Signs Of The End Times: There Was An Academic Conference On Jersey Shore Studies

Snooki may have read an unbelievably low number of books in her life, but that hasn’t stopped bookish people from taking an interest in her. On the contrary, her and her seaside cohorts’ seeming lack of any traditionally recognized kind of intelligence only spurs those eggheads on harder to study them like so many orange bugs under a microscope. Hence, it should come as no surprise that the University of Chicago held the first ever conference on Jersey Shore studies this past Friday, and it was well-attended.

In addition to your garden variety cultural studies professors, speakers included Gawker‘s Brian Moylan and writers from The Onion A.V. Club, and topics included “The Guido Pose and Italian American Identity,” The Jersey Shore (and reality TV in general) as refutation of Marxist labor theory, and “Bodily Discipline: Foucault + Snooki = BFF.”

If this sounds to you like something out of a Don DeLillo book, you’re not alone. Personally, as someone who “studies” this stuff every day for a living, I have to say there are limitations to the amount of meaning one can reasonably claim to have extracted from this subject matter, should one wish to be taken seriously. In fact, it’s this very disconnect between The Jersey Shore and any kind of organized thought that drives the humor in Crushable’s own Jersey Shore Field Notes. It’s funny because you’re not actually supposed to take field notes on the goddamn Jersey Shore. Then again, this type of condescending application of academic principles to people who don’t know what those are can be super fun, in kind of a mean way, so I totally get where they’re coming from.

(Via The New York Times)