Catchwords of the Literati

[intertext]

Via Oook Blog comes this reference to an article by Stanford Daily columnist Katie Taylor about the 10 most (over)used words in academic circles.

The Top Ten in reverse order of popularity are as follows:

10) Iconoclasm
9) Ubiquitous
8) Paradoxically
7) Subjective/objective
6) Duality
5) Feminist
4) Ironic
3) Dichotomy
2) Race/ethnicity
1) Juxtaposition

Kind of makes you proud, doesn't it?

What I want to know is - where is "paradigm"? What happened to "privileged"? "post-colonial"? or surely "politics"?

Those terms are, I hesitate to say, ubiquitous in the journals I read, and I find it ironic that, in a discussion of the duality between the feminist and post-colonial aspects of race and the subjective and even iconoclastic interpretations of the discourse that paradoxically arises from that juxtaposition and the dichotomy between the relatively privileged language on one side of the binary and what occurs when we deconstruct the other, we ultimately have any readers with the energy or patience to care about language or the study of literature at all.

Comments

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm droppping 'dichotomy' and 'paradoxically.' Considering my subjects, I can hardly lose 'feminist'...

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I think we can let you get away with that one :) I'd have a hard time dropping "subjectivity" given my own area of interest (intertextuality, the sublime and reader response).

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

I have tha tproblem, too - but I never use 'objective' so I think I can get away with it.
You do reader response, too? I thought I was alone in the world...

[intertext.livejournal.com]

I try. My work on intertextuality kind of circles around reader response theory, and it makes the most sense for teaching, too.