A quarterly publication of The Center for Literate Values

Board of Directors:

"The Center’s immediate focus is on publishing, publicizing, and distributing books, pamphlets, and other printed material which furthers the revival of the Western tradition and, specifically, of tasteful literary art and morally responsible analysis. In keeping with its broad purpose, the Center is especially dedicated to representing an intellectually rich faith in the God of goodness and mercy to the academic community, and, equally and concurrently, exposing the community of believers to imaginative, challenging works of art. Our commitment to subtle artistic works of high caliber and substantial content is as firm as our commitment to well-reasoned apologetics and polemics: we seek to serve the cause of truth, not to propagandize." The Center for Literate Values, Objectives, sec. 2

The previous issue of Praesidium (Summer 2005clicking here.

ISSN  1553-5436

©  All contents of this journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Literate Values of Tyler, Texas (2005), and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express permission.

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CONTENTS

A Few Words from the Editor

This edition is both relatively short and small in number of offerings—but its quality is as high as ever.

The Post-Literate Student and the Anti-Literate Academy:

A Bad Match at a Crucial Moment

John R. Harris

The very institutions entrusted with kindling in our children a love of literature may be most responsible for smothering the spark. Yet a few changes, though improbable in the current environment, could transform a distressing situation.

A Dark Turn in the Pop-Culture: "Bleak Future" and Occult-Horror Subgenres in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Gaming

Mark Wegierski

Dark Futures in Gaming: Some Further Explorations

Mark Wegierski

Mr. Wegierski’s exhaustive review of "dark fantasy" board games—of which Dungeons and Dragons is surely the most benign—may offer more than you ever wanted to know about such leisurely pursuits; yet we can no more afford to be unaware of the phenomenon’s multiplicity than of its demoralizing effects. 

Teacher, Make Me Wise!

Staff

The student-centered classroom of contemporary education would not have made much sense to the truth-centered masters of ancient philosophy.

Four Poems

Michael H. Lythgoe

Mr. Lythgoe’s poetry often helps us to recover a sense of reality in nature—but it does not turn away post-modernity’s long shadow.

Career Year (short story)

J.S. Moseby

Baseball season may be over—but small-town secrets are always in blossom, and the child’s initiation to adult hypocrisy occurs every day.

*****

At the end of September, I prepared a bundle for the Internal Revenue Service which included two issues of Praesidium, about twenty pages of completed forms, another dozen pages of supporting documentation, and a check for $150. I have lately received a standardized letter confirming that The Center’s application for 501(c)(3) status has successfully entered the first winding corridor of "the works". Now I am in the initial stages of a long, long wait. I occasionally recall with some anxiety certain forms which might have been filled out more knowledgeably by a professional accountant… but I have also been reassured that simple candor is the best policy in such endeavors. If the IRS sleuths recognize me for the fumbling ingénue that I am, they are less likely to suspect me of trying to sneak by something illicit under their noses—unless, of course, they reason that no one could possibly be so naïve.

A federal tax exemption would allow those who donate money to The Center to claim it as charitable giving. Our operating budget, I presume, would grow rather healthier as a result. One of the strategies we really must adopt, I am convinced, in order to survive is to pay out some kind of remuneration to contributors, since material is beginning to become alarmingly rare (but not, by some miracle, alarmingly inferior, or even approximately mediocre). I understand that any shift so sordid as offering actual cash to authors might undermine the journal’s academic integrity in the eyes of those elite few who live far above such coarseness (and for whom a publication in College English and another in PMLA merely means a permanent raise in salary or, perhaps, an award of tenure). In a less ivory kind of reality, however, we writers must make trade-offs: prepare an essay for Praesidium or read a conference paper before the yearly review with the Dean, keep Praesidium alive with a poem or place the same piece in a journal more "respected" by one’s peers, and so forth. A small check might nudge some of these painful deliberations in our direction. Even yours truly would be very, very happy to take a couple of hundred dollars a year to the bank in return for the hundreds of hours I sacrifice to composing my essays each year. (I dream of sitting in a barber’s chair one more time before I die: I’ve had to cut my own hair for the last decade, thanks largely to the struggle represented by The Center.) Those contributors who belong to our board, I hasten to add, were specially mentioned in my stack of forms as deserving of some small financial encouragement, since they presently receive none whatever. (I also stressed to the IRS that we would adopt a policy limiting the yearly amount paid out to such parties lest any significant conflict of interest arise in the selection process.)

What I most zealously desire to do under the aegis of a tax exemption, though, is to secure enough money from a charitable foundation to publish collections of Praesidium’s essays on certain subjects—pedagogy, cultural decline, disturbing trends in popular culture, etc.—as hardbound books, to be donated to specified educational institutions and also, maybe, to be sold (at no profit to individuals) to the public. We already have an immense wealth of matter from which to choose in our many years of archives. Inclusion in such an anthology, I may note, would give those of you who are academics further reason to write for us: the P&T Committee could not fail to be impressed by your appearance in a handsome volume of profound ideas.

Well… on verra. The Fall issue now in your hands contains a long essay by me, a still longer essay (or sequence of essays) by Mark Wegierski, several short poems by Michael Lythgoe, and a long short story by J.S. Moseby. This quarter’s theme, apparently, is determined and sustained resistance to theme. I typically like to hedge my bets against possible reader indifference to certain subjects by offering at least half a dozen pieces per issue. It didn’t happen this time. Nevertheless, I am confident that most of this issue’s contents will either inform or entertain, if not both. I myself knew nothing, for instance, of the rather sinister board games which Mr. Wegierski explores in great detail—but as a father, a teacher, and a student of our ailing culture, I was heartily glad to find out about them.

The Winter and Spring issues of 2006 will almost certainly, once again, be a Winter/Spring issue. I have already received the promise of several items (and, in one case, the item itself) for an expanded issue which will more than compensate for this quarter’s slightly thinner-than-usual product. We are not in danger of drying up and blowing away, rest assured. We may, indeed, at long last be on the verge of leafing out and blossoming as never before.

back to Contents

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The Post-Literate Student and the Anti-Literate Academy: A Bad Match at a Crucial Moment

by

John R. Harris

Few experiences can be more vexing to the devoted reader than the discovery of a text too dense with rare vocabulary to be understood. I remember fighting my way through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in my twenties as incipient panic gnawed at me. I felt so close to my goal—yet it slipped away with every page, every sentence. I was convinced that the ideas which loomed in Kant’s haze—scarcely resolved, alas, by Norman Kemp Smith’s translation—were the oasis after which my parched soul had long sought (for I came of age in the seventies, when honest truth had lately vanished behind hand-holding, flower-lacing, and guitar-strumming). Perhaps I understood about half of what I read, at last. A little knowledge is no doubt a dangerous thing, as the fundamental perversions of Kant by modern philosophers have proved; but in my case, I miraculously navigated past mirages to a self-transcending appreciation of moral duty. I was beatifically lucky in my Kantian struggle.

