Thread by @thrasherxy

You are a hack who for yrs made your living by showing up in a studio for an hour a week & reading things your staff prepared for you so ppl would mistakenly think you’re clever. Actual inquiry doesn’t work this way, but hopefully you feel better dumping on someone’s monograph.

https://twitter.com/KBAndersen/status/1373277502735585284

It’s a bit rich that someone whose livelihood came from others distilling and synthesizing information for him is going after people who deconstruct & think deeply about literature.

Something similar here to “cancel culture” hysteria: Few people get angrier about any kind of critical rigor than white man like @KBAndersen who’ve has everything handed to them. Bc everything they know has been chewed up for their unthinking digestion so they can hold power—

—they want no one to question or think too deeply abt ANYthing, so they can maintain power & be the gatekeepers of their know nothing fiefdoms.

A mentor once said we don’t walk into a physics department expecting every physicist to speak to each other in a way we non-physicists would understand. When they get under the hood talk about the nature of the universe, it takes complex, specialized thought.

Why, then—

—would you walk into an English department & expect the specialists there to not also have a specialized language to talk to each other that gets under the hood beneath the level of passive understand, @KBAndersen? Are you a physicist or an English scholar? No.

You’re just another white liberal man who expresses a kind of anti-intellectualism quite like that of the right: “If I can’t understand something EASILY (without my staff making it pablum for me), it’s illegitimate.”

You @KBAndersen are shitting on a book as inappropriate for a class from an *academic press* that you admit you don’t know it it’s ever been on a syllabi. You are so out to lunch abt academic life that you don’t know that academic presses are RARELY taught to undergraduates!

As @PatBlanchfield shows with righteously angry humor, criticism is important! Teaching students to read critically is important! And at conferences & in books from academic presses, scholars teach each other so we can research & better teach students!!!

https://twitter.com/patblanchfield/status/1373615694093430786

This kind of book isn’t going to be on an undergrad syllabus. It’s a diss book, written for FT scholars. Who cares what George Eliot would think? They’re dead. This smarm from ppl like Anderson, that everyone ought to just accept things as they are—this is very conservative.

There are dangers w over specialization (every word of this West interview is a gem, but especially what he says about specialization). But let’s not pretend like scholars can’t specialize in their dissertations, AND also teach the pleasure of reading! truthout.org/articles/corne…