Scott McLemee has a nice retort to the backwash from his recent lampooning of the MLA. (Ahem, Scott. There is no way to link to a particular entry on your blog. One must link to the blog entire. Ahem.) Lost in the kerfuffle about the difficulty of literary theory, he writes, is the fact it isn’t, really. Much of it is “the merest psitticism,” he writes. (But wouldn’t that be “psittacism” with an a? In a previous life I was a copy editor.)
2 thoughts on ““The Merest Psitti(a)cism””
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The whole site is pretty low-fi. Hence no permalinks for specific blog entries. Sorry! As for the spelling of psittacism, you are entirely correct, though in fact I did catch that, later on. Not the only typo at the site, I'm sure, given my faults as a typist — plus the limits of spellcheck, which suggests that for Heidegger, perhaps I should substitute Headgear.
Only noticed because I had to look in the OED to figure out what the word means, and only mentioned it as a flimsy pretext for linking to your vastly entertaining and erudite blog. Kudos, by the way, on your much-deserved winning of the Nona Balakian award.