A brief history of title design.

By Ian Albinson. Film listing here. And these may be of interest.

When it comes to the less reputable quarters of academia, you’re a cold-hearted, cynical bunch. Oh, don’t deny it. Some of you chuckled wickedly at that mistress of limpid prose Dr Caroline Guertin and her Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. Some of you managed to turn the infinite nuance of artistic theory into bawdy comedy. Others somehow found amusement in Professor Sharra Vostral’s musings on the politics of menstruation and her discovery that the humble tampon is “an artefact of control.” 

I mean, really. You people are such heathens.

It’s with some trepidation, then, that I share the latest find by TDK and Mr William Briggs – Stuff Academics Like, a compendium of curios from our Towers Of Learning. One of its regular features is the Guessing Game series, where readers are invited to ponder a list of imposing conference papers and lecture titles in order to fathom which of them is the imposter. Below are a few contenders from a recent list, only one of which is officially hokum. Feel free to take a shot. 

Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica. 

The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.

Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.

Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings. 

Not sure? How about,

The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.

Or,

Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.

Or could it be,

Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?

Nope. They’re all actual contributions to the broadening of our minds and the swelling of the culture.

The imposter, of course, is,

Guattari and the Onomatopoeic Imperative: Decentering the Archaeologies of the Speech-Act.

Which is obvious now that I’ve pointed it out. Oh, there’s more.