shiny ivory towers
Oct. 22nd, 2008 11:59 amI find fandom's anti-academic bias absurd. Furthermore, I find the anti-aca/fen debates that make the rounds in fandom every now and then worrisome, and very opposed to that aspect of fannish culture I've come to cherish over the years: tolerance of other people's weird obsessions.
There, I've said it.
I know my biases. I do, after all, harbour notions of getting myself a Ph.D in English; even teaching, perhaps - even though my thoughts on that topic mostly centre around, 'STOP ASKING ME GROWNUP QUESTIONS OK?' I work in a publishing house that thrives on pretentious academic publications. Where I stand today, I need to validate academia. Ooh, look, isn't the ivory shiny?
I also have difficulty comprehending how analysis is not fun, because it's something that comes very naturally to me. Splitting hairs is fun. Studying everything is fun. Fun me for me, anyway - they might not be for you. Which is not the point of this post here. The point here is very simply, why is my version of fun such an issue for you?
Here, for instance: The older I get and the more I have to do with academicians, the more I agree that academia is the enemy. Not, mind you, through any willful doing of evil, but through an insistence that everything must be studied. I lay the blame for the large number of college-educated people who never read for pleasure at the feet of English lit courses, where one is taught to examine the work at the expense of simply enjoying the story.
This posits 'simply enjoying the story' as opposed to 'analysing and ruining the fun in the story', which, as far as I'm concerned, is a false binary, because no, it doesn't work like that. For one, 'simply enjoying' is a vague and deceptive term. What does 'simply enjoying' mean? One assumes it is the pleasure of reading the story and knowing what happens next - except that this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not inimical to analysis, and, in case of some stories, impossible, because nothing actually happens in them. Or perhaps it is the pleasure of words - soaking up the beauty of a well-written piece; enjoying the beauty of a metaphor; reveling in the mystery of words; etc. And again, this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not opposed to an academic's brand of reading a text, either, because a lot of academic analysis follows naturally from this 'simple' pleasure (ref. the five hundred million works on language in Shakespeare, where the authors are thisclose to dying of wordgasm).
But more importantly, take away the theory and big words, and leave just the academic and her and her endless analysis and debates, replace the 'Derrida' and 'Foucault' with 'Joss' and 'SGA', replace the big words with, say, 'slashy' and 'canon', and what do you have? Someone very close to - dare I say? - what we call a Fan.
Fandom takes its Cult of Squee very seriously. It's very serious about not being serious. And in this serious not-seriousness there is a reverse snobbery, which posits that if you're not here just for the LULZ and can't see the simple pleasures of life, you must be a boring idiot or a pseudo-intellectual; which proposes that it isn't possible to be genuinely entertained by anything other than the simple way of reading, whatever that might mean. And in this inverse snobbery, fandom becomes precisely what it claims not to be: intolerant. Like Them.
I cannot be having with this.
There, I've said it.
I know my biases. I do, after all, harbour notions of getting myself a Ph.D in English; even teaching, perhaps - even though my thoughts on that topic mostly centre around, 'STOP ASKING ME GROWNUP QUESTIONS OK?' I work in a publishing house that thrives on pretentious academic publications. Where I stand today, I need to validate academia. Ooh, look, isn't the ivory shiny?
I also have difficulty comprehending how analysis is not fun, because it's something that comes very naturally to me. Splitting hairs is fun. Studying everything is fun. Fun me for me, anyway - they might not be for you. Which is not the point of this post here. The point here is very simply, why is my version of fun such an issue for you?
Here, for instance: The older I get and the more I have to do with academicians, the more I agree that academia is the enemy. Not, mind you, through any willful doing of evil, but through an insistence that everything must be studied. I lay the blame for the large number of college-educated people who never read for pleasure at the feet of English lit courses, where one is taught to examine the work at the expense of simply enjoying the story.
This posits 'simply enjoying the story' as opposed to 'analysing and ruining the fun in the story', which, as far as I'm concerned, is a false binary, because no, it doesn't work like that. For one, 'simply enjoying' is a vague and deceptive term. What does 'simply enjoying' mean? One assumes it is the pleasure of reading the story and knowing what happens next - except that this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not inimical to analysis, and, in case of some stories, impossible, because nothing actually happens in them. Or perhaps it is the pleasure of words - soaking up the beauty of a well-written piece; enjoying the beauty of a metaphor; reveling in the mystery of words; etc. And again, this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not opposed to an academic's brand of reading a text, either, because a lot of academic analysis follows naturally from this 'simple' pleasure (ref. the five hundred million works on language in Shakespeare, where the authors are thisclose to dying of wordgasm).
But more importantly, take away the theory and big words, and leave just the academic and her and her endless analysis and debates, replace the 'Derrida' and 'Foucault' with 'Joss' and 'SGA', replace the big words with, say, 'slashy' and 'canon', and what do you have? Someone very close to - dare I say? - what we call a Fan.
Fandom takes its Cult of Squee very seriously. It's very serious about not being serious. And in this serious not-seriousness there is a reverse snobbery, which posits that if you're not here just for the LULZ and can't see the simple pleasures of life, you must be a boring idiot or a pseudo-intellectual; which proposes that it isn't possible to be genuinely entertained by anything other than the simple way of reading, whatever that might mean. And in this inverse snobbery, fandom becomes precisely what it claims not to be: intolerant. Like Them.
I cannot be having with this.