We agree about the numbers but not the redemption. Part of the problem is the requirement for "publication" at a time when people simply have nothing to say: they are in their twenties or early twenties and they have never been out of school. What the hell would they have to say that is not, for the most part, completely derivative and uninformed?
The other part of the problem is the complete disciplinary fragmentation of the humanities and the consequent narrowness of vision, provinciality, outright ignorance, and worst of all, complete lack of intellectual curiosity. Today's humanists don't need to be redeemed from anything other than their collaboration in this process.
I too have read some extraordinary scholarship: just off the top of my head I'd mention Jacob Klein, Anne Middleton, Maragaret Slauch (I forget exact spelling), etc. However, not only are these people a very, very small minority, but their work is routinely ignored.
>Actually engaging concepts is the most difficult, occasionally hellish
>challenge imaginable -- it's as if there's just you and the material, and
>one or the other has to be the victor. And yet it isn't about
>violence; half the battle is recognizing one's own inner inability to
>*see* the work of art as it truly is, learning to absorb and channel its
>aesthetic power.
This is a nugget for a whole other discussion about high/low art and why there should be a need to channel anything.
>The other half is dealing with the division of aesthetic labor, which is
>horribly regressive right now. Ye Gods, half the MLA seems to think
>literature ended around 1745, and the other half doesn't even realize that
>the kids are playing "Devil May Cry".
What's "Devil May Cry"? What do you mean by the "division of aesthetic labor"?
Joanna