Doug Henwood wrote:
> trick that Camille Paglia and Hilton Kramer have
> deployed with depressing frequency and success: spinning a conventional
> opinion as somehow freshly transgressive and counterhegemonic.
This is really a very old academic & bushleague intellectual pastime. I became aware of it long before I became involved in politics while writing my dissertation, a rather dull one on criticism of Pope from circa 1890 to 1950. I hadn't read far in the material before a pattern became obvious. Small-time critic after small-time critic would affirm the most dully conventional opinion through first inventing a non-existent orthodoxy against which *he* was a brave revolutionary. It was quite sickening.
You don't have to read far in the academic criticism of any author, in fact, to find that deprived of this little gimmick, half the literary criticism
of the 20th century would simplly disappear. So the likes of Paglia & Kramer aren't even original in their trickery.
Carrol