Make Your Own Academic Sentence

November 20, 2009 8:27 AM

Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says: The conceptual logic of millennial hedonism is often found in juxtaposition with, if not in direct opposition to, the sublimation of difference.

Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:

Pootwattle's hastily published paper on the relationship between the conceptual logic of millennial hedonism and the sublimation of difference should resolve the disputes over terminology that have plagued the field since its inception.

nifty

posted by caddis (12 comments total)

Please make sure you have selected an option from each list.
posted by idiopath at 8:42 AM on November 20, 2009

I've done a few, and actually gotten sentences that I think are actually pretty right on. Fun.
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:08 AM on November 20, 2009

My academic friends (especially fellow University of Chicago alums) have been playing with this site for a few weeks. It would be freaking hilarios if it weren't so *sad. I've created dozens of sentances, and any one of them--like this one, "The (re)formation of desire replays (in parodic form) the historicization of the gendered body,"--could have been lifted from my UofC MA thesis. That's where the site sits, so who better to host the site. But for Chicago to have something so self-mocking is really shocking. And cool. ;>
posted by njbradburn at 9:24 AM on November 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

Using pre-made conceptual wholes like "gendered" and "historicize" strikes me as cheating in a context-free parody like this. Sentence structure aside, these concepts do, in fact, exist in a tightly organized network of relationships with each other already. I'm not defending airhead pseudotheory, which I despise. But there is perfectly lucid and legitimate social theory out there that uses these concepts. In that work, one would indeed likely find these complex abstractions frequently co-occurring in sentences. Such sentences could be bullshit; or they could be incisive in context.

Pretty LOL-late-1990s if you ask me.
posted by fourcheesemac at 9:40 AM on November 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

Ditto (somewhat) fourcheesemac. Out of the 20 or so sentences I constructed, about 3-4 were actually fairly smart, things that I could see writing, depending on context. The rest were just random A+B+C+D, but like 4cm says, these abstractions do have significant relationships to one another.
posted by Saxon Kane at 9:52 AM on November 20, 2009

So the logic of linguistic transparency asks to be read as the construction of process?

I wouldn't say LOL-late-1990s, David Lodge was already satirizing this in the 80s. Which makes me feel old, because I thought of the book as a contemporary satire.
posted by cgk at 10:33 AM on November 20, 2009

This intellectual randomization is going to put real academics out of work, just as the whole range of on-line random generators is putting comedy writers out of work. (I hear "Two and a Half Men" has a Story Editor that is really a few lines of php code running on a Windows server... the producers are working on something similar for "The Big Bang Theory" but much cooler because it's on a Mac.)
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:36 AM on November 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

The illusion of post-capitalist hegemony is strictly congruent with the fantasy of the nation-state.

Ah.
posted by mrgrimm at 11:27 AM on November 20, 2009

Don't forget The Postmodern Generator for whole essays on things like "Reinventing Social realism: Postmaterialist narrative and the cultural paradigm of context"
posted by radiomayonnaise at 11:43 AM on November 20, 2009 [1 favorite]

The illusion of consumption is strictly congruent with the authentication of print culture.

I'm not sure I can really argue with that.
posted by gyusan at 12:11 PM on November 20, 2009

+1 for the Postmodernism Generator, tirelessly delivering random postmodern essays since Feb 2000.
posted by memebake at 12:57 PM on November 20, 2009 [2 favorites]

Metafilter: strictly congruent with the fantasy of the nation-state.
posted by Tesseractive at 8:42 AM on November 21, 2009