1st Year Grad Student Still Has No Idea What Critical Theory Is (Spring 2003)

1st Year Grad Student Still Has No Idea What Critical Theory Is (Spring 2003)

Despite having completed almost an entire year of graduate study at U.C. Irvine, where he has studied with some of the best theory faculty in the world, Comparative Literature Ph.D. student Phil O’Shippe is still struggling to articulate the basic concepts of critical theory.  Says O’Shippe, “I visited my family for Easter a while back and my uncle asked me what critical theory was.  I was having difficulty explaining it to him, and then I suddenly realized why – I really just didn’t know.”

 

Hoping to catch up with other students who have a better theory background,

O’Shippe has taken all three courses in the introductory theory sequence.  Says Professor Andrzej Warminski (known in the hip-hop community by the moniker “Dr. Drzej”) of the sequence, “The course titles are actually tropes – in this case, acronyms.  220A stands for aggravating, 220B for boring, and 220C for confusing. ”  

 

O’Shippe hopes that, given time, he will master critical theory, as well as other concepts he has been exposed to at Irvine. "I have a pretty good handle on cultural studies.  I know it's, like, this thing that, like... Fuck!” Asked to respond to the concerns of students like O’Shippe, Professor Dragan Kujundzic gesticulated wildly and delivered the following statement: “I would say it’s a problem, yes, but not a crisis.  By definition, something must be critical for it to be a crisis, and clearly that is not the case here, or else we would have no problem, so to speak.”   Kujundzic added that next year there are plans to implement a second-year Critical Theory sequence of 220D, 220E, and 220F: Deconstruction,

(d)Econstruction and Free\ak -construction.