July 21, 2006
The ancient door screeches like a banshee as you open it, giving way to the oppressive silence of a tomb! Your torch winks out, pale moonlight is the only illumination! You hear a rustling somewhere among the stacks: is it a cat? A book-eating insect? Some cursed scholar trapped forever in the twisting passages of occult knowledge? The only way to find out is to go onward, but the real question is: Dare you enter THE LITERARY CRITICISM LIBRARY OF HORRORS?
Around the first maddening bend, you encouter NEW FRENCH FEMINISMS: AN ANTHOLOGY. Not even a basic grasp of feminist theory’s generalities, or even a close reading of Toril Moi’s sexual/textual politics can prepare you for the atrocities contained within. Also contained within: BRAIN-EATING GHOULS who will DEVOUR the part of your mind which classifies French feminist Luce Irigaray as an essentialist! Take care! Beware!
If you have escaped with your brain un-devoured, past the next shelf over you will hear a fluttering: surely, you think, a bat, or some other be-winged night-creature. WRONG. It is the fluttering of the pages of Roland Barthes’ ELEMENTS OF SEMIOLOGY, a maddening tome which would be more accurately titled ELEMENTS OF DEATH BY CHAINSAW. Mr. Barthes shares with his ideological contemporaries the idea that criticism is an attitude, not an act. He also shares with his ideological contemporaries a set of glistening wolf-fangs and a thirst for human blood! Beware! Take care!!!
If you still have blood pulsing through your veins, you have escaped Mr. Barthes and his devious vampire-volume. But you have gone, as they say, out of the frying pan and into the fire. But this isn’t just any fire: it is the all-consuming inferno of criticism that is PRACTICING HISTORICISM by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt! This fire burns texts, and EVERYTHING is a text: paintings! Religious ritual! YOUR FLESH! Before you can think, historicism will melt the flesh off your bones! You will try to stamp it out with a blanket of ahistorical 20th-century New Criticism, but Gallagher and Greenblatt will merely cackle at your naiveté as your fat drips sizzling into a puddle on the floor! YOUR PAIN IS COMICAL TO PROMINENT CULTURAL CRITICS CATHERINE GALLAGHER AND STEPHEN GREENBLATT, and when your bones cool, they will use them to make furniture! TAKE CARE! BEWARE!!!
But if you manage to get past them without your flesh being blackened like a salmon recipe concocted by a Cajun madman, around the next corner you will come face to face with DEATH. Not DEATH himself, but rather DEATH OF A DISCIPLINE by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, innovator of post-colonialism and CACKLING RED-EYED WITCH. In a black ritual marked with candles, goat-blood, and opposition to migrant alterity, Ms. Spivak MURDERS Comparative Literature with a sharpened dragon-tooth through the heart, then resurrects it as a demonic familiar which engages the dominant episteme, re-evaluates cultural erasure, and EATS THE EYEBALLS OF BABIES. It will eat your eyeballs too, if you haven’t already dashed them out yourself rather than witness the terror of Ms. Spivak’s satanic lit-crit. BEWARE! TAKE CARE!
Also: The librarian is a FUCKING WEREWOLF!
Posted by DC at July 21, 2006 06:54 PM