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Books Related to Cultural Selection Gary Taylor - ISBN: 0465044883
A lively, if typical, speciman of a contemptible genre - Rated
Cultural Selection extends eloquently, the unfortunate hegemony of cultural studies within the literary academy. Though analyses such as those concerning Nixon and the Vietnam Memorial are entertaining, they fail in a way that calls this mode of criticism seriously into question. The theorizing is tertiary, never attaining to explanatory adequacy. Instead, the reader is subjected to what is at times an enormously tedious concatenation of truisms. This is not, though, specific to Taylor's work (as it is among the best of its kind); but rather is endemic to the whole of cultural studies as a "discipline" blithely unaware (willfully?) of its own epistmological assumptions. The presentation of various evolutionary theories is a cheap rhetorical maneuver effected in an attempt to hide a lack of theoretical rigor behind a burlesque of scientific efficacy. If Taylor had really wanted to supply us with a coherent, explanatorily adeqate matrix through which to analyze the literary artifact, he might have considered one more appropriate to its data (for example, recent innovations in generative grammar, along with its literary applications in the work of John Steven Childs). Unfortunately, the fact that the book far surpasses much of what has been done in a similar critical vein underscores Chomsky's assertion of the utter intellectual ineptness of such theorizing ("I am waiting for Mr. Foucault to explain to me how exactly it is that my work is determined by historical and cultural constraints" (Chomsky 14)). In the end, the whole of cultural studies along with its dogmatic and unjustifiable assertions of socio-cultural causation must be categorized as so much academic frosting: a nice diversionary treat ultimately lacking in epistemological substance. Some light reading, perhaps, after one has done the real work of addressing the work of scholars such as Quine, Putnam, Chomsky, or Carnap. One can only hope that the formal elegance of their work (particulary Quine's work in semantics and Chomsky's promising Minimalist revision of x bar) will displace the current intellectual sloppiness of cultural studies.
