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How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read
What a wonderful title. This new sensation, by French intellectual superstar Pierre Bayard, tells how to liberate our reading habits from the oppression of our most formidable peers (we carry around books to look cool) and more importantly from our own ever-more-demanding selves, which pursue the perfect reading experience but for largely misconceived and self-destructive Freudian reasons; rather than improving our reading, we should instead perfect a new kind of "anti-reading," and as part of a broader program of reconciling antinomies, de-objectifying the book, revising Barthes to fit a new and partially unhidden world where structures can be liberating, and uncovering the not yet fully recognized Proustian roots of the modern sensibility.
Highly recommended, it comes out tomorrow.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on October 29, 2007 at 07:37 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
It's almost like you haven't read any Barthes at all...ah, I get it.
Posted by: Luke G. at Oct 29, 2007 7:44:13 PM
Was this post the result of a postmodern nonsense-generator? Reminds me of Alan Sokal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair
Posted by: Rob Adams at Oct 29, 2007 7:52:58 PM
I'd like to talk about this book. But not having read it, I don't yet know how. In order to not have to read it, I'd have to read it first.
Posted by: at Oct 29, 2007 10:12:25 PM
crazy. Tyler just turned Post Modern on us.
Posted by: thehova at Oct 29, 2007 10:17:16 PM
Before I got the joke, I thought this just fell under what you called 'aspirational' posts. Perhaps this is why the postmodernists became popular - they kept reading incomprehensible verbosity and multitudinous references, figuring something was there?
Posted by: Sam at Oct 29, 2007 10:46:54 PM
No, post-modernism became popular due to nominal necessity. Modernism (in philosophy, construed broadly) was deemed to have ended with figures like Nietzsche, Dewey, and so on. The next wave of substantial philosophic work building on late modern philosophy was pre-ordained to be called post-modernism by people too dull to comprehend things without neat typological boxes (it comes after modernism -- let's call it post-modernism!), and by the dullards' exceedingly simple minded students, who fail to even understand the typology.
Posted by: lskjfa at Oct 30, 2007 2:58:55 AM
Wow--how po mo! Heck why don't we do one on econmics research! Why bother reading any of the journals
just send us a digest Tyler! We can use jargon to describe things we never read! Not so much
post modern but post literate!
Posted by: Robert at Oct 30, 2007 3:18:37 AM
How do you get to read books before they come out?
Posted by: Richard at Oct 30, 2007 10:47:08 AM
It worked in high school English class, I can't imagine social situations being any more difficult.
What's with the opposition in the comments? Have you never heard of bulls**t?
Posted by: 8 at Oct 30, 2007 11:13:28 AM
People already do this for economics. I got a critique of my paper from someone who hadn't read it. (I confirmed this.) Most people react to the subject with their own opinion, which can be pretty off-topic.
I wonder if people do this for fiction? "New Salmon Rushdie? Oh yeah, it's got people saying weird things that I didn't understand -- brilliant!"
Posted by: David Zetland at Oct 30, 2007 11:29:22 AM
hilarious!
Posted by: Azad at Oct 30, 2007 12:03:51 PM
If you get started on a paper about how not to read comments on your blog I will work on one about how not to read your posts.
Posted by: aaron_m at Oct 30, 2007 1:08:54 PM
An interesting article explains how there is a new start-up company whose purpose is to write up 100 page abstracts on magazine articles, so that people don't have to read them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/28/AR2007102801135_2.html
Posted by: Chloe at Oct 30, 2007 1:42:04 PM
Chloe, I thought that was the most brilliant idea ever, until I realized that you meant 100 word abstracts. Now I'm all disappointed.
Posted by: Zubon at Oct 30, 2007 5:19:32 PM
I'm french. Pierre Bayard is totally unknown in France ! He's not a "French Intellectual superstar".
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