Word: paglia
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...Paglia, a professor of humanities at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, is known for her controversial cultural criticism and her position as an "anti-feminist feminist." But last week she started off her speech by saying that "educational reform is the number one issue of my career," especially the state of America's public school system. One expects such a comment to be followed by talk of school funding, vouchers, busing, bilingual education, the condition of inner city schools, teacher testing, charter schools and other components of the national debate on this subject. Many of these issues did arise...
...sounds like a stretch to blame America's educational problems on what is essentially a literary and cultural movement, that's because it is. Paglia's assertion that humanities professors at Harvard are "trying to take away meaning, tell students it's all meaningless"--thus producing that "gnome" effect--simply isn't true. A small fraction of our humanities classes deal with literature produced in the second half of this century, much of which has come to be labeled "postmodern." The aim of these classes, like any others, is to give students a way of understanding and appreciating the material...
...Paglia, however, is not alone in portraying postmodernism as a negative influence on educational scholarship, or as a virus that particularly attacks the educational elite. For this reason, it is useful to ask: What the heck does "postmodern" really mean...
...problem with Paglia's use of the word is that she takes it beyond the strictly literary realm, adding all sorts of political and sociological undertones, and the result is extraordinarily vague. Yet, in this vague sense, the word gets tossed around quite frequently. The definition of a term that is useful for understanding literature has been bent out of shape, blown full of hot air and basically stretched to such a degree that it has ceased to have any meaning at all. The real postmodern dilemma isn't figuring out how to fight off some sort of vague monster...
...that they give us a way of looking at some of the great works of art produced in the last 40 or 50 years, strange and tricky works by Pynchon, Nabokov, Beckett and many others. The danger of talking about postmodernism as something that robs us of meaning-as Paglia says humanities scholars are trying to do to us today-is that many of these so-called "postmodern" authors are profoundly moral, presenting some of the difficulties of making meaningful literature in our time...