Thanks for tagging me version this thread is making me feel a lot less schizo about all my grievances with my course. The really depressing thing about this "lensing" is that, even as it fades, its aftereffects are so strong as to have still diminished the prominent discourses in especially film studies now. The majority of contributions to discussions in my classes start with "In undergrad I did _____" or "well at my home university we had _______." Alternatively, there has been no turn towards problem-solving, critique, and the broader resonance or deeper movements of a text (cue biscuits meltdown), only purely theoretical questions or discussions of production ethics that go nowhere. The latter is where identity politics loom most heavily, as even when not explicitly employed the framework is still the same in terms focusing almost entirely on representation as opposed to intention or effects. Simultaneously, the sort of creative autobiographical work that linebaugh mentioned is still encouraged in some spaces. These tendencies seem to me symptomatic of a fear of creating serious, actionable criticism of a text or broader cultural movement; a fear of rocking the boat that did not hold back the academics who crossed over into the public sphere and blurred the line between scholar and critic (like many of the most heralded film critics and post-modernists). There seems, in my experience, an almost subconscious self-limiting or terror at the idea of speaking to anyone outside the ivory tower, which only drives students and faculty further and further inward as they continue asking and answering questions invented entirely to spark and continue esoteric conversations between themselves that only they are equipped to talk about. To hypocritically bring in my own personal experience, I can't deny that it's made me immensely sad as the few genuine scholars, ie people fueled by a thirst for solutions and new ways of living and thinking in their research and knowledge production, all encouraged me to pursue a postgraduate degree and that energy and encouragement drove me into this morass that seems inescapable. It feels to me as though academia, at least in my field, is incapable of producing another Pauline Kael, Paul Schrader, Mark Fisher, Jacques Derrida, etc. The conversations I've had on here have been exponentially more edifying and galvanizing than any I've had in class in the past 6 months. I'm not really answering the question here, just ironically offering my personal experience. Sadly, all the questions luka mentioned in his first reply, which are the ones that drove me to attempt to pursue an academic career, are not the ones being asked in place of the more explicitly representational/identitarian ones that were asked and encouraged until recently. I've simply stopped contributing to class discussions, even at the cost of my grades, basically out of silent protest because I believe none of us are benefitting from these endless "remember when" and "I have this experience but no actual observation on it" conversations. The faculty could barely even be called lecturers; I can count on one hand the amount of traditional lectures designed to give us new knowledge we've had in class over the last academic year. Lovely people, most of them, but nowhere near the thirst for newness and revolutionary energy of the best of their predecessors, and at worst narcissists only interested in one-upping their colleagues in virtue signalling and theoretical knowledge.
