ACTA's Must-Reads

To the extent that he makes a clear argument, it is this: procedural liberalism--?ensuring that wide, vigorous, and meaningful discussion? about political and ethical questions of all sorts can take place ? naturally gives rise to substantive liberalism ? generally put, ?that humans should be considered to have equal claim to basic human rights such as food, shelter, education, health care, and political representation.?

1. In the actually existing political spectrum in this country, are the principles of 'procedural liberalism' much disputed?

2. Why would Dr. Berube consider that study of the liberal arts gives rise to procedural liberalism gives rise to social democratic sentiments? Instruction in the trivium and quadrivium arose in medieval societies which antedated the formulation of procedural liberalism by three centuries and the formulation of procedural liberalism antedated the systematic application of social-democratic measures in modern societies (at least in the forms which Dr. Berube appears to be referring to) by two centuries.

Though I haven't read M Berube's latest book, I can't say I've found much gold in what he's written in letters and in opinion pieces against David Horowitz. The liberal arts, properly and traditionally conceived, seem to me quite incompatible with a fraudulent intellectual cult with heavily leftist and antinomian overtones called post-structuralism. Of course in that it is a phenomenon of our time, it deserves some slight notice, though it is of virtually no efficacy in teaching literature, rhetoric or languages. I'll leave to MM John Ellis, Roger Scruton, Raymond Tallis, MD, John Searle, Stephen Logan et alii to sort the philosophically perverse rituals of this tribe. And likewise with its historical epigones, which have been successfully demolished by real historians such as Victor Davis Hanson, Donald Kagan, Jacques Barzun and Keith Windschuttle. And likewise with its pretentions to critique science, political theory and the fine arts (following Roger Scruton's critiques, I exclude film and photography from this group).

In the field of literary studies, those like M Berube, who were "trained up" during post-structualism's heyday naturally find it difficult to yield up their critically stillborn children to a humanist or Socratic maieutike or midwife for burial. The cheap rhetorical tricks, the blazing non-sequiturs, the "assertions leap[ing] out of a mass of verbiage" (as Gerald Graff has it), the smarmy, infra dig "we now know"s, the prurient and meretricious winks at "pop culture"'s sluttish trivia and the deliberate and specious distortions of great authors' works and thoughts are now still tediously and fulsomely aped in grad schools (under the flattered, batting eyelashes of their superannuated champagne-hipster "mentors") by would-be epigones (or yapping cuccioli) of a rebarbative academe. Their icons are often at best frivilous attention-sponges like Baudrillard (without the talent or aristocratic hauteur of a Baudelaire, a Villiers de L'Isle-Adam or a Barbey d'Aurevilly) or truly dangerous and malignant personalities like Foucault, Lacan, de Man, and the Marxist martinet, AKA the Paris strangler, Louis Althusser. In that they divide human beings into rigidly-conceived types according to race, class, and sex ("gender" I reserve as a grammatical term), they may rightly classified as anti-humanists, or even-post humans incapable of pursuing common humanist goals such as the artes liberales that were developed and promoted through nearly 2500 years of western intellectual and cultural history.

New would-be post-structuralist "contributors" to this tradition are apt to offer such weighty but hastily conceived theses as one on cybernetic transexuality, or on gustatory sweating recipes in 1960s TV cooking shows, or a Marxist-Barthesian critique of the sex-toy industry or the latest debate on whether war "comix" more accurately "onomatopoeise" (neologisms--or better, solecisms are de rigeur in this game) 50-calibre machine gun fire as "rat-a-tat-tat!" or the more ethnically and religiously insensitive "budda-budda-budda!". Incidentally, as a practical and scholarly translator from several languages, I find it ironical that many (especially English) profs and virtually all students trustingly rely on fairly literal translations (little room for obligatory Barthesian "plaisir du texte" on the faithful translators' parts!) particularly from French and German works that convey messages of radical linguistic inderminacy.

I've long held that if humanities profs are incapable of using words like intention, meaning, reference, reason, proof, truth or knowledge unmanacled in "scare quotes", or if they cannot give a vigourous defence of the liberal arts as generally and traditionally conceived, then "in the end", fragrantly self-contradictory post-structuralists as well as deconstructionists, as Scruton has it in Modern Philosophy, disappear up their own backsides, "leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur".

