Advocations (was Re: Mondaugen's law)

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> I don't know -- presenting an endless stream of folks who act out their S&M
> and other sexual fantasies and tell us about them in the most post-ironic
> way, with narrator-novelist Jerry Springer giving us the nudge-nudge,
> wink-wink to let us know when to laugh, cry, or shake our heads in wonder,
> der Springer has quite a bit in common with Pynchon, don't you think?
> There's even the strong possibility that, like Pynchon, Jerry (or his
> producers) might actually help things along by encouraging guests to
> fabricate, exaggerate, dramatize, or even invent their stories.
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n
> http://www.millison.com
> http://www.online-journalist.com


"Lately it has become impossible to say with
 confidence whether such topics as "Eat
 Me; Captain Cook and the Ingestion of
 the Other" or "The Semiotics of Sinatra"
 are parodies of what goes on there or
 serious presentations by credentialed
 scholars.2 

 At one recent English lecture, the
 speaker discussed a pornographic
 "performance artist" who, for a small
 surcharge to the price of admission to her
 stage show, distributes flashlights to
 anyone in the audience wishing to give
 her a speculum exam. By looking down
 at the mirror at just the right angle, she is
 able, she says, to see her own cervix
 reflected in the pupil of the beholder, and
 thereby (according to the lecturer) to
 fulfill the old Romantic dream of
 eradicating the distinction between
 perceiver and perceived. The lecturer
 had a winning phrase—"the invaginated
 eyeball"—for this accomplishment.
 During the discussion that followed, a
 consensus emerged that, in light of the
 optical trick, standard accounts (Erwin
 Panofsky's was mentioned) of
 perspective as a constitutive element in
 Western visual consciousness need to be
 revised. 

 As English departments have become
 places where mass culture—movies,
 television, music videos, along with
 advertising, cartoons, pornography, and
 performance art—is studied side by side
 with literary classics, it has not been
 easy for the old-style department to
 adjust.

http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWfeatdisplay.cgi?19991104032F@p2