Thursday, August 07, 2003

NO LOVE FOR HATERS; ALL THE LOVE FOR ENGLISH MAJORS
So all day long I've been compiling data relating to previous English courses and analyzing how frequently certain courses are taught/which names they go by. My favorite course titles from the last four years are as such:
1) "What Was Postmodernism?" Why even shoot for nonpartisan status in the war between structuralists and poststructuralists when you know which side of the avant garde (invisible) fence you're on? Because obviously postmodernism is now something that was, that its state of "becoming" has ended, solidified, and codified itself into something that can only be described as past-tense. This is all a matter of ridiculous verbage that you'll have to excuse seeing as my most complex phrases as of late regard the acquisition of beer.

2) "Flight and the Avant Garde Imagination" It's no longer necessary to decide which side of above avant garde (invisible) fence you're on because you are now above it. That's right, you're flying in the clouds of ABSTRACTION. Which we may as well refer to as "ABSTRACTIO," "ABSTRACTI," or maybe just 'STRACTION. The previous sentence makes as much sense as any element of said class ever will.

3) "A Salutation Speech From the 19th Century to the 20th, Taken Down Shorthand By Mark Twain" I wouldn't even begin to imagine what this course was like, except that I knew somebody who took it and liked it a lot.

4) "Diaspora and Transnationalism in African American Expressive Culture" This one excites me mostly because I'm (hopefully) taking it next semester, even though its title has technically been changed to the much more humdrum "African American and the World." And it's taught by one of my favorite professors, the one I had last spring for "African American Performance in the Era of the Harlem Renaissance." Do you begin to catch my drift?

5) "Toward Creating an Aesthetics of Dysfunction" First of all, the pressure is off because there's no WAY anybody is going to expect that you actually create your own personal aesthetics of dysfunction during the semester; you just have to take steps toward it. This, I assume, indicates that the student reexamine previously staid notions of beauty, or more obtusely, "aesthetic pleasantness" to include not only symmetrical faces, blue birds pulling festooned white ribbons, Victorian table legs, skinny people, and Greco-Roman composition, but also self-destructing art machines, badly bruised ankles, very large women on guerneys, incredibly small people with wide shoulders, family arguments in fast food restaurants, and half-sleep in the bed of a remade Conestoga wagon transporting moronic travelers across the desert in a Book of Mormon travel package. But like, moving towards that.