Cheers,

Dr JA

The problem with the NRO review is that is gets Berube wrong. The closing dualism of the excerpt above -- realism versus postmodernism -- is exploded by Berube's oft-cited adherence to John Searle's distinction between brute fact and institutional fact. A mountain is an institutional fact; the heap of stuff we call a mountain is a brute fact. Realism and postmodernism -- 'tho the latter term is fairly meaningless these days, and I'd replace it with "realism and social constructivism" -- co-exist quite happily in literary studies. Everyone will agree that "I wandered lonely as a cloud" is a simile; the question comes down to what that simile means. (Postmodernism as an art form likewise doesn't reject naive realism. Postmodern architechs, however miserable I find their work, still believe in the truth of the laws of physics and engineering, for example. This is why Lyotard -- despite his generally bad thinking -- called postmodernism something like "incredulity toward master narratives." Marxism can't explain everything. Behaviorism can't explain everything. Realism can't explain everything. Nominalism can't explain everything. Which puts us in what William James called "a pluralist universe.")

Jacques would have us all simply mouth off "truth" and "meaning" and "intention," but Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp basically devasted those concepts in their essay, "Against Theory." Ironically, they devasted them by agreeing with someone like Jacques: the meaning of a poem is its intention. The problem is that there is no certain means for determining intention -- it's a private, inner state (Wittgenstein's private language issue). All we have are interpretations with better or worse evidence. But all interpretations are statements of meaning, or statements of the author's intention. Michaels and Knapp knock Derrida and Hirsch on their asses. One could even go a step further. The intention behind a poem was nothing more and nothing less than to write that poem exactly as we find it. Its meaning, then, is, likewise, the poem exactly as we find it. Hermeneutics goes out of business.)

Jacques also pretends that English departments are all like a David Lodge novel. That's simply not the case. Most scholars have moved beyond poststructuralism. The dominant paradigm in literary study today is a rather old-school historicism. He'd like us to go back to some age of the golden oldies. But for every stoopid article about sex-toys today, I'll show you a stoopid essay about "the sublime humanity of Shakespeare." And for every pointless article on TV, I'll whip out an equally pointless article about "the tragic soul" or "rose imagery in Burgundian sestinas of the late 1550s." It would be interesting if, in any of jacques' comments on literary studies, he actually cited some current literary research in top, peer-reviewed journals that proves his take on literature departments to be at all trustworthy.

It's ironic, however, that Jacques pulls out his John Searle fanclub membership card against Berube. It's a sign that (a) Jacques is ridiculously unfamiliar with Berube's writing; and (b) Jacques has been tilting against the windmills of postmodernism a bit too long.

I always enjoy it, though, when a defender of "reason" and "proof" and "truth" and "knowledge" offers no proof to defend his model of the truth, leading me to conclude that his knowledge doesn't adhere to the basic empirical principles of reason.

"I always enjoy it, though, when a defender of "reason" and "proof" and "truth" and "knowledge" offers no proof to defend his model of the truth, leading me to conclude that his knowledge doesn't adhere to the basic empirical principles of reason."

Alvin, you do realize that you yourself have not offered even a shred of proof for anything that you have said, don't you? Where exactly, on your own terms, do you imagine that leaves your argument? I would be fascinated to know what evidence you believe proves that "most scholars have moved beyond poststructuralism."

I mean, what evidence could *possibly* prove such a sweeping assertion?

T M Alvin Lucier:
Je suis heureux de vous rencontrer (et pour la premiere fois, je pense que oui), jeune monsieur.
Beaumarchais is said to have said that "what's too silly to be said can be sung"; if alive today, he might have added, "or left to theory". Or, I might add, left to M AL, whose sophmoric rhetorical farrago above suggests that he has reproduced for our edification and enlightenment the undigested ruminations, casual speculations and cheap banter of an English department seminar on "theory", or better, as Dr Tallis has it, "theorrhea". In this, one may regard M AL's piece above (paraphrasing Karl Kraus on psychoanalysis) as part of the disease of which it pretends to be the cure. Real diseases do not merit punishment; but figurative ones like post-structuralism and deconstruction sometimes justify the attentions of the Latin master's or mistress's ferule when he or she "needs to put a bit of stick about" for their pupils good. And so to begin:

