litcritter bashing

[Carl Remick]

>it's really appalling how transparently
>many academicians act out--in the absolutely worst sense of
>that phrase--the bogus belief that their insitution, writ
>generally, is the heir of all that is best. i'm quite confident
>that if these institutions are recognizable in a century--and
>they will be, they're very resilient--their canon will include
>from this period people who weren't involved in manufacturing
>mannerist mummery.

Hope you’re right, but – referring to a NY Review of Books article I cited 
on this list a couple of days ago, “The Decline and Fall of Literature” by 
Andrew Delbanco – there’s a pervasive anti-humanistic undertow now present 
that could suggest a bleaker outcome.  Delbanco states:  “The academy, some 
say, has never mattered much to the fate of literature, and literature may 
even be endangered when professors get their hands on it. This idea has a 
good pedigree (‘We see literature best from the midst of wild nature,’ 
Emerson wrote in his essay ‘Circles,’ ‘or from the din of affairs’) but 
today this would be a glib answer, and an anachronistic one, in view of what 
[Alvin] Kernan [author of _What’s Happened to the Humanities_] calls ‘the 
waning of book culture’ even within the university.”

Carl

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