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Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Teoksen The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism tekijä

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Geoffrey Galt Harpham is the author of numerous books, including What Do You Think, Mr. Ramirez? The American Revolution in Education and Scholarship and Freedom. He was president and director of the National Humanities Center from 2003-2015.
Image credit: Tulane University

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Associated Works

Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (2005) — Avustaja — 100 kappaletta
Asceticism (1995) — Avustaja — 25 kappaletta

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Scholarship and Freedom could have been about freedom of expression in academe. But it isn’t. It could have been about publish or perish, but it isn’t. It seems to be about three people who did a lot of research. But I don’t know why it’s about them. They are in no way connected, have no parallels in their scholarship, and their links to freedom, if any, come from three completely different angles that have little to do with their scholarship.

Geoffrey Harpham starts off his book with attempts at definitions and descriptions. “Scholarship and freedom must be grasped together, with freedom understood as the enabling condition and ultimate goal of scholarship, and scholarship as the most refined and disciplined form of the fundamental freedoms of inquiry and expression. “ This level of insight is not particularly engaging, but its density is a good indicator of what the whole book is like to read. Tough.

He says “Scholarship begins in humility, and even in humiliation.” It makes the writer “renounce his ideas about what he feels the truth ought to be and embrace the truth as it actually is.” These are the most accessible points I found.

He profiles Linda Nochlin, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Bernard Lategan. Lategan was a (white) South African Minister and biblical scholar who came around to rejecting Apartheid. Eventually. Linda Nochlin spent most of her life appreciating the 19th century realist artist Courbet, and later came around to boosting feminism. W.E.B. Du Bois was a martyr for race issues, and bloomed in Germany, because there was no tolerance for him in his native USA. The reader will find their stories quite forgettable.

There is one lighter note in the book, regarding footnotes. But even here, Harpham’s heavy hand drags it through the swamp until it is not just no longer funny, but bizarre, confusing and dull:
Footnotes. The most hateful, risible, off-putting vermiculate feature of scholarship. The fine print hideaway for caution, boasting, temerity, ass-covering, and intimidation. The ramifying fungal system of a disease of scholarship, the death-drive of knowledge, a dark and airless basement for castoffs and junk, the swarming anthill of micro-disputation, the Great Dismal Swamp of irrelevance, the graveyard of readerly interest, eloquent evidence of a wasted life sent in the pointless pursuit of the not-worth-pursuing. A crushed but rebellious force whose mad ambition is plainly to rise up and crowd the “main” (read: entitled) text off the page altogether so that recto and verso are all note, a sublime result approached only by a few geniuses (Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, F.A. Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, and inspired parodists (David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest). An anti-Mardi Gras inversion where unashamed pedantry overthrows and mocks the vulgarly populist argument. Who’s in charge now, professor? All the eyesore forms taken by the scholar’s secret desire to leave the world, go underground, burrow in among the worms, insects, and rodents, and stay there without having resolved the question or advanced the issue.

This paragraph is preceded by … a footnote.

David Wineberg
… (lisätietoja)
 
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DavidWineberg | Jul 22, 2020 |

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12
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121
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#164,307
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