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April 19, 2006
I've been trying to find the Australian's editorial (17/4) that railed against postmodernism and literature, but I cannot find it. It has disappeared into the archives already.
Bill Leak
A pity. The argument was incoherent.The editorial was about a question on a private girls school Year 11 English exam, which asked the students to examine the play Othello from the perspective of the "dreary postmodern trinity" of race, gender or class issues. The editorial went on to say that the sky is falling in terms of english literature because of the postmodernists. The reason? Analysing the play through the prisms of racism, sexism, and feminism supposedly destroys our love for great writing, dumbs down the curriculum, and destroys the transcendant themes of human existence.
The Australian's heavy handed intervention into literary theory failed to understand that there are different ways of reading a text, and that reading from different perspectives gives us different interpretations. The Australian is saying that there is only one way to read a text--the conservative one it advocates.
Update: 20 April
Gee, the PM is wading into the debate now. He says:
I feel very, very strongly about the criticism that many people are making that we are dumbing down the English syllabus...I think there's evidence of that in different parts of the country ... when the, what I might call the traditional texts, are treated no differently from pop cultural commentary, as appears to be the case in some syllabuses....I share the views of many people about the so-called postmodernism ... I just wish that independent education authority didn't succumb on occasions to the political correctness that it appears to succumb to...We all understand that it's necessary to be able to be literate and coherent in the English language, we understand that it's necessary to be numerate and we also understand that there's high-quality literature and there's rubbish...We need a curriculum that encourages an understanding of the high-quality literature and not the rubbish.
I'm real sure the PM is well in Derrida's texts.
Not to be outdone--or is it just jumping on the cultural conservative bandwagon?---Christian Kerr of Crikey concurs, saying that ' postmodernism....shuns our intellectual inheritance and offers nothing but vapid verbology in its place. Vapid verbology only understood by a few self proclaimed and self-perpetuating high priests of the movement....Conservatism often has cultural common sense on its side – and this is one of those occasions. Our natural, inbuilt bullsh*t detectors tell us something is shonky. We just latch onto it and express our concerns differently. Hence the varied ways in which John Howard, Camille Paglia and Michael Palin in drag give us the same message: crap is crap.'
I'm sure Kerr is well versedin Deleuze's texts.
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I think he is trolling. He is giving the talkback radio stations something to talk about that fits in the echo-chamber. He is giving theage something to write about. People will buzz all over it, but either way all eyeballs/ears are on the PM now. He is marketing his message to the media and that message, like most trolls is, I am an attention whore.