"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."

— Paglia, Camille (b. 1947)


Date
May 20, 2013
Metaphor
"As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter."
Metaphor in Context
As this book began to veer astray, I felt that Lindemann's mind was like a sleek yacht built for exhilarating grace and speed but commandeered by moldy tyrants for mundane use as a sluggish freighter. Her book is woefully burdened by the ugly junk she is forced to carry in this uncertain climate, where teaching jobs are so scarce. The very first paragraph of her acknowledgments shows what has happened to this and countless other academic books: Lindemann effusively thanks a Princeton professor "for giving me the idea that Bourdieu may have had something to say about pro-dommes' claims to artistic purity." Well, the dull Pierre Bourdieu, another pumped-up idol forced on American undergraduates these days, had little useful to say about that or anything else about art, beyond his parochial grounding in French literature and culture. (No, Bourdieu did not discover the class-based origin of taste: That was established long ago by others, above all the Marxist scholar Arnold Hauser in his magisterial 1951 study, The Social History of Art.) The leaden Bourdieu chapters bring Lindemann's momentum to a humiliating halt and effectively destroy the reach of this valuable book beyond the dusty corridors of academe.
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Camille Paglia, "Scholars in Bondage" The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 20, 2013). <Link to chronicle.com>
Date of Entry
05/21/2013

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.