But that, of course, was philosophy—old school philosophy, rationalist, aimed at universal comprehension even when it was most ruthlessly terminological. By deep and sustained introspection, one can divine the intent of a writer like Kant as one observes oneself wrestling with questions of reality and duty: for any human mind, at the bare-bones level of rationalist critique, is the human mind. What about a novel? Not too long ago in this journal’s pages, I ruminated upon a highly innovative Irish novel by Díarmuid Ó Súilleabháin titled Aistear (see Praesidium 4.1, 37-49). The plot, such as it is, traces a number of characters beyond their death to a land of eternal light. After more than a dozen plane crashes, car wrecks, and other exits, we end up at the Crucifixion and Saint Peter’s denial. A young man with little formal schooling in Irish Gaelic may be forgiven, surely, for finding such elusive strands of action impossible to keep within his grasp. My first attempt at the novel was a failure: only after many years could I address it with more success. A story, you see, is all about particulars, not generalities (let alone universals)—and I was defeated by so many particular incidents communicated in so many peculiar words. My vocabulary was not up to the task..

Those who do not read beyond their mother tongue and who graduated from high school more than two or three decades ago may consider this discussion rather remote from the realm of ordinary experience… but think again. I put it to you that today’s college student is typically in this alarming situation whenever he or she is required to read a work of literature written in the English of a period dating before, say, the twentieth century. Henry James’s vocabulary and syntax are probably impenetrable to most undergraduates, and Joseph Conrad’s as opaque as a Channel fog. Shakespeare’s plays might as well have been written in French—or in Swahili. H.G. Wells may prove accessible, and F. Scott Fitzgerald will raise few obstacles; but somewhere not very many generations of authors ago, the instructor finds that his class hits a wall of comprehension-resistant granite.

There is my Point One: that students in institutions of higher education are incapable of reading many of their tradition’s classics today because they cannot understand them at the ground-floor level of verbal units. Another chasm opens once this one has been bridged—and again, I can illustrate it from my own experience with literature in other languages. I have lately attempted a reading of El Diablo Cojuelo by Luis Vélez de Guevara. This odd little novel, which ran through three printings in the lively Madrid of 1641, faintly reminded me of Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac, past masters of the outlandish and the grotesque. Its pedigree was apparently much more specific, however—and its allusions to contemporary Spanish literature and history far too specific for me to identify. I readily grasped that the central character had freed a companionable little demon on crutches from an astrologer’s bottle, and that the diablillo then gratefully escorted the young man of the world throughout Spain as if on a magic carpet to perceive—both panoramically and under the magnifying glass—the progress of modern decadence. I admired the literary device’s novelty, the author’s courage in undertaking so delicate an assault, and the genius of using humor to disarm potential persecution. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are certainly not devoid of further examples apprising us of the intimate connection between wit and acerbic social commentary, Swift being but the most obvious.

The most obvious to me, at any rate, and probably to other English-speaking literati… but I soon grew painfully aware that Vélez’s world was not that of Rabelais, let alone Swift. So many of his allusions raced over my head that I was forever spinning about in the airborne pair’s carnival-nightmare wake—not accompanying them, but hopelessly chasing their ever-more-distant figures. I gave up about halfway through, though the novel is quite short. Diction and syntax were far from helpful: Vélez’s sentences seem interminable, and his words, besides being archaic, frequently pertain to long-extinct curiosities of dress, deportment, and architecture. Yet in dress, deportment, and architecture we find the influence of something beyond a complex vocabulary. First and foremost, it was the author’s culture which I failed to penetrate. I know too little about the frightening plummet of Andulasia’s fortunes in the seventeenth century—nothing more, really, than what I have picked up from Don Quixote and Lazarillo de Tormes—to appreciate the innuendo of a book like this. I am a prisoner of my ignorance, and I honestly haven’t the time to limp from my bottle on the crutches of a dozen history books: El Diablo Cojuelo is not that important to me for the moment.

Again, I suggest that our undergraduate students occupy much the same situation. Even a world as historically and culturally proximate to theirs as Victorian England projects fashions and manners sure to strike them as positively arcane. Why all the fuss over courtship in Henry James? In an age of condoms and hook-ups, our robust, well-tanned sophomores in their gym shorts and flip-flops cannot begin to grasp the nuance behind a seating arrangement or an "improper" glance. Their mores are as neatly severed from the Western world’s of a century ago as my generation’s were from the Middle Ages. They no longer disapprove of hypocritical stuffiness, as we did: they cannot so much as conceive of it. To disdain the salad fork as you move along to your garden greens is one thing: to wonder at a mysterious article called a fork—its appearance distinctly warlike, yet its function said to belong to the feasting hall—is quite another.

Before assigning most of our literary classics to these winsome barbarians, we should have to teach them vastly more cultural history than they presently know. To do less would be a) to foment their loathing of literature (for they have no more time to spend on Shakespeare than I do on Vélez), or b) to suborn the brutal misreadings of literature—the "relevant" or "updated" readings—which have come to be the special province of upper-division English classes. You might as well confront a lifelong denizen of the Sahara with a Constable landscape or a Turner seascape: unless he is first primed with a crash-course on geography and the temperate zone’s flora, the canvas is a mere Rorschach test.

I mentioned the mores surrounding courtship just above. Impinging upon this matter are the morals surrounding sexual conduct—and that raises a third point. Assuming that contemporary students might be equipped to handle the articulate diction and intricate syntax of yesteryear’s author and that relevant customs and conditions could be illuminated beforehand, we should still be faced with a yawning gap in moral values between our forefathers and our children. This can prove highly consequential in literary narrative. Morality is the science of what people ought to do. Its principles are profoundly affected by assumptions about basic human nature. (For instance, if a moral system maintains the value of self-sacrifice, it will be ramified quite differently by those who think us all naturally disposed to serve our neighbor and by those who think us all naturally selfish.) Narratives display characters acting in accord with a certain view of human nature, and also in accord with their individual nature (which may vary delightfully or horribly from the norm). The events of a really good narrative—and here I grow tendentious, but I will assert that aesthetically "good" stories capture us in coils of complexity—thread the external action inextricably through the hidden devices and desires of its participants. A gripping plot which keeps us turning pages demands that we be projecting possible actions, based upon what we understand of the characters’ motives and personalities, into the near future; and the magnetism thus drawing us into the characters depends, in turn, upon our sharing some or most of the author’s assumptions about human nature. A story which ascribes motives to its participants which we find wholly incredible—too noble, too vile, or too ridiculous—is not "real". This is how we usually register our dismay: as an appeal to hard reality. Yet the truth is that a moral chasm has opened between us and the author, whose unhappy presence, in terms of the story purely as an art work, becomes a disastrous aesthetic flaw.

