April 06, 2004
Week of Loathing (Day the
Week of Loathing (Day the Third): The Comparative Literature Graduate Student
We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are lucky enough to be finished with our college educations. After a collective four years dabbling in the hubbub one normally associates with a Liberal Arts education—“Take Back the Mid-Afternoon” rallies, “White People Are Evil” teach-ins, &c.—we have all blithely moved on to greener pastures, sliding down the razor blade of life, as Tom Lehrer memorably put it.All, that is, but one of us. One of our young staff members—let’s call him “Chip”—is toiling away at a Master’s at Bates College. It is largely thanks to the acumen of “Chip,” then, that we offer this, our third installment of the First Annual Week of Loathing (April 4th-10th, 2004), which is directed at a particularly noxious irritant, the Comparative Literature graduate student.
Dear reader, you know the type: Shaved head; miniscule octagonal glasses; dangly earrings; all-black wardrobe provided by Banana Republic; clunky footwear; a tattoo of Judith Butler; a leather pouch chock-a-block with tomes by such authors as Antonio Gramsci, Homi Bhabha, and Fredric Jameson.
A rather repellent visage, n’est pas? But wait, it gets worse. One can always catch the Comparative Literature graduate student smoking clove cigarettes outside the campus library, prattling on about the “fetishizing of anti-consumerist pedagogy” in an ostentatiously stentorian voice.
Naturally, the Comparative Literature graduate student deserves as much obloquy as we can muster. After all, he is busy attempting to help the impoverished while being blessed enough to be far away from anyone who is, well, impoverished. And what help he offers! Surely our country’s underfed benefits greatly from such recondite articles as “W(h)ither the (Dis)course: Toward a (Post)colonial Parsing of (Glut)tony”! Why, look at all the delectable parentheses that our nation’s starving can savor! It is, naturally, the merest coincidence that such articles not only greatly ameliorate world poverty, but also land the Comparative Literature graduate student an enviable tenure-track gig at Princeton, where he can really get in touch with the poor.
What perhaps most offends us, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” about the Comparative Literature graduate student is the nauseatingly safe way in which he touts his radical credentials: He “subverts the dominant paradigm” amidst a faculty that is busy “subverting the dominant paradigm.” How gutsy!
The art critic Harold Rosenberg once excoriated such pseudo-radicals with the delicious phrase “the herd of independent minds.” Given the countenance of many of the female Comparative Literature graduate students, this description appears a propos in more ways than one.
