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Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Suitable for any occasion

It appears that Chris Clarke’s latest masterpiece, the graphic-novel version of What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, has been reposted on various Internets servers without any attribution or acknowledgment.  This is a travesty—and it should remind us all that with this so-called “net neutrality” and these kids today, unscrupulous cyberpirates can take an Internet that’s not even theirs and put it into a tube where it can clog up somebody else’s Internet that’s still waiting to be made into a graphic novel.  Or, as Chris himself points out, “there was a time when you could steal images from something and then add text to them that riffed on another guy’s hard work and put the result somewhere and people would respect your property.”

Well, I’m not going to take this lying down.  I’m going to do the only thing I know how to do:  announce the arrival of another new book!

A whole box full of Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities just arrived on my doorstep.  This book is not yet available in graphic-novel form, so if you want to find out what happens at the end, you’ll just have to go see for yourself.  I will, however, provide the table of contents here, so that you can get some general idea about which humans and humanities I talk about:

Part One: Physics

(This section is mostly about the Sokal Hoax and its aftermath.  There are smarter discussions of the hoax out there, sure, but mine is the only one in which you can find a sentence that ends with ten igneous rocks that rotate voluptuous velvet ocelots with friendly tomato juice—and a brief discussion of Dirac’s Large Numbers Hypothesis, at no extra charge.)

1.  The Sokal Hoax for Beginners
2.  The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency
3.  Of Fine Clothes and Naked Emperors
4.  The Utility of the Arts and Humanities

Part Two: Positions

(This section is about various figures and fields in the humanities: Stanley Fish on the interpretation of interpretation, Martha Nussbaum on education and cosmopolitanism, American Studies in the Cold War and the present, and Thomas Frank’s take on cultural studies.  Mix and match!)

5.  There is Nothing Inside the Text; or, Why No One’s Heard of Wolfgang Iser
6.  Citizens of the World, Unite: Martha Nussbaum’s Plan for Cultivating Humanity
7.  American Studies without Exceptions
8.  Idolatries of the Marketplace: Thomas Frank, Cultural Studies, and the Voice of the People

Part Three: Professions

(This section consists of shorter essays on teaching, lecturing, and some distinctive features of Life on Campus.)

9.  Days of Future Past
10.  Teaching to the Six
11. Working for the U.: On the Rhetoric of “Affiliation”
12.  Dream a Little Dream
13.  Professing and Parenting
14.  Speaking of Speakers
15.  Universities Should Be Open for Business
16.  Analyze, Don’t Summarize
17.  The Top 10 Contradictory Things about Popular Culture
18.  The Elvis Costello Problem

Part Four: Politics

(From a review essay on Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country to a review essay on Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism and all the turmoil in between, this section consists of my essays on debates in and about the American left.)

19.  The Lefts before September 11
20.  Nation and Narration
21.  Can the Left Get Iraq Right?
22.  For a Better—and Broader—Antiwar Movement
23.  Fighting Liberals
24.  The Loyalties of American Studies

Part Five: Posts

(Essays drawn directly from this humble blog!  No fair hunting through the archives to find them here.)

25.  Azkaban Blogging
26.  Back in Les États-Unis
27.  Vacation Reading II
28.  Republican National Convention, Second Night
29.  More Plans for Democrats in Distress
30.  The Beinart Effect
31.  Theory Tuesday II
32.  Theory Tuesday III
33.  Was I Ever Wrong

Best of all, Rhetorical Occasions is endorsed by Krusty the Clown, who says, “I heartily endorse this event or product or collection of essays.”

Now, about that book cover.

It’s just asking for trouble, I know it.  I mean, it’s my great big fat looming head, which, however ghostly and gray-tinged, is still big and fat and looming.  I don’t know what to tell you, except that my initial suggestions for the cover (all of which had to do with “rhetoric” or “speaking” or “occasions” or “occupatio”) were so terrible that we eventually decided just to go with an author photo and leave it at that.  I didn’t realize, at first, that the photo would wind up being a big fat ghostly head, but I suppose it’s appropriate, since, as my family members have often remarked over the years, I do indeed have a big fat head.  (UNC Press threatened to make a bobblehead of me and label it “actual size,” and they wouldn’t have been far off, either.) But the question remains as to how many people will want to read a collection of my essays that has a great big looming ghostly me-face on the cover.  I can think of only two answers.

One is that if you buy thirty or forty copies of the book, line them up face out (literally!) on a bookshelf, and repeat the words “rhetorical occasions, rhetorical occasions, rhetorical occasions” over and over, you’ll find that you soon leave yourself utterly and travel in a trancelike state to pure objective reception of the outer world. Sounds silly and pretentiously spirituel, I know. But it worked for me.

The other is that these books are quite sturdy and provide excellent material for dart practice and pin-the-tail-on games.  The book paper, including its paper cover, meets the guidelines for permanence and durability set out by the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources and the International Darts Federation, so let fly! 

As for why I am publishing two books this fall, one close on the heels of the other: I thought we were clear on this, everyone.  This blog has made it clear time and time again that our goal is world domination by 2009, and let’s be realistic about this, all right?  There’s just no way to achieve world domination on that kind of schedule by publishing just one book at a time.

Actually, some of the essays go together quite well with What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? But then, I was tweaking the second section and rewriting much of the Sokal section (and writing the first essay entirely from scratch) in 2005 whenever I wasn’t writing Liberal Arts, so there’s no surprise there.  And just as I was finishing the book, there was some encouraging science news in the reality-based community, and then this blog found itself hosting a discussion of science-studies scholar Steve Fuller’s strange defense of Intelligent Design, to which I finally replied the day after I mailed off the manuscript of Rhetorical Occasions.  So it all makes sense somehow.

Except for the Kandinsky mural in the Student Union building.  That’s all Chris Clarke’s work, and I had nothing to do with it.

Posted by Michael on 09/20 at 10:23 AM
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