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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.
Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON THE THOUGHT OF KARL MARX. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for Robert Paul Wolff Marx."





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Monday, April 2, 2018

HOW I SPEND MY DAY


I am now spending hours going through mountains of file folders, papers, and offprints in an effort to subdue my life to some sort of order.  I am simply astonished to discover episodes in my professional life that I had completely forgotten.  For example, it appears that in 2004, I undertook, using my USSAS mailing list, to raise money for an NAACP voter registration campaign.  Really?  Who knew?

Along the way, I came across one delicious item that I need to share with you, if only to illustrate just how wonderful my colleagues were in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  Here are the title and sub-title of a paper delivered at a 1990 panel discussion in Atlanta, Georgia.  The author is my colleague Michael Thelwell.

“Cap’n Dey Done Stole De Canon, Best We Bring Up Our Howitzer”

Or, not necessarily more precisely, but in the fashion of the day:

“The problematique of de-situating the re-marginalization of Afro-centric tropistic significations, intertextually, against the ambience of a phallo- and Euro-centric, post-Derridian canonical discourse, mediated by a post-Freudian, pre-coital detumescence and seminal exhaustion, other-ality, and the influential anxieties of race and gender.”

5 comments:

LFC said...

The subtitle, clearly intended to be amusing, is indeed amusing.

LFC said...

p.s. One could deconstruct it, but I think that would be, for lack of a better word, overkill.

Charles Pigden said...

Well clearly your colleague is a wit, but what was the paper really all about?

Robert Paul Wolff said...

It is a brilliantly funny attack on standard Yale style literary criticism and the manifold ways in which it misunderstands, distorts, demeans, or unintentionally savages the Black experience and literature, complete with an over the top burlesque of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

LFC said...

I took the "influential anxieties of race and gender" to be a -- perhaps slightly strained? -- dig at Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, simply b.c of the juxtaposition of "influential" and "anxieties." My (rather ignorant) impression though is that Bloom has never been preoccupied w race/gender. Perhaps that's the point? Whatever. It's still funny.