And so begins the Week Without Pants!

Roommate's gone back home for the weekend. Pantless party at my place. I hope for her sake she calls before she comes back to St. Louis.

I've been trying to coax an article out of my dissertation defense, which is what I was doing all morning (sort of). But I'm having a problem keeping focused. Some of my concerns about skepticism, however, are seeping into my scholarship and are distracting me from the meat of the article. I want to bash Freud more than is probably strictly necessary. But it's sooooo much fun. I feel like a super-naughty iconoclast! I like the idea that I might make my department chair (a Freudian) cry...that's what keeps me going from day to day!

I think that the Freud thing started with my defense itself, when I told a professor that because the Freudian model of memory had long been supplanted by experimental data about how memory works, Freudian theorists were going to have to "deal with it." Seriously, when I talk to academics outside of the humanities, people say, "You've got to be kidding me!" "They still use Freud?" or "It's funny that that is where Freud ended up." Don't get me started on deconstruction, and Lacan can lick me.

I guess what touched off my rage against the half-assed nonsense that is Freudian criticism is the fact that when I was doing my dissertation, I had to come to grips with an important figure in the field of "trauma theory," Cathy Carruth. Her Unclaimed Experience is required reading. And it is, every page of it, unabashed gobbledygook. It makes no sense. Listen, I can read, and for a while I thought that I had met my match, but eventually I decided, no, this bint had no idea what she was saying. One day I will write up a scathing review of her book, which is turtleshit all the way down.

Hey, Cathy! Just because you can't go half a page without saying "precisely" 3 times doesn't mean that your words refer to anything. Jesus, she's a bad writer.

But there is an inherent problem, I believe, in the way that literary studies are set up, and it has a lot to do with how people find themselves suddenly too heavily invested in a goofy belief system to easily turn away from it. I mean, if you aren't careful, you could walk away from graduate school believing everything that they told you. I recommend reading up on Frederick Crews to anyone who wants to see a Freudian coming to his senses.

Must go.

HJ