What post-modernist apologists like M AL all too often offer as serious thought, aside from the threadbare rhetorical tricks endlessly repeated, is, mutatis mutandis, a whimsical musing or a counter-factual speculation that receives as great or greater attention than a logically consistent proposition, an accurate description of a writer's use of a literary figure or form or a profound literary revelation about human nature. That one is capable of thinking a thought doesn't ipso facto guarantee either its soundness nor its truth to human experience. When M AL concludes that my "knowledge doesn't adhere to the basic empirical principles of reason", e.g., he leaves out mention of the triumphalist post-modernist mockery of these very principles, i.e., the Aristotelian Laws of Thought (better look 'em up somewhere, M AL!). This trendy defiance of fundamental logical principles suggests that the pipsqueak Nietzsches, Sartres, Heideggers and Wittgensteins sitting on taxpayer-financed golden seats in English departments are not super- but rather, sub-philosophes and poseurs. And I see that M AL has re-manacled truth and other crucial terms in the fallibilist programme of literary and philosophical research and exploration, as if by multiplying "scare quotes" quotation marks to the level of "'"'"scare quotes"'"'", one has detto--fatto, and exponentially, thereby increased the levels of irony and thus of literary and philosophical sophistication of one's thought (O sancte Derrida! Let the lethal term "naive" not be applied to my seminar paper! whispers M AL, as the gap between his title and his initials seems to shrink). Post-modernists often mock the "naive" search for fallibilist truth (e.g., the capering, perfumed wimp of a post-structuralist who claimed the Gulf War didn't take place except on paper--you know whom I mean, M AL!--but we war vets can't agree). Hegel presciently answers such dogmatic pessimism that decrees we not only don't know but can't know (of course, the Greek Metrodorus was far ahead of the post-structuralist fakirs here in the cryptic koan-like statement that we don't know what we don't know), e.g., an author's intention. Hegel simply treats these claims as any others requiring verification. Any rudimentary-level student of literature can see that the bogus caricature of an author's intention as "what-passed-through-the-mind-of-the-author-at-the-moment-he or she-penned-the-words" doesn't account for the frequently extensive authorial processes of revision, correction, discussion, emendation and expansion. It really doesn't concern Wittgenstein's development of the private language problem at all. And perhaps on another occasion I'll set out more clearly post-structuralists' serial abuse of the either/or fallacy. In any case, "theory" really doesn't concern itself with analysing literature, it merely focuses on its own psway-dough, sub-philosophical navel in an adolescent self-preoccupied existential trance. "Theory" is about . . . well . . . "Theory", which is about . . . well . . . "Theory"--detto-fatto, in aeternum, and with all the elegance of tautology.

Just a few points on the WBM-SK touting above. This essay's been round a while, hasn't it, M AL?--not exactly hot off the "academic" quid pro quo, group-n'-grope ego-caressing club journals like the PMLA, Social Text or Critical Inquiry, where the scribblings of Jacques Derrida or Terry Eagleton or Harold Bloom or Michel Foucault on cafe serviettes or on stray squares of toilet tissue are treated with all the reverence due the holy and miraculously-efficacious relics of saints and martyrs. And I'm not sure how WBM and SK--ooh, wow!, kinda like, basically, y'no, no'm say'n--"basically devastated" truth, intention, meaning, etc., but I do know that, in the perhaps callow words of your former grad-assistant teacher in English Comp 101, "a diction problem is indicated". So perhaps, M AL, you might consider checking your Valley-girl argot at the ivied portals in future. Likewise the high-school football argot about literary critics knocking each other on their asses. Attend to synthesis, or elocutio verborum, i.e., diction, M AL! Diction!

