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DIRECTIONS (Qs. 71-77):
Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow.
PASSAGE-1
A TED talk (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is one of the routes to academic stardom that didn’t exist a decade ago. (The 30th-anniversary celebration aside, curators only began posting fame-making free online videos in 2006.) Although TED plays an inordinate role in setting the tone for how ideas are conveyed—not only because of the reach of its videos but also through spinoffs like regional “TEDx” events and the TED Radio Hour, one of the few places nonpolicy intellectuals get substantial on-air time—it’s just one of a number of platforms that are changing the ecology of academic celebrity. These include similar ideas-in-nuggets conclaves, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival and PopTech, along with huge online courses and—yes, still—blogs. These new, or at least newish, forms are upending traditional hierarchies of academic visibility and helping to change which ideas gain purchase in the public discourse. In a famous essay, “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos,” first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that “the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one’s talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usually reserved for the icons of popular culture.” Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting lit-theory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepia-toned.
“If David Lodge’s Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today,” observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, “he’d be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn’t be doing Theory. He probably wouldn’t be in an English department.”
VERBAL ABILITY
DIRECTIONS (Qs. 71-77):
Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow.
PASSAGE-1
A TED talk (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is one of the routes to academic stardom that didn’t exist a decade ago. (The 30th-anniversary celebration aside, curators only began posting fame-making free online videos in 2006.) Although TED plays an inordinate role in setting the tone for how ideas are conveyed—not only because of the reach of its videos but also through spinoffs like regional “TEDx” events and the TED Radio Hour, one of the few places nonpolicy intellectuals get substantial on-air time—it’s just one of a number of platforms that are changing the ecology of academic celebrity. These include similar ideas-in-nuggets conclaves, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival and PopTech, along with huge online courses and—yes, still—blogs. These new, or at least newish, forms are upending traditional hierarchies of academic visibility and helping to change which ideas gain purchase in the public discourse. In a famous essay, “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos,” first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that “the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one’s talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usually reserved for the icons of popular culture.” Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting lit-theory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepia-toned.
“If David Lodge’s Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today,” observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, “he’d be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn’t be doing Theory. He probably wouldn’t be in an English department.”
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