My purposes would be little advanced here if I were to ramble off a string of authors whose moral universe I consider "unreal" to the point of tastelessness. I may mention Michel Tournier in passing. I was forced to expose myself to his novels quite hastily in refereeing an article once upon a time, and I recall being appalled by the deliberate (surely deliberate) triviality of every motive. A Robinson Crusoe-like character growing obsessed with some sort of water-clock, a forgotten apostle arriving moments too late for the Last Supper and being enraptured by the food’s taste and scent… no parody or allegory lay in sight whenever Tournier would devote pages to these irrelevancies whose connection to identified events could have struck only a lunatic as substantial. All of us who have taught literature for a living, I would wager, know this quality as a distinguishing one of postmodern fiction: the parody of mere story-telling, it might be called. When the author reaches a point where a character’s motives are conventionally explored, absurdly inept excursions take place, instead. The result is supposed to be insightful or witty or both. To me it is none of the above.

By way of a more bona fide example, I might cite a response to a novel of my own creation. A love affair was at issue. One of my best-educated contacts cried foul that the narrator should have become so enthralled to so pedestrian a young woman. I harkened to Manon Lescaut in rebuttal—but I was already sweating cascades of self-doubt. Had I been wrong, after all? Do men not really fall in love sometimes with a woman’s mystique rather than with the woman herself—with what they do not know of her, that is, or perhaps with her very flaws when they put her in need of a protector? Is a certain kind of man (and far from the worst) not attracted to vulnerable women because their defense renders him lovable? I could hardly have expected anyone to wade through the book if this basic assertion about human nature were untenable. Eventually I calmed down: I came to realize that my correspondent was deriding, not the plausibility of a young man’s vaulting into a scenario where he could play The White Knight, but the fact that young men sometimes do such things. This urbane reader was, in other words, confusing my story with my recommendations for the Good Life. It was his reading which was tasteless: he assumed that I was preaching, and then accused me of preaching badly.

I suggest that this incident and the deliberate tastelessness of novelists like Tournier are related. Our ailing culture has arrived at a point where even its most erudite—especially they, it often seems to me—have lost all respect for (or perhaps all awareness of) morality’s narrative aspect. They do not recognize that the moral universe’s atom is the chosen act: crisis, perception of crisis, decision to respond and accept consequences. Motive is not an outdated literary convention: it is the necessary elucidation of a character’s act, and hence determines the moral stature of that act. To deny motive—to refuse its communication to the reader or, worse, trivialize its value by communicating an irrelevant motive—is to claim that nothing humanly happens, that an elopement and an abortion and a massacre are simply so many trees falling noiselessly in a forest where seasons grind away absurdly. On the other hand, to insist that all characters’ motives should be mine or yours—should conform to the list of politically correct motives which our clique has compiled—is to confer upon the fallen trees a logger’s utilitarian significance, but not, still, to hear the shock waves which they send through the community. Great stories are seldom moral exempla. They are, rather, maps of worthy ambition and disastrous error which the moralist may profitably untangle later, but whose aesthetic dénouement requires reaching a specific terrestrial destination. Indeed, the fervent ideologue denies morality as much as his frivolous postmodern brother (or alter ego) when he moralistically condemns a tale for not broadcasting the right message at the right volume. For the aesthetic purpose of morality in narrative, I repeat, is to refine, to deepen, and to interweave—yet this is precisely the vector followed by a truly moral intelligence.

Our poor students! If we, their teachers, have so far relinquished any common ground on matters of the human heart that we dare not even speak formally of "human nature", what hope have they of finding the riches within their tradition’s great plays and novels? The good news is that human nature, being fixed for all human time, may be studied by anyone in any circumstances, whatever academic trend may rule about its reality. Frankly, I should suspect that working in a hospital or rearing a family or running a small business might be rather more instructive in the complexities of the human heart than taking a psychology course. I have known students from the blandest of backgrounds to bring to their reading of an ancient epic or a Shakespearean tragedy an understanding of human egotism and human fallibility far in excess of what their highly decorated professors possess. For such students, endowed with the advantages of "street smarts" and life’s hard knocks, our decrepit culture’s neglect of any coherent moral instruction is the very least of what keeps them from entering a century-old classic. That such a thing as human nature does exist is proved by the ease with which they grasp Sir Gawain and Ariosto once the encrustation of cultural difference has been rubbed away.

Yet these students are, one must admit, exceptional. They are usually older than the typical undergraduate, and have usually employed their additional years in getting to know life rather than in fleeing it (like the "professional student" who abounds at large universities). In the others, we do indeed encounter a problem: and it is less one of sheer raw ignorance, I believe (as when the barbarian is introduced to the fork), than of false indoctrination. These younger, more naïve students are convinced that they are wizened veterans on the subject of human behavior—and the source of their illusion is electronic entertainment. By the time they enter college, they have voyeuristically observed so many seductions, passionate embraces, robberies, forgeries, conspiracies, rapes, murders, suicides, coups d’états, and high crimes and misdemeanors that they fancy they have little to learn from anyone—or from all of us put together—about "what really goes on". They are jaundiced and cocky… and immensely ill-informed. Their "taste" in narrative reveals as much. They are quite content to play out stereotypical roles in video games, or at worst (when they must be cheated of their "interactive experience") to read some formulaic pamphlet claiming to be a novel which features their favorite game’s or show’s characters waging yet another war with the evil vampire-android sexpots from between the wrinkle in the time warp. To reclaim a mind littered with such unmoored detritus for the classical novel’s human world of soul-searching and critical action is to clean out the Augean Stables ten times. The semester’s calendar hasn’t enough hours for the undertaking.

And the brainwashing—or brain-soiling—starts early. I am incessantly appalled at the kind of children’s fiction which has been put before my own young son by "professionals", often graced with a Caldicott or Newberry Award. From the tenderest age, apparently, our children are to grow comfortable with the notion that magic can waft them from one setting to another, that Never Never Lands can be approached through secret doors, that avuncular old men (invariably of non-European origin) can fish a deus ex machine out of an antique shop’s attic… and so on, and so on. A little of this goes a long way. I’m all for creativity—but a child nearing adolescence is surely ready to be weaned from scripts where he or she is alternately the only spectator of a miraculous pageant and the pageant’s center-staged wand-waving hero. When do we expect our children to begin to understand that reality is created by the consequences of acts, and that acts can be so meditated as to have happier rather than sadder results?

