The Gnostic Pynchon

[Paul Mackin]

Very interesting, the idea introduced by Vaska that lit crit techniques
might be a very desirable tool in the world of commerce. I'm sure it's
well founded. What could be more important to material success than
knowing how language actually works? I heard somewhere that successful 
CEOs tend to have even bigger vocabularies than college professors. What
immediately comes to mind however is (and stop me if I'm wrong) the very
pronounced left-tending anti-capitalist SOURCE of deconstruction (not to
imply it might not also have right-wing adherents). What in other words of
the idea that what French intellectuals REALY wanted was to topple
capitalism--but that when they saw (after '68) that this was not going to
be possible by  DIRECT means, it was decided instead to attempt the deed
INDIRECTLY by developing techniques for exposing flaws in the language
upon which capitalism depends.

Not that the strategy is likely to work. Language is still plenty good
enough for capitalistic purposes. Terrance, I've changed my mind. Let the
kid study lit.

						P.



On Sat, 24 Jun 2000, Vaska Tumir wrote:

> Intellectual capital and the bottom line don't necessarily coincide -- which makes me wonder why all the citizens so keen on having their kids acquire the first don't make a bit of a stretch for it. 
> 
> But that aside, it's something like 14 years now since I first saw an article publicizing the results of a survey done across a number of US industries.  The point of the things was (and since then I've been seeing about one of these things every 3-4 years) that right across the board, employers were claiming that humanities graduates make the best managerial cadre.  Better, apparently, than kids coming out of business schools, for instance.   One could do a little archivial digging through The Wall Street Journal to find the first in this series of articles.  
> 
> One wouldn't think so, but it in the end seems that all the theorizing and all the rest of the stuff we do in our humanities departments ends up being pretty good for that old bottom line.  Sometimes it worries me, mostly it doesn't.  [BTW, the job market is dire only for the Ph.D.s, not for the kids with undergraduate degrees in humanities.]
> 
> Vaska 
> 
> P.S. Just saw Mifune.  A great little Danish film well worth catching.  It picked up something in Cannes, but in Toronto, at least, it's playing only in the rep cinemas.
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Terrance 
>   Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 12:08 AM
> 
>   [snip]
>   It seems we
>   have turned our backs on the humanities and for very good
>   reasons: they aren't providing the intellectual and
>   professional capital to help students in the real world.
>   Here it is the money and the money and most citizens are
>   doing well in the new economy and would be more than willing
>   to fund English, or Comparative Literature if they felt
>   their children were accumulating intellectual capital.
>   Citizens aren't going to shell out their hard-earned money
>   for philosophy or even philosophy of technology, of science,
>   of mathematics, of computer science, and I don't think
>   gender studies, identity politics, and Pomo/Film/Pynchon is
>   high on their list either. Sorry, I simply do not think it
>   has anything to do with cross departmental
>   anthropology/myth/history/Pynchon classes. Pedagogically I'm
>   all for it, but what will all the young women do with Woman
>   Studies degrees if they can't pay the rent for a room of
>   their own? Pynchon will survive. I'm convinced of that,  but
>   I'm not so sanguine about the prospects for those that teach
>   his fiction, Pomo, Mo, Larry or Curly.  Until the humanities
>   can demonstrate that it has a positive content that
>   contributes to the bottom line, no one is going to take it
>   seriously.    
>    
> 
> 
>