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Posted by Gul Al Maktoum on December 3, 2007, 2:20 am
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or another. Such major victories, however, are Pyrrhic
ashes in the mouths of those for whom ideology is an absolute. If
--gender interchangeability-- is the hypothesis then there can be no
rest until all societal fashions resemble those of the various Star Trek
pyjamas-as-street-wear incarnations: interchangeability must be total.
One of the earliest bastions to fall (and which is still in the hands of
the People's Revolutionary Government of Gender Interchangeability) was
Academe. I believe that Gore Vidal alluded to the conquest -- however
obliquely -- in the closing paragraphs of his essay --Edmund Wilson: This
Critic and This Gin and These Shoes-- (New York Review of Books,
September 25, 1980):
But Wilson was quite aware that --things-- in themselves are not enough.
Professor Edel quotes from Wilson's Princeton lecture: --no matter how
thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature
from the historical and biographical point of view . . . we must be able
to tell the good from the bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We
shall not otherwise write literary criticism at all.--
We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has
won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side.
Ambitious English teachers (sic!) now invent systems that have nothing
to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that
must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy.
Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be
full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken
down. Fortunately, as Flaubert poi
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