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Monday, February 24. 2014

Let's take a college course to talk about books, to help me become a more discerning and considerate reader

MacDonald:



This year’s conference theme is “Vulnerable Times.” MLA president Marianne Hirsch explained the concept a few months ago: “The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”



Ahh, the wonders of the Liberal Arts and those darn complex temporalities.

Posted by The Barrister in Education, Our Essays at 13:05 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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Perhaps Beauty, Truth, Virtue and the library as an island of civilization in barbarous times is just hopelessly old-fashioned? I'm reflecting on all those devoted monks guarding and recopying the intellectual treasures of an earlier age, while robber barons and corrupt Popes and pirates, etc ravaged the land. No libraries, no Renaissance....

I'm an unabashed elitist w an academic librarian grandfather who wd have had obscenities to direct at such twaddle as these conferences. A library should preserve the best, and most beautiful and noblest elements of our civilization. To inspire and edify the young, renew the middle aged, and console those ravaged by old age and sickness. Instead, our modern libraries are noisy places that throw out the classics and buy 50 shades of grey.
#1 retriever on 2014-02-24 14:41 (Reply)
Once again I am forced to remind MF readers that the time has come--the time to acknowledge that those women/gays/ethnic minorities,who were put into academic roles without either the educational background or the ability to comprehend the complex, must now be acknowledged for the terrible harm they have caused our educational system, our ability to do complex research, and ultimately our nation. We do not need to single them out one by one, but each member of each faculty must acknowledge and collaborate in an effort to reduce their terrible negative impact! Inequality has been destroyed--now comes the time to re-build and that requires a mastery of knowledge and skills that this "enabled group of the 1990-2010 generation were not required to obtain.
#2 faculty wife on 2014-02-24 15:27 (Reply)
Talk about "privilege". What kind of system enable purveyors of such twaddle to get paid at all, let alone what they get paid?
#3 JorgXMcKie on 2014-02-24 15:44 (Reply)
Gee, a class in BS. Neato Keeno!
#4 Sam L. on 2014-02-24 19:38 (Reply)
“The Presidential Forum [one among many panels on the topic] will theorize vulnerability’s complex temporalities. Discussing embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed, forum participants will expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”

When I took the GRE, I encountered some reading passages that read like the above passage- like pure gobbletygook. I selected the answer that had the most incoherent prose- or which most sounded as if a sociologist had written it.

The strategy must have worked, because my GRE Verbal was slightly better than my SAT Verbal taken years before.
#5 Gringo on 2014-02-24 22:13 (Reply)

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