The tail is wagging the dog: our passive-observer fantasies before electronic screens have now infected even what literature continues to sell profitably among us. Minds thus conditioned simply cannot grasp the stakes in Austen or Tolstoy or Conrad. They are insufferably bored. Where is the pageant? Why do the characters talk so much, think so much? Why doesn’t anything happen (in the unmotivated sense of a spontaneous external cataclysm)? I am not particularly disturbed to hear such questions in a ten-year-old boy. When a college freshman rebels in the same terms, however, we know we have inaugurated an age of post-literacy.

In my experience, the academy’s response to the crisis of post-literacy has been a catastrophic failure. I should say, more correctly, that I have observed no response. In a supreme irony whose humor appears, perhaps, only to those of us who understand "human nature", the products of radical, anti-canonical graduate programs developed in the sixties and seventies have turned out as hermetic and elitist as the "boring" Old Guard—far more so, it seems to me. English departments are driven overwhelmingly by the career ambitions of those who staff them (for the lasting legacy of feminism to the profession was that career comes first, and even non-feminists—males and diehard traditionalists—have followed suit to protect their livelihood). How do you ensure a successful career as a professor of literature? You embrace a shift of emphasis to publication rather than teaching, and you endorse a trendy theory of scholarship which renders last year’s articles immediately "old hat" and rewards mastery of jargon over objective knowledge of content. So engrossed are most mainstream English departments in this dog fight that they have had little energy left over to resist the creeping illiteracy of those under their tutelage, even when they have had the collective astuteness to notice it. Many professors, indeed, choose to exploit the problem so as—once again—to advance their career. When administrations hand down a mandate to attend more to the classroom, such teachers court their students’ favor by showing videos endlessly and assigning everything from comic books to pornography—everything except literature, in short. The student evaluations come back, students declare that they have "had fun", administrators breathe a sigh of relief concerning retention, and the professor garners a teaching award to go with his or her two new five-page publications. The good times roll.

But let me start from the beginning: freshman composition. It is no secret how the system works—journalists with no academic connection whatever have written about it. The typical freshman reader (i.e., the anthology of essays to which the student responds somehow in writing) is replete with hot-button issues: cloning, gay marriage, racism, oppression of women (but usually not abortion or, for that matter, anything related to religion: the hot button mustn’t set the house on fire). The professor is largely handcuffed at textbook-selection time, to be fair. Such anthologies are the only thing out there between an affordable two covers. The publishing industry, which salivates over possibilities for big sales, grinds out these tomes in response to academe’s most vocal, most avant-garde cohort, the coterie of iconoclasts from the nation’s Ivy League schools. You must understand about the teaching profession (for the same is true even of primary and secondary education) that the vast majority of teachers, though themselves rather tame parents and taxpaying homeowners of the middle class, raise not a peep about the hijacking of their instructional materials and philosophy by a phalanx of zealots. They fear being blackballed by the most influential, and also being identified with anti-intellectual extremists at the spectrum’s other end. Besides, they have children to rear, taxes to pay, and papers to grade. Resistance consumes more hours than the day is long.

So freshmen read the same essays, year after year—sometimes different essays, but always the same kind of essay. If lucky, they are assigned George Orwell’s "Shooting an Elephant", which appears in every reader I have ever seen (and is generally the literary highlight of a thousand pages). They are likely to read the late Stephen Jay Gould, as well—an entertaining writer with a brilliant scientific mind, but always toted onto the scene to blast away at some unnamed, implicit mainstay of Christian fundamentalism (the Creation, the benign universe… the religious implications, I repeat, are coy of necessity: the individual professor may season them to taste). I am happy to report that the quality of writing by African-American contributors has ascended over the decades. We are more likely to see Frederick Douglass and Dr. King now than Angela Davis—and even Shelby Steele and Brent Staples are sometimes included. On the other hand, gay apologetics proliferate, and they seem to me to grow more plangent and insipid (e.g., Andrew Sullivan’s "What Is a Homosexual?"—which stunningly succeeds at evading the title’s question). The worst writing, for sheer logical discatenation and resort to sterile sarcasm where proof is required, however, must surely flow from the pens of the last generation’s feminists. Amy Cunningham’s "Why Women Smile" and Betty Rollin’s "Motherhood: Who Needs It?" cull out a few facts disingenuously and impose arbitrary interpretations upon them, often by backing into inappropriate analogies. Their greatest use is in demonstrating to students how not to write.

I have composed this list with The Norton Reader open before me—but the overlap to be observed in the contents of other readers must hover in the neighborhood of 75%. If anything, the NR is more reserved than most. Unless one has entirely lost touch with the realities of Main Street, one will grasp at once that the typical eighteen-year-old will be out-of-step, faintly or completely, with almost every position staked out rather visibly in these collections. I do not say that the positions are uniformly wrong, or even radical. I disagree personally with many of them—but what disturbs me is the very evident effort to indoctrinate, not the specific ideology. All but the dullest freshmen perceive this attempt. The young women tend to tolerate it, and even (apparently) to yield to it somewhat. The young men, however, tend to turn hostile, and to remain that way throughout the semester. They build up a resentment (and in their group, by the way, I would also count women reared in fundamentalist households) which extends to the entire department and continues vaguely toward all the liberal arts. They focus more fixedly than ever on their business or nursing degree. They make up their young minds that they will never read any damn short story, book of essays, or novel for as long as they live if they can just survive their college experience. I suspect that they are proud, in a way, of their bad grammar and inarticulate paragraphs. Every solecism is a sly thumb in the eye of "the liberal elite" (a phrase whose adjective does not change meanings for them when found in "the liberal arts"). All those gays and feminists and atheists—literature is something that belongs to them. To hell with it.

At this rate, the forces of post-literacy, initially unforeseen consequences of too much mind-numbing entertainment and too much instant, unmeditated communication, acquire a kind of rationale. To be post-literate—to avoid literature and disdain elegant writing, to be impatient with questions and mistrustful of skepticism—is to be a solid citizen, a pillar of faith and community. Freshman composition, in my view, nourishes the kind of incipient fascism which it grandly aspires to stamp out.

