Stupid shit found on Reddit. Lancelot was a transformer
(media.scored.co)
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I have some background in lit crit, which is where I saw some of the origins of this leftist rot that would quickly metastasize to every discipline in the academy. My best instructor heavily stressed the importance of the constraints imposed upon our interpretations of a text by the text itself; you’re not allowed to support an interpretation of a text when evidence within the text explicitly contradicts you.
This is so obvious a concept that it borders on complete tautology, but it was nonetheless necessary for curtailing the wildly unsupported ideas proposed by leftist students. Often times, leftist students would propose insane themes and subtext - about LGBTQ or anti-capitalism or patriarchy - that were not remotely supported by the actual writing and were, in fact, ruled out by a more complete reading. Those students were there to promote leftist ideology, and their only interest in classical literature was to torture our interpretations of it until we discovered that all of literature was secretly about trans lesbian communists.
My good instructors rapidly became outliers as the intolerant leftists forced any non-activists out of the department. Eventually, the faculty consisted only of teachers who gleefully ignored all constraints on interpretation. You could score easy A’s in any course, at any level, by simply regurgitating the most brain dead critical theory ideas in any discussion or paper. It didn’t matter how detached these ideas were from the subject text. The entire lit crit discipline became 100% corrupt and useless in just a matter of years.
Isn't the whole idea behind Critical Thoery that there are infinite, equally valid, interpretations of any text?
That’s the motte. The bailey is ruthless enforcement of leftist ideology. Critical Theory is basically a hand grenade that leftists tossed at western civilization in order to burn it all down and make way for communism.
The “infinite equally valid interpretations” bit used to run into the brick wall of “there are constraints within the text that make your interpretation impossible”. That shit got tossed when the leftists took over.
Another example is the concept of “lenses”. We used to employ different these as viewpoint exercises - feminist lens, masculine lens, etc. But then the leftist lenses became the default while every other lens became verboten.
Sort of, until they are able to enforce an interpretation that they like, then that one is canonical and everyone who thinks otherwise is a Nazi bigot.