Postmodern Prof Whistles Dixie

Campus Report ^ | May 18, 2009 | Malcolm A. Kline

[bs9021]

Postmodern Prof Whistles Dixie

by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 18, 2009

From the people who like to paint critics of higher education as anti-intellectual comes a new tome that shows how cerebral the pursuits of the academic publishing world are. The University of Virginia Press has just released Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968, by Michael P. Bibler.

Bibler is an assistant professor of English at Mary Washington. His self-proclaimed areas of expertise are: Gay and Lesbian Studies; Postmodernism; and The Southern Plantation, in that order. “He has had articles published in Mississippi Quarterly and the anthology Perversion and the Social Relation,” his web site tells us. “He also recently presented papers at conferences held by the American Literature Association, Lavender Languages XII [apparently he missed I through XI], the Modern Language Association [apparently we missed him], Beyond the Islands: Extending the Meaning of Caribbean Cultures and the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.” ...

[cartan]

Tax dollars at work. Beautiful.

[Flightdeck]

I always wonder how valuable I would be in the event something like ‘Red Dawn’ occurred, or if I needed to rebuild society on an island paradise. I am usually discouraged by my anticipated failure, but then I read something like this and realize I could do much, much worse. Expertise at such skills as ‘Gay and Lesbian Studies’, ‘Postmodernism’, and ‘The Southern Plantation’ are truly and undebatably useless.

[flowerplough]

Can’t help but wonder with which particular part of his anatomy this Postmodern Gay and Lesbian Studies prof does his(?) whistling.