On to the sophomore literary survey! The Norton-style anthology for these courses (St. Martin’s also publishes one: there must be a few others) has undergone changes over the past twenty years which parallel those in freshman readers. World Literature has truly reached around the globe, even though much of the planet’s surface did not produce literature (in any independent and aesthetic sense) until "colonized" by Western alphabetic writing and printing. Aztec mythology indexed entirely to natural cycle and naturalistic gods (i.e., without character development or representation of fine sentiment) occupies the same block of pages as Milton, for no better reason than that Westerners "discovered" these oral traditions in the seventeenth century. The poetry of the T’ang Dynasty, with its charming individualism and haunting tendency to withdraw, falls a few dozen pages before Grendel comes rasping from Beowulf’s marshes. The intent, of course, is to be "fair"—to give other cultures something like equal time with the West, and to insist that time itself has not always found the West leading the race to sophistication. To be sure, certain themes are also favored over others, the freshman reader once more anticipating the relevant criteria. Any text which seems to reflect upon or nudge forward an example of The Independent Woman is sure to get the Norton nod, as is any work of iconoclasm (an absurd criterion in an endeavor aimed at the typical, were we to accept that aim’s good faith). The Norton’s portrayal of Gargantua is eager to recite the Abbey of Desire’s precepts in a sententious, out-of-context detail which renders them tedious (and reminds me of the "rebellious" sixties’ intellectual tedium). The uproarious mock-epic exploits of Brother John, the cleric awarded with the monastery, find no place. The Lesbian taint of Bradamante’s adventure with Fiordispina in Orlando Furioso, truly insignificant in this sprawling, wry romance, proves irresistible to the same editors, yet they cannot be bothered to reproduce Canto 1, with all its clues to interpretation. (Furthermore, neither Bradamante nor Fiordispina really is a Lesbian at all—not remotely: hence the situation’s naughty humor, wasted on our scholar-editors!)

Political correctness notwithstanding, a sense of indoctrination could not hang heavily over such a survey course, it seems to me, unless the instructor were an irrepressible crusader. The dominant impression for most students, rather, is one of confusion. You might as well take a world tour without ever leaving your aircraft. Ten minutes in ancient Athens, five in seventh-century Medina, six in eighth-century Saxony… and then on to China, Japan, the New World… back to France and Spain… the survey turns into a roller-coaster. No anthology I have ever reviewed attempts to introduce a marginal coherence upon the chaos by providing an oral/literate dynamic in the background and referring to it each new culture and era. After all, that might well be said to smack of universalism: for if all human beings, regardless of cultural environment, tend to think in certain patterns before they develop an alphabet, then the human mind must depend upon certain cognitive structures which precede experience. No heresy is more loathed up and down the ivory corridor… so the instructor takes Rabelais’s advice and "does what he will".

On a practical note, I have not observed many instructors to sweat much over the survey’s strategy. In junior colleges, being a sophomore-level course, it is claimed by those with tenure. At the four-year school, however, it is dirty laundry, and falls into the same repellant heap as freshman composition. Adjuncts tend to staff it. Thanks to financial and other logistical pressures, it is considered a lecture course and hence permitted to enroll dozens of students—perhaps even a hundred. The hapless teacher highlights a few nuggets from the podium whose coyly dropped names may reappear on mid-term or final exam, the student memorizes for the same occasions a few timelines usefully supplied by W.W. Norton, and… so much for the world’s literature. It is entirely possible that presenting classics in such a swirling atmosphere of upheaval, flux, and transeunt omnia stifles any nascent love of literary art better than fire-and-brimstone indoctrination. The lukewarm, as we know, is spewed out.

What brave heart, then—or what twisted soul—actually chooses to embrace more of this torture by becoming an English major? A smattering of students will endure almost any pain to be near literature: lonely dreamers, mostly, for whom writing has become the primary means of perceiving the world. Rather more (although this depends heavily upon the campus and the region) are vocal misfits with whom the ideology of oppression and rebellion resonates—and to whom, of course, purely literary quality (if such a thing exists: it doesn’t, according to their philosophy) is infinitely subordinate to political righteousness. Most are education majors, properly speaking, who must sit through one or two dozen more hours of upper-division English for their secondary certification. It is a mixed bag. The firebrand misfits tend to form one clique, the ed. majors another, and the loner-dreamers to stay alone and dream. In my opinion, whatever chance the literary life might have had to affect the next generation has already been squandered at this point; for most of the student body, obviously, does not belong to any of these groups. My present purpose is not served, therefore, by generalizing about what English professors most often do in their upper-division classes. Let it suffice to say a) that the aesthetic approach to literature ("What intrinsic qualities make this composition beautiful?") is not addressed even at the upper levels—especially not there, where post-structural theory is most active; and b) that much the most likely segment of this odd classroom mix to pursue an English doctorate is the disgruntled misfits. The professional vector, therefore, will continue to point away from the mainstream, like a comet’s orbit carrying it out into unpopulated space.

It would be easy, if not facile, to call for a more rigorous enforcement of orthography and a more conscientious instruction in grammar throughout our system of higher education. Students must write more, to be sure. Classes such as the sophomore survey which are filled far beyond the point where one professor might reflectively annotate three or four essays per student per semester should be reduced to manageable size. The business professor and the education professor, furthermore, should assume equal responsibility for policing usage. Anyone endowed with a teaching position at a university should be capable of spelling "anachronism" or of writing a complete, coherent sentence—and of ensuring that students do so.

Yet this, alas, scarcely even amounts to the battle’s first blow. My own difficulties with texts in other languages, after all, could be solved without help if I simply persisted in my studies. Anyone can use a dictionary, and most students will opt to use one if adequately motivated. A problem of a much higher order is presented by the classic text’s distance from contemporary life. The freshman-composition approach to this obstacle is to stage a disingenuous "celebration" of "otherness"—to package short essays representing the alien as quaint, colorful, and diverting. The sophomore-survey approach condescends even further insofar as it center-stages major works of the past or of distant cultures, then abandons the student to whatever thumbnail "meaning" the textbook’s introduction and the flustered instructor care to provide: an erudition deeply indebted to the "keyword phrase". When most students cannot even appreciate the nuance of a century-old work belonging to their own culture, expecting them to profit from two classroom hours of Homer is an ambition lying somewhere between the gullible and the duplicitous.

The apparent antidote to this complaint is a rigid division of course matter according to historical period and cultural setting: a course in Victorian Literature, a course in the African Post-Colonial Novel, a course in Ancient Greco-Roman Epic, and so forth. Though two of the three examples just listed might be said to focus on genre more than place or time, genre is a function of place and time. One cannot study Milton alongside Virgil without remarking several epochal changes which render Paradise Lost something far more like a novel than an epic, surfaces notwithstanding. In the departments of yesteryear, literature used to be taught in just this way: students, that is, were immersed in the historical/cultural milieu of a related set of works so that they might respond sensitively to obscure references and unstated assumptions within those works. Milton was rarely taught beside Virgil, though Virgil was a prolegomenon to studying Milton.

