Postmodernism, The Physicist, and The Porn Star

{Don't miss our nomination period to nominate your most attractive physicists}

When was the last time you read an article that has, in one shot, something about creative writing, postmodernism, a physicist, and a porn start trying to change career? Well now you have!

This article is lamenting the state of creative writing classes, and that they no longer teach you how to write, but now teach you how to think. But worse still, they inflict on postmodernism ideas onto students.

The trouble with creative writing classes in the modern university is they do not teach writing. As anyone who has suffered through one of these classes knows, they are nebulous attempts at inculcating students with the values of today's postmodernists -- most importantly, pretension. Pop-cultural analysis, pop-psychology, and pop-philosophy are discussed, while how to write a compelling sentence is not. Rules of capitalization and punctuation are ignored probably because they are vestiges of neocolonial homophobic sexism.

Now, as someone who didn't take creative writing in college, I have no idea if this is true, or if this is universally practiced in all schools. So I'd like to hear from someone who knows more about this than I do. Still, the mention of the word "postmodernism" cannot evade the infamous Alan Sokal that managed to throw a pie in the face at that discipline.

Social Text's editors published the article in 1996 and soon after Sokal revealed it was a hoax, proving that certain branches of academia today are unable to distinguish nonsense from fashionable nonsense. This stems from the fact that relativism forms the intellectual bedrock of the humanities today. Because attempts at discovering truths are derided as antediluvian, substance and argumentation are relegated, while servility to the gatekeepers takes on supreme value. This is why we get such fashionable nonsense, and, unfortunately, this is exactly what Lorelei Lee will both teach and be taught.

Ah, such fun!

Zz.