Smelser & Davies offer a view of US reception of the claim that the Wehrmacht was uninvolved in, indeed unaware of, war crimes in Eastern Europe - reception that extends from eager students at Annapolis through to contemporary Holocaust deniers and wargame aficionados. After that it was good to encounter Barbara Ehrenreich's spirited article 'Are Women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?' and What Are Intellectuals Good For? - A Crooked Timber Seminar on George Scialabba's Book [PDF].
'George Scialabba and the Culture Wars; or, Critique of Judgment' by Michael Berube in the latter work comments that Scialabba "is not altogether fair to Edward Said.
Culture and Imperialism, Scialabba writes, is an inexhaustibly tiresome book. "The writing is clumsy, stilted, verbose, imprecise, and marinated - pickled - in academic jargon"; worse still, "Said's polemical manners, here as elsewhere, are atrocious: sneering, overweening, ad hominem. Too often, he innocently misinterprets or not-so-innocently misrepresents other people's arguments."Scialabba reportedly questions Said's dissection of an imperial subtext in Jane Austen ('Said & Sensibility', anyone?):
[Said's] interpretive strategy is bold and ingenious. How are we to assess Austen's few references to Antigua, and what are we to make of them interpretively? ... "My contention is that by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming ... the importance of an empire to the situation at home." This is the hermeneutics of suspicion a la folie. In fact, not much more can usefully be said about the relation of Mansfield Park to the British Empire than that the former was written in the latter. "Extraordinary formal and ideological dependence," my eye. It is just this sort of grandiloquent assertion that excited so many people about Orientalism and that makes Said's celebrity so depressing.