The apparent solution, however, is not the best one in my opinion. At this very late stage in the game—a game which, I reiterate, literate culture is losing badly—hazing literature back to history’s tidy reservation will not restore order. For that matter, the New Turks who began the destruction (or "deconstruction") of literature about forty years ago used history constantly as their crowbar. They perhaps used it cynically, inaccurately, or selectively, creating as much havoc in history departments as in the havens of the beaux arts; but my point is merely that history, even at its best, is something extrinsic to the essential literary phenomenon, the perception of beauty in a text. By indexing these or those terms of the text to The Woman’s Struggle or The Rise of the Proletariat or European Propaganda, one reduces the text to an illustration of certain motives—perhaps fully real and true motives—or of certain trends—perhaps fully objective trends—which nevertheless have nothing immediately to do with the pleasure of reading. Maybe a poem, though paid for by a pompous nobleman who wished to advertise his largesse, has endured because of an elegant metaphor; maybe a novel, though printed under a regime which wished to keep the people subdued, has endured because it projects a sense of vanity in human affairs powerfully from the experiences of its characters. That a beautiful object can be exploited by schemers does not compromise its beauty. The essential nature of beauty, indeed, is to be vaguely, enticingly purposeful—which leaves its mystical gesture toward a far horizon ever prone to misappropriation by some despot or some martinet stealing his way into the background.

We must make our young people want to read and write again, and we will only do so by impressing them with the written word’s beauty. I believe that poetry, for instance, is a perfect match with freshman composition. If the objective of the course is to teach freshmen how to inquire more closely into matters rather than to parrot unexamined platitudes, then no form of writing brings greater delight to the open mind than a poem. I have already alleged (and I hardly suppose the proposition in need of underscoring) that this same course, thanks to the typical anthology’s sanctimonious ideological harping, all too often comes across as an indoctrination. Collections of essays could still be highly useful… but a poem here and there might save the day for the literary imagination. Take a much-anthologized piece by Theodore Roethke, "My Papa’s Waltz". In every class, one or two students invariably read this bittersweet reminiscence of the poet’s working-class father returning home tipsy on a Saturday night as a portrait in child abuse. The "waltz" is indeed a bit rough: the father stumbles against furniture and presses his son rather too tightly in an effort to remain upright. Yet the "villain", if there is one, must surely be the system which sapped this man’s vital energies six days a week, forcing him to seek the joie de vivre in a bottle on those rare occasions when he had the leisure to do so. To remove the culprit even to such a distance is, in my view, the sort of doctrinaire intolerance of humor and paradox which one finds in too many Marxists. Sad the poem certainly is, at some level—but remembering our parents is always sad in this very sense: i.e., that their joy tends to burst forth only through narrow cracks of the day’s care and travail.

Would these insights be out of place amid two or three essays seething with indignation about a childhood in the ghetto or the barrio? Would they not, rather, leaven the utopian social engineer’s agenda with the lacrimae rerum—the awareness that human life at its very best can only be insecure and straitjacketed in conditions? If we want these intellectual raw recruits in our charge to begin thinking for themselves, should we not put before them a kind of statement which states nothing very explicitly, but which instead forces them to picture a context and stay alert for irony? Why, for that matter, should the hotspurs who design freshman readers avoid plainly religious issues—for what could be more consequential to one’s outlook on life than one’s belief or non-belief in a superior power, and the specific character of that power if believed in? I have dangled poems before students like Yeats’s "Second Coming" and Dickinson’s "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" along with the question, "Is this a truly religious poem, expressing a belief in eternal life?" An essay about Darwin, either pro or con, invites the student only to regurgitate what he or she has been reared hearing or to reiterate (in too many cases) the instructor’s strident conviction. An analysis of a poem, by contrast, requires the student to point to certain words and phrases, to connect these with the work’s whole, and—in short—to weigh critically and objectively the greater and lesser possibilities of meaning where the communication’s ambiguity becomes, at last, irreducible. Part of the semester’s exercise might involve the students in writing their own poetry, perhaps—but they will end up doing this by themselves, I suspect, if we only introduce them to the grand (some would say holy) experience of speaking around, through, and just shy of what cannot really be spoken. If we make them independent thinkers in class, they will become poets over vacation.

Into the mix might well be added some philosophical texts, especially ethical treatises. The Norton already presents snippets of Plato and Machiavelli, for which I applaud its editors; but why not go farther? Why clip out Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from its context in the Republic? Why not go the rest of the way from Machiavelli’s urbane hypocrisy to Hobbes’s overt misanthropy? I have used Kant’s essay on the wrongness of lying in all circumstances. It isn’t long: dozens of essays of this caliber could easily be trimmed to the proportions of a freshman reading assignment, and the result would be extremely provocative. We should, in effect, be addressing in the first year of college the third and most formidable obstacle to reading comprehension which I named in my opening section: the confusion of moral values. Instead of being inoculated with the Ivory Tower’s behavioristic speech codes and mores à la mode, students would be confronted openly with a range of positions—many of them contradicting others. Do we want them to learn how to think—or do we just want them to embrace all our conclusions lest they think "wrongly"?

On a practical note, I acknowledge that freshman composition programs are also expected to teach methods of documentation on many campuses, an exigency which renders the dry, fact-laden essay a dreary necessity. It invites, as well, a great deal of plagiarism and (in my view) an unconscionable degree of dependency upon Internet sources. I have little to say about this aspect of the course, other than that it is inconsistent with broader, more worthy objectives and cannot be defended in any respectable manner. Are our colleagues in business and history so lazy that they cannot consume half a class period revealing the peculiarities of their discipline’s documentation? English teachers have allowed themselves to be thus imposed upon because the dependency seems to make their field less dispensable. They are happy to be every other department’s ancilla if the gross indignity secures them a fat piece of budgetary pie. I object to the incoherence of it all. One cannot at the same time teach young people how to reason independently and demand that they repeat what others have said throughout their writing. There is a place for scholarship: freshman composition is not it.

The sophomore survey, which is at present the last nail in literary education’s coffin, could easily be the portal to a life of tasteful, dedicated reading. The course’s preposterous globe-trotting and time-traveling have to go—yet not in favor of a cultural and temporal fixity which reduces it to a history class cum literary illustrations. A historical survey of the world would be a very fine thing in the core curriculum. The English department, however, must serve the cause of literature: of taste, imagination, and intelligent mystery. Just as poetry seems a natural fit for freshman composition, so literary narrative seems to me the obvious content for the sophomore course. The sophomore has begun to learn how to ponder life as a result of his freshman experience: he knows (or she, if you prefer—the undergraduate majority is usually female) that institutions aren’t always as honorable as they appear and that issues are seldom cut-and-dried. This person, poised to choose a major and to embark upon a journey which may consume an entire career, is probably now aware that decisions have consequences. One might say that sophomores are writing the first page of their own life’s novel which has been within their power to write. Few lessons could be less welcome at this juncture than the present survey’s implicit doctrine that everyone does things differently, that nothing abides, and that critical choices (therefore) are not really critical at all in the grand scheme of things.

