Martha Nussbaum is a fine scholar and has a fairly solid reputation, but
she has involved herself here in the ongoing backlash against European
"theory" that has its public harlequinade in the rants of Camille Paglia
and its more serious efforts going among the traditionalists who have
broken from the MLA and other organizations to try to reassert the
hegemony of the formalist and philological practices that more or less
peaked during the 1950's. One very easy line of attack characterizes
the "jargon" that (they will aver) is all there is to postmodern
theory--that without its complex and daunting language, there would
be "no clothes." You can see these endlessly repeated plaints on
a number of academic lists, with the permanent home being a list called
PHIL-LIT. Nussbaum is capable of serious analysis (as are some others)
and probably provides some, but the ideological underpinning of these
attacks almost always reveals itself and undercuts the value of the
discussion.
Tom Dillingham
she has involved herself here in the ongoing backlash against European
"theory" that has its public harlequinade in the rants of Camille Paglia
and its more serious efforts going among the traditionalists who have
broken from the MLA and other organizations to try to reassert the
hegemony of the formalist and philological practices that more or less
peaked during the 1950's. One very easy line of attack characterizes
the "jargon" that (they will aver) is all there is to postmodern
theory--that without its complex and daunting language, there would
be "no clothes." You can see these endlessly repeated plaints on
a number of academic lists, with the permanent home being a list called
PHIL-LIT. Nussbaum is capable of serious analysis (as are some others)
and probably provides some, but the ideological underpinning of these
attacks almost always reveals itself and undercuts the value of the
discussion.
Tom Dillingham