> Maybe it has to do with the fact that engineers are making things, whereas
> lit-critters so obviously are not (and suffer from a kind of neurosis of
> futility)
It all depends. I've found litcritters at community colleges, grad students, and high school teachers to be mighty cool, it's the over-50, tenured professors at major universities who are godawful snots. Unfortunately, these latter are in charge of hiring, publications, etc. They are Bourdieu's gatekeepers of social capital, a.k.a. the censorship boards of the American Empire, and they do their jobs with revolting efficiency.
I suspect there's also a disciplinary problem here, too, in that the national language departments are as meaingless as nation-states, i.e. have nothing to say to the wide, wide world of multinational capitalism or its boundless stream of narratives. They've been forced to reinvent themselves, like family firms retooling themselves for global markets, thus resulting in a predictable cycle of academic speculations: post-structuralism in the 1970s (the liquidation of national philosophy), postmodernism in the 1980s (the liquidation of national signification), and postcolonialism in the 1990s (the liquidation of national cultural studies). So you get a few superstars, who reap the Wall Street-style rewards of the theoretical speculation, whereas anything genuinely antagonistic to the total system (like Adorno, or Sartre's last and most interesting works) is shunted to the wayside. The rhythms of the total system are total.
Fredric Jameson is the shining exception here, of course, a superstar who is also a brilliant and responsible theorist, and I have to admit that the *only* reason I ever became a litcritter was because of his work; every sentence he writes is a testament to how use-values can rise up to defeat exchange-value. But he's an exception.
-- Dennis