These are some initial thoughts on Jeffrey Sconce’s “Trashing the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” published in Screen in 1995. The most I could manage with my time this morning was a few short paragraphs, but I look forward to expanding them.
In his 1995 essay “Trashing the Academy,” Jeffrey Sconce argues that the growing academic interest in “paracinema” represents a political and cultural shift within the academy. Paracinema, for Sconce, is a “counter-aesthetic” that valorizes cinematic “trash.”
Academic disciplines are just that, discipline. The academy not only disciplines, but also legitimizes. By submitting to discipline, graduate students gain legitimacy as scholars. While discipline involves learning research methods and best practices, it also involves the shaping of tastes. Disciplined scholars gain a certain amount of cultural authority, they are considered “legitimate” scholars with “legitimate” tastes in a “legitimate” field.
Paracinema, then, represents an opportunity to rebel. Paracinema is, using Bordieu’s terms, a “refuge or a revenge” for those without cultural capital.
Jacob N. Given 