Discursive tactics of "American-ness"

Ever notice that once you start paying attention to certain phenomenon, you start finding examples and manifestations of it everywhere?

Among the various themes I'm noticing in public discourse is the idea of what and who is apparently being "anti-American". It's a long list these days, and includes not just rock bands and movie stars, but also entire states. It has been a common theme in my political economy and cultural studies classes.

I found this article via AL Daily about a new book that examines the themes and attitudes encompasses within the theme of "anti-American". Has me curious as to whether there is a paper in there somewhere for me, for one of my classes this semester.

And they're off!

They're finished and submitted. My OGS and SSHRC graduate funding apps are handed in. Just finished driving up to the middle of nowhere that is York campus, handing them in, and driving all the way back.

Done done done!

Now I wait until April to hear if I've managed to snag one which will give me a nice cushion of funding for next year, my thesis writing year.

Reductionism inherent to grad school

Another Sunday night, another important book of social theory reduced to a mere two page summary for a 5 minute in-class presentation.

This, following the reducing of my entire two years of MA life onto a single page for the Ontario Graduate Scholarship application, and a comparatively expansive two pages for the SSHRC Canada Masters Scholarship (both of which get submitted to my department tomorrow, for better or for worse...)

Reduce, summarize, compress, congeal. These seem to be the action verbs of my emerging MA identity. But since I prefer to expand, elaborate, detail and examine, this new ethos isn't fitting me so well. I'm tired of butchering amazing works of social theory (Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment today) to fit a five minute "bebe la-la" presentation for a class.

When do I get to be broad, deep and complete?

Explanations for schoolwork

I was asked by a fellow student why we need to do summaries and critiques of existing works of social theory. My answer, more or less, was to say that it was a way of encouraging us to engage critically, broadly and deeply with the work. She seemed unsatisfied by that answer.

I wish I'd had a link to this critique of a new book on aesthetics and culture by Oxford lit professor, John Carey. This is the kind of critique every student should strive to be capable of writing.

Build-up

This was the lead-in on AL Daily to reviews of the new book by Steve Best, long-time digerati...

It’s been a long march down the crunchy granola path from macramé and LSD to the Web, Wikipedia and Google...More > More >

Would you also have clicked the "mores"? Yeah me too.

(Oct 16 - Correction -- the book is from Fred Turner. I was reading Steve Best when I wrote the post, hence my silly error. Thanks Dean for noticing and alerting me to my error.)

Attention & retention

Another Sunday spent reading social theory...but how much of this am I retaining?

I'm doing the readings for my Political Economy of Communications & Culture course. And since I joined the class late, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

Yes the underlying topic and approach fascinate me. Particularly in the way Canadian PEC theorist Vincent Mosco argues for a multilayered integrated analysis that privileges neither economics/materialist arguments (a la Marx / Frankfurt school) nor culture and individual/everyday arguments (a la Hall, Fiske and Williams). But if I'm so interested in this and I see so many tie-ins to my eventual MA thesis, why don't I retain the essence of the arguments?

You'd think that by now I'd know the various generalized theories about capitalism, cold. A year hasn't passed since I started this academic odyssey that I don't read some substantial bit of Marx, along with theorists extending the Marxian concepts out to various avenues of exploration.

But I still, to this day, have to constantly brush up on "use value" and "surplus value", not to mention the ideas of a "historical materialism" etc. etc.

Is it age? Is it simply a question of conditioning (e.g. raised to believe anything economic was boring)?

Whatever it is, I would like to conquer it. It is holding me back.