Do I suggest, then, that the sophomore course should consist of several novels, short stories, and dramas selected for their "relevance" to the student’s personal position? Not in the least. I find this sixty-esque formulation, on the contrary, repulsive for its condescending assumption that we teachers can know what is relevant to our students in a narrowly exclusive manner—that we can know the past to be irrelevant, to phrase it from another angle. Students should be exposed to several classics of the past even at the risk of not clearly understanding their historical and cultural context. For why, I ask, do classics exist—why do people keep reading Homer and Dante and Shakespeare long after sea raids and the geocentric universe and aristocratic patronage are forgotten relics? Isn’t it because generations of readers have found a common humanity about these authors which manages to reach them through dense filters of curious custom?

I realize that what I have just written may itself sound very sixty-esque. Organizations like the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics have formed lately in direct response to a pernicious pedagogical tendency which smiles upon transforming the past into the present—which condones reading our personal interests, concerns, and ambitions into texts where they have no legitimate place. I deplore this kind of narcissism myself: but surely the correct road is a middle road. Nobody dies the same death—but everybody dies. Should we say that the subject of death is closed to conversation because none will approach it from exactly the same direction? Do we not tend, rather, in an excess of reverence for individual detail (probably a legacy of the scientific revolution), to underrate the common elements of our experiences? Is not literature, indeed, our last best hope of recovering this common humanity; or if that distinction belongs properly to religious faith, would not the quality of our faith itself be much enhanced by literary narrative? The believer who has accompanied Gilgamesh to the land of the dead better understands that from which he has been redeemed than the believer who reads only one book and mutes whatever voice in him would inquire beyond it.

Furthermore, I cannot think of a better way to impress upon students the crucial differences between their time and another than by having them read narratives about similar experiences from far-flung eras and cultures. Gilgamesh fears death as we do—but not, perhaps, precisely as we do. It seems to stalk him and Enkidu in an objectified, monstrous form (Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven) and to haunt the aftermath of sexual overtures (Enkidu’s loss of power to the prostitute, Ishtar’s lethal rage after her rejection) rather than to be the neutral void which limns our Space Age glitter with absurdity. Death in the ancient world is more fleshed out: it has teeth and claws, or else it has soft feminine curves which dissuade a man from attempting timeless deeds. For the preferred ancient means of surmounting death through immortality has also grown somewhat alien to us: not a soul’s elevation to beatitude after pursuing goodness through worldly persecution, but an eternizing in story and song handed along to future generations. Enough of this "false immortality" lingers in our own culture—the athlete’s aspiration to The Hall of Fame, the lifelong-politician’s creation of a grand library cum mausoleum—that a young person might well be stirred to re-examine his ambitions. Will he court the treacherous, temporary glories of secular triumph as a pre-literate tribesman would have done—or will he, instead, devote himself to invisible principles in largely invisible ways, as the literate life of spirituality once prescribed?

I have in fact often used the katabasis, or Journey to the Underworld, as a basis for organizing the sophomore survey’s syllabus. The Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Dante’s Inferno are obvious selections—as are Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Ben Okri’s short story, "Worlds That Flourish". The contemporary Nigerians have actually managed to conserve much of the optimism which accompanies the ancient myth, as have the medieval tales of Arthurian knights traveling to strange lands in search of a beautiful princess or a holy relic. All such voyagers return, and they return enlightened and humbled—spiritually improved by a traumatic ordeal, like Gilgamesh himself. What renders the course most fascinating to me (and, I think, to my students) is to proceed to later Western transformations of the sequence into voyages from which the traveler returns brooding and exhausted (Wells’s Time Machine, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) or perhaps, once caught in a hellish labyrinth, not at all (Kafka’s Trial, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo). Nothing I might enunciate from the professorial soapbox could so alert this generation to the vast demoralization which has overtaken the West during the past century or so. I maintain that the despair which sabotages the myth’s essential optimism expresses a significant cultural and temporal gap in terms of human sentiment.

The survey, then, if arranged around certain themes, would at once offer an education in moral reality—in human desire and the consequences of action predicated upon it—and engage whatever moral sense these young readers already have to render distant places and times intimate to them. The theme might well be sexual love, or heroism, or defiance of accepted standards. One may find an abundance of great works on all such subjects. The key is to honor each work, not for its cultural identity (for students often do their best writing when protesting Aeneas’s desertion of Dido or decrying Medea’s sanguinary revenge), but its aesthetic integrity. That is, a student must be dissuaded from calling Medea a lunatic because she claims descent from Helios, the Sun. In Dido’s case, my classes inevitably have rousing discussions about whether she is a victim of the meddling goddesses Juno and Venus or whether, in Virgilian terms, these goddesses are not themselves mere projections of psychic elements within the hapless queen. The rules of the author’s artistic universe are not always easy to tease out. If these rules end up warping basic human emotions beyond recognition, then and only then may a reader correctly charge the author with abusing his medium just to close his story’s loopholes.

Yet most supposed abuses turn out (since these are, after all, time-tested classics) to be culturally conditioned: i.e., the entire original audience of the piece must have accepted as genuine the alleged distortion. Such reflections point the student back in the direction of that multicultural sensitivity so much desired by the contemporary professor—but the salutary path is walked this time as a result of contemplating a complex art object, not on cue and under duress.

May not the same technique be carried into upper-division literary offerings? It would be a shame to fall back upon "theory" after having recovered so many readers and opened so many minds through humanity. I may as well repeat (since I cannot stress it too often) that I am all in favor of supplying students with the cultural and historical context needed to comprehend works remote from their circumstances—but that a literary text is primarily an art work. The post-structuralists who took graduate programs captive thirty years ago, and whose methods continue to dominate many undergraduate major programs, were enemies of historical criticism first and foremost because they offered a rival version of the same thing. They ignored the text’s proportions and its mood to highlight certain elements illustrative of an epochal struggle: the ascent of women, the ascent of oppressed classes, the ascent of the colonized. Though deconstruction was not identical with these neo-historicist efforts, it supplied the solvent necessary to bring down traditional edifices of canon and period. Since words were propped up merely by other words and not by eventual underlying substance, one was free to speculate about who, exactly, had pushed the initial domino arbitrarily to set the whole leaning column in motion. One was even obliged to so speculate: an inquiring mind could do no less. History, of course, suffers from no dearth of dubious motives. Thus one could select one’s favorite conspiracy and elevate it to the position of chief villain. Being a conspiracy, its inner mechanics would always remain somewhat implicit, lost to posterity in destroyed records and unrecorded whispers; and being human motives, the conspiracy’s vital energy would not have a quantifiable effect upon human actions. If one could simply prove them present (and what motive is not present in any human breast?), one might allot them ten or fifty or ninety percent of the total influence without fear of interdiction.

