Aporia

ABSTRACT

Adopting a researcher-poet stance, this prose poem is a reflection on the consumption and marketing of French theory within American academia seen through a graduate student perspective. Following Cusset’s argument that French theory was essentially created and marketed in the United States ‘by American modes of reading French authors’ (35), this text represents the overlooked, minority voices of humanities students as ambivalent ‘theory-consumers’ and ‘critical academic spectators’. The Derridean concepts deployed in the poem, aporia/aporie, hauntology/hantologie, respectively characterised by uncertainty, doubt and temporal disjunction, are ironically mapped out against contemporary graduate student lives marked by poor employment prospects, vulnerability, performance anxiety, private consternation and mental illness. This contribution advances the role of prose poems in consumer research by underlining the innovative possibilities they allow for alternative, subversive, deeply ambivalent and ironic representations of consumer experiences in academia. This prose poem also offers novel conceptualisation on contemporary academic theory.

KEYWORDS:

• French theory
• deconstruction
• Paul de Man
• Jacques Derrida
• François Cusset
• literary theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.