"I merely want to remind us that cyberspace is a literary invention and does not really exist, however much time we spend on the computer every day."
-- Fredric Jameson
@augierakow@John_Attridge I don't think it's a question of quality, but of knowledge. To understand a thinker, whether one agrees with that thinker or not, requires doing the actual reading. Maybe those who don't have more influence, but then it's a question of goals.
@John_Attridge *The very possibility of indoctrination is inversely correlated with functional literacy. The problem is that students are not reading and indeed cannot read. And neither can their professors.
I respectfully disagree: if everybody read Foucault, we would be better off (not necessarily because he is correct). What students are being indoctrinated in are the ideas of third-rate pseudo-radical scammer careerists who cite Foucault and maybe assign him as a reading. But he is not even read since reading itself has become practically obsolete in the mainstream.
I agree. So much fun. Joyce was the only author to write in dialect convincingly because he knew that dialect was a fiction and thus created his own universal dialect that any reader is free to switch in and out of, depending on whether she decides to read aloud or silently. Almost like the oral law and the written law, there is the oral Wake and the written Wake.
Without irony: this seems like a good way for humanist or literary intellectuals to actually make money these days. Find a finance bro. Modern patronage.