wordles are more than games The summer winds on, we've a new Supreme Court Justice,  and in a week or so I'm going to imitate Chaucer, though he did his bit in the spring:.  Off I go on pilgrimage to England... the country separated from the United States by a common language.  I'm off to see an old friend of mine whom I met when he worked for the Historic Buildings Division  of the Greater London Council in the days before Margaret Thatcher's Tories abolished Greater London.  (How sad to see the noble building reduced to housing an aquarium--but I digress, this post is going to do that a lot).  Why do people visit Merry Olde England?  Cultural or Heritage Tourism is a big draw...the Monarchy survives at least partly because it provides a sort of cachet attractive to those who want their pomp circumstantial.  




People who say they hate history behave as if they love history.   In the United States, the National Park Service is a major employer for Historians.  One can specialize in Heritage Tourism and  Heritage Tourism is touted (bad word, but I'm stuck with it) as a money-maker.   Why then do history courses wind up on the take-it-because-it-is-good-for-you list?  The list which  is the kiss of death?  I  suppose it is because academics can make anything dull if they work at it hard enough.  It's a craft.  It's a gift.  But here's a secret:  we're not the best at making things dull and incomprehensible.  We're actually far more popularizers than people give us credit for being,



The postmodern critique of genre adopts several themes. First and foremost, denying the assumption of generic "essence" or a fixed identity for any given genre, critics have attacked classificatory impulses of descriptive genre theory, noting that, as a normative rule, "every work deviates from any particular set of characteristics that may be attributed to its kind" (Snyder, 1). A related charge is that, far from conforming neatly to taxonomic labels, most texts exhibit characteristics of more than one kind of genre and sometimes of multiple kinds: "Essentialist genre theory assumes that a preconceived unifying principle is a sufficient basis for interpretation, classification, and evaluation, and this kind of genre theory simply does not entertain the possibility that there may exist such a thing as a multigeneric text" (Madsen, 8). Taxonomy as a principle is predicated on images of fixity and stasis; critics today insist that a taxonomical essentialism cannot recognize - much less explain - the evolutions and transformations that mark the history of every genre. Postmodern critics, linked closely to the varieties of Marxist-based literary historicisms, find this lacuna the most egregious of all and assert instead that "over time every work combined with all others of more or less the same kind constitutes the history of the genre: the genre is its history of individual instances" (Madsen, 9).

F. Elizabeth Hart
Embodied Genre:
The Conceptual Semantics of Shakespeare's Dramatic Types

The Wordle  is based on the text above, which  is the second paragraph of the essay.  Doesn't it just really make you itch to read some more Shakespeare?

Sesquipedalianism, anyone?

I started this post because I wanted to introduce people to the glories of Wordles.  As the inventor of this gadget describes "Wordle is a toy for generating "word clouds" from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text."  I think he's too modest.  This may be fun, but it's more than a toy.  The word clouds are significant.  Try Wordle-ing some of the text from TPM Blogs, or, for that matter, anything "newsworthy" or "Political". 

Behind this text lies a skirmish about General Education  in which I've been involved this summer.  The serious side of the  issue is the tendency of  some academics (hopefully not me) to practice populism in reverse.  If I can make language as opaque as possible and simultaneously create a gate through which only those blessed with control of the language can pass, I can control the discourse, and become a member of the privileged elite.  Beggar whether anyone outside cares one way or the other.  May I be given fifty lashes with a wet noodle if I ever use a phrase like "find this lacuna the most egregious of all" in public without quotes.