re-l8

The young humanist, as Castle depicts her, is necessarily perverse, and certainly neurotically invested. She is likely to be a prig, but is also a cynic, at least about some cultural norms. She disbelieves many hoary old narratives, but still thinks academic achievement earns love. (These days: she knows all the numbers, but still thinks she will get a job.) She is the bad child of Dewey's progressive educational model ,  an introvert, a solitary, an obsessive   who can fake the moves of the good child. And by trying so sincerely to earn a way into the academic middle class while feeling uneasy about it she lives out a contemporary contradiction, in which being middle-class these days means feeling freaky a lot of the time. She is good, in other words, at inhabiting the gap between sincerity and irony, between cultural gatekeeper and cultural rebel, between grandiosity and humility. And she is good at making others feel similarly.

WORD.

fell on 2011-06-07 at 10:27 p.m.

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