It’s the end of December, the end of 2009, and the end (finally!) of the Aughties. More importantly, for some of you, it’s nearly the end of semester break. What will you study next year, while pursuing a degree that might well lead to a soul-crushing job combined with equally crushing student-loan debts? You could do worse than Lebowski studies, a field that seems to be undergoing some sort of renascence. Hardcore academic types Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe have proved this by assembling The Year’s Work in Lebowski Studies, a collection of academic essays devoted to the world as seen through the eyes of The Dude. Some of them sound fun—Craig N. Owens’ contribution “On the White Russian,” for instance. Others, like Stacy Thompson’s essay “The Dude and the New Left,” sound significantly less fun than a multiple root canal:

It is easy enough to read the Dude as the failure of the New Left and its exhausted state in 1991, the moment infamously described as “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, when the world economic order had supposedly evolved to its inevitable telos, capitalist liberal democracy…. But to test this reading dialectically, it is worth inverting its structure and reading the Dude directly against this interpretation, not as the failure but as the triumph of the New Left.

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. Seriously, stuff like this is enough to make you think about pursuing a minor in Star Trek studies while preparing to tackle that really challenging degree program in Motel Management. Or you could just kick back and relive some cherished movie moments by watching the short version of The Big Lebowski. (Warning: Some profanity may be involved.)