"Writing on the Body; understanding whitman and his use of personal identity"
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So - When I was in grad school I noticed that there were these "buzzwords" that seemed to be all the rage every year or two. When you were researching a particular topic, if it was 1982 the word "movement" would be in every title; in 84, it was Body. "the Body and East Asia", "Embodying the sound and fury" "Understanding the Body in Feminist philosophy". "Dialogics" and "dialectics" were the big thing in the early 90s. And it didn't matter who or what you were writing, if that was the "in" thing, you got it into your title somehow. I never really understood the whole "othering" part of literary criticism, Bahktin, Tracy, Pierce all deal with the theory of teh "other" in literary criticism and religious criticism - and i never understood it at all. I just think it was a way to get "hits', back before google.
I don't know anything about lit crit, but "nano-" seems to have peaked as a tech buzzword in the last few years. The trendy thing in the social sciences currently seems to be to slap "cognitive," "neuro-", or "evolutionary" in front of everything (good timing for me). "Game theory and x" is also popular.
And sometimes, it's fully appropriate. Cognitive linguistics is probably a perfectly valid term. But I can see some pseudo-scientific Art Historian who needs to "publish or parish" and decides to write "Cognitive approaches to the analysis of Art" or some such. It was that kind of "use a term just cause" that made me giggle. My own thesis had "Storytracking" as its buzz word - but in my defense, the author of the concept was on my committee.
Yeah, I have come across some Bobo-esque things like that where they just randomly sprinkle in the names neurotransmitters and brain anatomy.
I'm sure there's a webcomic tracking the use of terms throughout time and shows "nano" technology peaking and being slowly replaced by "pico" technology. I thought it was xkcd but can't find it, might be Piled Higher and Deeper, but to be frank that's a more difficult one to search.
Nice.