StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064.html

Perhaps you thought that the Right Wing attack on the Academy had lost some of its steam, its power to accuse scholars, teachers and other academic figures of cultural, if not political subversion of the most heinous kind? The charge has it basis in the idea of a betrayal of the vested interest in an undying canon of Great Works, although that notion could be and is being broadened by the inclusion of other works, that simply offer another set of viewpoints, as a way of apprehending, more clearly, our common heritage: a conscious act of political, historical, cultural, and literary clarification.  The notion of the diversity of the literary endeavor and the ineluctable value of that diversity, to produce works that reflects a broader range of possible narratives, in the production of that work, hardly seems worth a question. But being that The Wall Street Journal is a Murdoch publication, this sub rosa attack on the academy has at its root an attack on the Academy as purveyor, indeed publisher, of the relativist propaganda that seeks to subvert the notion of the unchanging, immortal canon .One can see quite readily that the Conservative idea of Originalism, in the interpretation of the Constitution, is analogous to this idea of an eternal, immutable set of literary works: as the reading of the Constitution could be based, on a politically inspired phenomenology, having its ground in thinking within the political/ethical parameters of the Founders. Although this might be considered an impossible act or thought experiment subject to a real subjectivist bias.

The author of this book review titled What Killed American Lit. is Joseph Epstein, a Contributing Editor to The Weekly Standard, and a writer for The New Criterion and Commentary. So, should we be surprised at the ease with which Mr. Epstein goes about his task, of fomenting a  low grade hysteria against the English Teachers of American Universities?;  although he does manage to modulate his tone for the very respectable readers of the once staid Wall Street Journal. Mr. Epstein doesn’t mention the names of Foucault or Derrida, or the vogue of French theory, that has swept the American University English Departments, since the translation of On Grammatology into English.  For the political intent of this review is simply to attack the English teachers of the American University as sclerotic, disloyal and subversive to the Conservative Ideal,  that remains the great undefined quantity of this essay. But it most assuredly exists, since it must exist because Mr. Epstein makes it the basis of his faith. Or is that the central problem with this broadside?

American Littérateur                       

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) is in a tizzy. Why you ask? The sky is falling? Hold on to your hats! The Younger Generation is going to the dogs, morally. (Does anyone remember Harold Hill?)  They don’t even know what morality is! Or even how to answer a question properly, with the requisite comprehension. And the proper respect for the world of Patriarchal privilege that CP grew up in, and holds most dear, is utterly lacking in the younger generation. Perhaps they watched too much Fox News? Or was it an early exposure to Rush Limbaugh? Oh! And the science quoted was at best debatable, being that its’ conclusions were tested against what criteria? This is after all science. Then we have the magic words in Right Wing circles ‘moral relativism’, it is so hackneyed. It has lost its power to shock, even with the two old war horses trotted out for the occasion, Allen Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb, to testify, albeit mutely, to the pernicious effects of a surrender to that vacant ideal of Liberalism, as interpreted by our resident moralist. No one need point the finger at CP as a right wing intellectual clown; he rather handily demonstrates that reality.

Political Cynic