zinn: A Public Intellectual Who Mattered

Original Aura

Should We Be Talking about Louis Menand’s New Book?

Avatar and Disability

Behold The Man II

Kindle or Netbook?

Don Draper is, of course, never himself.

I Don’t Care What The Critics Say, I Love Mad Men (and the Sopranos and the Hills)

Don Draper as an unraptured Emma Bovary

Adam Bede Again

ajay on Avatar and Disability

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Monday, April 27, 2009

Concerning the inherent superiority of printed text to irresponsible online drivel.

Posted by Scott Eric Kaufman on 04/27/09 at 10:13 PM

Is it absolutely necessary for the image gracing the cover of the most recent issue of the official mouthpiece of my professional organization to depict something that, when seen on my desk by a colleague from another department, compelled her to ask where a viper fish would even get a detachable penis to whack off against a shrimp-wielding toucan? Do other departments not laugh at us enough already?

Why does this same issue contain a write-up of a forum from the 2007 MLA convention? Did it really take two years and change to transform that panel into something print-worthy? So I take it the first sentence is supposed to read:

In contributions to this 2007 panel of the division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century, titled “Untiming the Nineteenth-Century: Temporality and Periodization,” periodization, a venerable mainstay of comparative literarature safeguarded by its apparent neutrality, is critically arraigned.

Lest you think I’m mocking the author of this sentence, Emily Apter, let me make this absolutely clear: Apter’s introduction is lively and interesting—historicists like myself tend to be interested in arguments about or against periodization even when we disagree with them—but how well is her intellectual project of two years previous served by appearing so belatedly? How well is her intellectual integrity represented by an error so basic only a typesetter could have made it?  These are the standards against which necessarily inconsequential (because) online conversations should be judged? 

Maybe I’m still in a foul mood, but I don’t think so.

(x-and-posted.)


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