This was bad history, perhaps—pseudo-history, as some of my Old Guard colleagues in history departments would insist—but it was still the modus operandi, at whatever degraded a level, of historical method. Its disparity with a true aesthetic approach is immense. Allow me to hint at the chasm’s size by listing a very few projects which might be carried out in literary studies. The relationship between form and content is so intricate that, as has been observed often, the two cannot be separated. This does not mean, however, that the intersection cannot be explored: on the contrary, its exploration would seem to be one of the first things a literary critic should undertake. Yet I experienced first-hand the icy rebukes one meets in such endeavor when, as a comparatist with a classical background, I dedicated my doctoral dissertation to stylistic effects in epic narrative which were largely unintended, but which nonetheless endowed their texts with an aura once labeled "sublime". I had in mind features like the Homeric formula and Virgilian redundancy—stylistic peculiarities which make the epic ring with innumerable minute echoes, in Homer’s case, or retard its action like a cinematic "slow motion" or "replay", in Virgil’s case. My advisors could not imagine who would want to read such a treatise. To do them justice, nobody in academe was then or is now in the least concerned with the handling of texts in a fashion which fails to index them to historical events. I later tinkered with an article which would have pursued the notion of the "Virgilian formula": a fully literate composer’s affection, that is, for similar sounds in identical parts of the hexameter. I was pondering not only phrases like amor compressus edendi (Aeneid 8.184) and amor successit habendi (Aeneid 8.327), where a key word induces the poet to replicate a sequence of sounds within about 150 lines of the first usage. I was also, and especially, intrigued by phrases like canities inculta iacet (Aeneid 6.300) and planities ignota iacet (Aeneid 11.527), separated by thousands of verses and in nowise portraying the same sort of scene. Such subconscious or wholly unconscious fingerprints applied by the author to his pages often create a seductive charm of extremely subtle operation… entirely too subtle to satisfy "objective" literary scholars, with their self-serving devotion to historical artifact. Needless to say, I didn’t waste my time carrying the project much farther as I began to assess my surroundings better.

Is it so very subjective, though, to assert that Ariosto’s stanzas exert a significant effect upon his narrative? Those of us who have read Orlando Furioso in its original form and have also waded through English prose translations are painfully aware that the degeneration of ambiance between the two is owing, not just to the ineptitude of English with the Italian idiom, but—probably far more—to the sacrifice of the stanza. On the one hand, Ariosto set in motion a constant irony by employing the straight-laced Boiardo’s verse form in his resumption of Orlando’s adventures. On the other—internally, with a keen effect even on those who might never have read a line of Boiardo—he was submitting every new description or reflection to the metronome of meter, the artifice of rhyme, and the ticking clock of an eight-verse time limit. The beaux gestes and forlorn brooding upon which medieval romanciers and troubadours had lavished so many thousands of unkempt verses were now neatly packaged, one after another after another. The formal reinforcement of Ariosto’s profound skepticism—the playful presentation of grand deeds whose grandeur the poet finds highly suspect—is exquisitely apt. Would not such a fine connection of artistic means and ends be well worth studying? If not, then why in the world not—why have departments devoted to literature, if not?

For that matter, any study of the relationship between a literary work’s definite and indefinite elements—its clear-and-distinct, objectifiable qualities (length, rhyme, number of scenes, etc.) and its open-ended qualities (metaphorical suggestion, mood, irony, etc.)—would be highly fertile. I have always thought F.R. Leavis heavy-handed for chiding Joseph Conrad over his use of "meaningless" words like "inscrutable" and "incomprehensible". These adjectives fail to communicate any specific boundary or quality, granted; yet in Conrad they are drifting reminders precisely that boundaries, colors, numbers, and scales cannot contain reality—very urbane reminders, their polysyllabic mumbles implying dispassionate observation rather than romantic excess.

I do not see this sort of thing being written about any author in literary journals or "scholarly" books: I have not seen it written anywhere in my lifetime. Why not? Because discussion of a work’s aesthetic qualities, once again, assumes that there is a universal human mind—a universal level within all human minds—which perceives phenomena in the same way and hence may be treated—though with trepidation—as objective. This assumption of universal human thought processes or spiritual tendencies is heresy in modern academe. It is so because the Ivory Tower has been governed by progressive ideology for several decades now. Progress of the twentieth-century variety vastly differs from mainstream nineteenth-century enlightenment. The liberalism of yesteryear aspired to awaken the common humanity in everyone, precisely, as a means of uplifting the human race. The academic avant-garde which has dominated our campuses since World War Two endorses complete reprogramming of entire populations; and for such a project not to appear as a crime against humanity, individual human beings must be viewed as possessing nothing within but what nature and culture have put there (the survival instinct, the sex drive, worship of local deities, fear of local authorities, etc.). The most innocent, most undeveloped notion of the aesthetic immediately flies in the face of this new orthodoxy. Poems and stories cannot be beautiful in themselves: literature can only be appreciated within its own culture, and then only because those in power have conditioned those in submission to value it.

In so hostile an atmosphere, how would we go about recruiting sympathetic professors? The question lies beyond this essay’s scope; but, in idle self-indulgence, I offer the following profile. The ideal English teacher should love literature, primarily. This would be reflected in the breadth of the prospect’s reading and studies. It might also be suggested by his or her personal creativity—by a résumé filled with short stories, say, or by competence in a musical instrument. The ability to write clearly and grammatically would be a sine qua non. Sloppy, jargon-ridden salutes to the political correctness of obscure works, accepted for publication by arcane journals, would raise suspicion.

You may judge for yourself if English departments, poised though they are on the verge of extinction, are thus revising their criteria. I see no realistic hope for them, as a collective institution. On the other hand, I discern a great hunger among students to find something beautiful in life—something worthy in itself which cannot be devalued by the flux of trend. I also observe a great yearning, often hidden just under the surface, to discuss the meaning of things, the nature of the good life. It is a yearning to tell stories and to hear stories—not fantastical escapist stories, but true stories. Stories whose beauty is woven from their engagement of real moral issues, whose vital pattern-forming force is indistinguishable from the earnestness and maturity of their characters. People will have their stories, one way or another. It will be a crying shame if departments of literature cannot assist them in tapping a rich tradition so that they need not start from scratch.

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