xkcd on literary criticism

So, here’s Friday’s xkcd, called “Impostor”:



The basic joke is that lit crit and sociology aren’t hard sciences, and the farther any field is from the hard sciences, the easier it is for any idiot to pretend to be an expert in said field. In addition to this explicit content, the subtext for the joke is that even the “experts” in these fields aren’t experts in the way that an engineer is an expert.

Now, I don’t think that literary criticism is a hard science. However, I think the joke becomes a bit of a cheap shot when this subtext is investigated. The joke is about knowledge communities in that the protagonist is seeing how long it takes for each group to realize that he doesn’t share the knowledge of their subfield.

While we can all debate the merits of literary criticism,—I myself have some doubts about its usefulness—what xkcd’s author Randall Munroe is charging here is that the knowledge community created by literary criticism has no boundaries, but is rather merely a set of cleverly-arranged buzzwords like “deconstruction” which are used to dazzle and distract instead of increasing knowledge. At this level, the joke also seems to be a sly reference to the hoax Alan Sokal perpetrated on Social Text, the cultural studies journal where he managed to get a “phony” article published.

The reason I think this joke gets its laughs cheap is that it is targeted at grad students. Of course English grad students can be easily bamboozled—they are also new initiates to the lit crit knowledge community, and like the protagonist of this strip they are unable to tell what fits into the field and what doesn’t. It would be slightly more difficult for him to pull this stunt with an English professor. This perspective flips the joke somewhat in that if Engineering grad students can be completely initiated into their knowledge community so quickly, it must not be as complex as the knowledge community of literary criticism.

Poor Jon Arbuckle

I’ve felt like this all week since SXSW.



via Garfield minus Garfield

Surveillance pie

From The New Yorker, via CartoonBank.

Doonesbury on classroom communication

I found today’s Doonesbury to be particularly funny.


For me, the strip works on two levels. First, I think Doonesbury is poking fun at the way young people interact with technology, rather than suggesting that technology in the classroom is a wonderful thing. As evidence for this perspective I would suggest the joke in the throwaway panels—Zipper appears to be busily engaged in some sort of heavy thinking which overwhelms him, but this activity is revealed in the last panel to be checking his email—and the fact that Zipper is not the brightest character in the strip. I found the comic funny at this intended level: Zipper is clearly not participating in the class, and his scheme for avoiding being called out on this point makes for an ironically-exciting narrative.

(Personal note: this situation reminded me of my own college experience. When I was a freshman, I would regularly sit in the back of a large, required survey course and read the newspaper. On one occasion, I didn’t hear the professor when he called on me to recite something or other. When a friend a few rows over got my attention and let me know what had happened, I jump up to do the reading, but the professor had moved on to something else, so I stood sheepishly for five minutes until he finally acknowledged me.)

The comic also works for me at another level, one where Zip is able to use his considerable techno-savvy to deal with the age-old problem of being called on to answer a question about material you haven’t studied. Zipper is merely using his laptop—IM and Google—to provide a novel means for achieving an old solution: getting the answer from someone else. And, in this case, because he found the answer himself, it is more likely that he will remember it.

I’m generally amused by professors who don’t allow laptops in their classes because they “distract” the students too much. Do professors think that all the students without laptops are paying attention? Did they never pass notes, or sleep, or read newspapers in class? At least in Zipper’s case, he is able to use his distraction as part of the classroom environment, even though he isn’t completely engaged with that environment.