I Hate Biblical Criticism and Lit Theory. So there.

If you want to know how to get on my bad side, just start talking about all the different "theories" or "criticisms" in biblical or secular literature as a "given" to understand anything. Odds are, you would be tuned out so completely that you might doubt your own existence, if you're philosophically sensitive to that kind of thing. But lit theories...Ah! Friends! How I hate them all! In all my academic experience, nothing was ever so tiresome or did so much to turn my joys and sorrows to undifferentiated mush as when we started forcing literature through these tight tubes, whether it be "form criticism" (in biblical studies) or "queer theory" (in literature). It's funny, because the criticisms were supposed to be "liberating" and open up "new perspectives" and so on, when really they are the unkindest taskmasters. I know they must have been exciting at one time, but the excitement I think came from some lust for destruction--destruction of the "old" ways of looking at things--but now they're just old hat, and people must begin to see that they were only a virus of thought, latching on to works with lives of their own, injecting them with itself and exploding them into a pathetic viral goo that defiled eveything it touched. I just realized that probably most don't even know what I'm talking about. Oh well. Let me vent.

I've played with the idea of writing up an extremely condensed history of biblical criticism, but I think that's a bit much for a blog post, hey? It's good to know the history, though, because it shows that certain ways of thinking are not inevitable, no matter how many "intelligent" people may adhere to them. I pretty much know I couldn't write a history of lit theory, because I'd get so agitated I'd have a heart attack. Heart attacks are always bad and often lethal. "Sad. He was only 27." "What did he die of?" "He tried to write a history of lit theory." "Ah. Such a senseless death." "I know, I know. Like I said. Sad."

Yeah, scrap that. I think I'll just write about Chaucer some more. I think next on the reading list is Troilus and Criseyde. Been a while. I love Chaucer's English, Frenchied up though it is. Until I finish that, though, I'll just post whatever stuff.