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Nov. 25th, 2004 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusSo, I've been reading Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson for my partition literature essay. It's not as hefty going as I expected a book on the history of nationalism to be, and it's actually really interesting. Mostly, I agree with his premises, except I just have two problems:
Sloppy scholarship really irks me. It's even worse when a first-year English grad student can spot an error made by a PhD in history, writing in their own field.
Anyway.
My geeky pursuits have lead me to pen this piece and attach it to my website. Since my website will eventually laced with assertions that would make a postmodernist's skin crawl (like, for instance, I believe in the existence of a gay history, and I'm not a moral relativist), I wrote this as a pre-emptive counterattack to this ironically self-righteous group.
Since I respond to their argumens in their own language, though, maybe anyone who feels the same way I do about postmodernism should avoid it :)
Right now, I'm working on a quick gay history of Canada. I've learned a helluvalot, like the fact that there's been a gay village at church and Wellesley, Toronto, pretty much since those streets existed, and it was founded by a guy who was "out."
("Out" as what I don't know. He only seemed to like guys, but since the word "homosexual" wasn't invented yet, and "gay" meant something different, what was he openly -- "openly sodomite"?).
Anyway, these gay history pages will be forthcoming. I'll post a link when it's ready.
- Canada is the exception to almost all of his ideas about nationalism, and he barely brings us up.
- He's too eager to assign capitalism with the credit/blame for everything -- so eager that he misses the movement launched towards vernacularization 150 years by Dante before the printing press
Sloppy scholarship really irks me. It's even worse when a first-year English grad student can spot an error made by a PhD in history, writing in their own field.
Anyway.
My geeky pursuits have lead me to pen this piece and attach it to my website. Since my website will eventually laced with assertions that would make a postmodernist's skin crawl (like, for instance, I believe in the existence of a gay history, and I'm not a moral relativist), I wrote this as a pre-emptive counterattack to this ironically self-righteous group.
Since I respond to their argumens in their own language, though, maybe anyone who feels the same way I do about postmodernism should avoid it :)
Right now, I'm working on a quick gay history of Canada. I've learned a helluvalot, like the fact that there's been a gay village at church and Wellesley, Toronto, pretty much since those streets existed, and it was founded by a guy who was "out."
("Out" as what I don't know. He only seemed to like guys, but since the word "homosexual" wasn't invented yet, and "gay" meant something different, what was he openly -- "openly sodomite"?).
Anyway, these gay history pages will be forthcoming. I'll post a link when it's ready.
