An interesting article in Salon about books by writers who hate academics (particularly, those in English departments). The author is an academic, and makes some good points. Here's one:
"But I still don't understand, frankly, why people hate literary scholars for having a professional vocabulary while remaining perfectly content with economists' using "devaluation" or philosophers' using "existentialist," or physicists' talking about a "projective Hilbert space endowed with the Fubini-Study metric." These days even Tucker Carlson uses "deconstruct" and George W. Bush has developed quite a fondness for "ideology," which half my dissertation committee rejected as jargon. So what's the big deal? Have there been excesses of obscurantism and pomposity? Yes, but as our literary writers have long known, from Laurence Sterne to Herman Melville to James Joyce to William Vollmann, sometimes nothing succeeds like excess."
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we gets no respect i tell yas. the point about the jargon is well taken and, of course, the point that new criticism is also a very prescribed way of reading -- as much as any other theory. of course new criticism has an ideology and a cultural frame and its insistence that it doesn't can feel a bit underhanded. i think the article's point that these "how to read" books are very much "what to read" books. when i was an undergraduate these arguments were happening all the time among the faculty (i was an english major), but as students we were still taught new criticism. now that feels a bit deficient, but i also think it produced a bunch of very careful, sensitive readers. i feel like it prepped me for when i first encountered what we now call theory a few years later, but there's no question that it had to be left behind at a certain point. my huge impossible hope is that all these theory wars are a thing of the past. that the next crop of scholars -- us, i guess -- sort of take it all in and use whatever theories (and i'd lump new criticism in as a theory) seem best suited to the task at hand. does that make sense? i've had a lot of coffee this morning.
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