Sixteenth-century Burgundian sestinas' rose imagery sounds promising, M AL--think your French is up to it? At least it's pertinent to literature, whereas the non-hyperbolic examples of anti-cultural sewage I composed are not proper objects of literary study, which rightly concentrates on the sublime, profound and enduring rather than on the fashionable, superficial and ephemeral. For "Le nouveau est", as the sublime political philosopher Joseph de Maistre has it, "par definition, le perissable parti des choses" ("The new is . . . by definition, the perishable part of things"). On the simplistic caricatures or banalities about the "tragic soul" and "the sublime humanity of Shakespeare" on which M AL hangs his evidence about frivilous papers and theses written today, I challenge him to produce them. Older generation scholars, classically and rhetorically trained and with the languages as well as the sound traditional learning to back them up, could, of course, far out-produce (in quality) the new generation of mostly semi-educated, post-humanist, hipster-flaneurs. Perhaps M AL even fancies that the post-structuralists' groundless delusions and imperialist fustian about all the world being their text are "true"; if they have so tempted him by dangling the power of a critical Nero before his eyes, he may be indeed lost to reason and le bon sens, though there is a cure: learn the classics and read the greats, M AL.

On post-structuralist writing, I'll let the sage Stephen Logan of Cambridge the Greater (i.e., not the one in Massachusetts) express the scepticism one feels before yet another at once weighty but weightless post-structuralist tome:

One reason why the huge, sprawling,
endlessly variegated mass of theory has
been so successful as a diversion from
authentic learning is that its
proponents have persuaded trustful
enquirers to discriminate carefully
between degrees of fatuousness. . . .

If the effort of extracting whatever
value in [post-structuralists] work feels
to a reasonably industrious reader like
putting Niagra through a sieve, then
it may be fair to dismiss them until
they learn to write more
considerately.

My translation challenge still stands to those of M AL's "bent" of thought.

Though M AL's short piece is long on error (and almost too ponderous a task to correct, let alone instruct) I'll perhaps chew on it a bit longer. Until then, M AL,

votre humble serviteur'

Dr JA

Alvin,

I'm afraid I've never studied postmodernism, so I'm probably woefully ignorant of what it is and what its value is.

I'm hoping I can learn something from you, though I'm admittedly less interested in the theory of postmodernism and what it can or cannot "co-exist quite happily" with than in its application.

How should postmodern theory and thought inform my morality and ethics, my voting decisions, my choice of food, whether or not I regard throat-slitting to be just another form of political or artistic expression, who I should root for in the World Series, whether or not global warming is occurring, whether or not animals have rights, etc.?

Or is postmodern theory rather like a work of art, something that is intrinsically valuable for its own sake, its logical beauty if you will, something that needs no utility, something like, for example, the piss Christ?

Or is the goal of postmodernism more like a religion, a way of thinking which attempts to "explain everything?"

Clawmute

Mr. Dog: You're right, I shouldn't have made the quantitative claim about "most scholars" having moved on from psotstructuralism. But here is the table of contents of the most recent issue of PMLA, the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal of literary criticism. It's an excellent way of getting a taste of the current state of the profession. You'll notice the lack of poststructural themes:

Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law by Joseph R. Slaughter
The Other Interesting Narrative: Olaudah Equiano's Public Book Tour by John Bugg
Beauty along the Color Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and the Crisis
by Russ Castronovo
Native Sons and Native Speakers: On the Eth(n)ics of Comparison
by Yung-Hsing Wu
Austrian Inner Colonialism and the Visibility of Difference in Stifter's Die Narrenburg by Joseph Metz
Traducing the Soul: Donne's Second Anniversarie by Ramie Targoff

*********
Jacques: your comments make no sense. I never once defended theory or poststructuralism. You might want to take a basic literacy course soon.

I made a few simple claims: (a) the NRO review sets up a false binary opposition between realism and "postmodernism;" (b) Michael Berube follows Searle's distinction between brute and institutional facts; (c) Jacques' idea of what English departments are like sounds about 25 years out of date.

I am not a big fan of theory. I made it through a Ph.D. program in English at an Ivy League university having read no Lacan; 25 pages of Foucault; 20 pages of Derrida. Baudrillard, who wrote *The Gulf War Did Not Take Place*, was never once mentioned in my three years of course work. (Of course, while Baudrillard is mostly sophomoric, George W. Bush has parroted Baud's argument about gulf war I for gulf war II: it's an eternal war that is never really fought but also fought everywhere and all the time.)

Jacques also believes that the phrase "basically devastated" is Valley-Girl-ish. I won't get into a style war with Jacques. The man can't write a single sentence without some pointless aside or tedious reference. "Basically devastated" was meant to sound silly -- sort of a bathetic or oxymoronic construction, like "mildly annihilated." Jacques would like to be the Diction Police (sort of like the neo-classical Unities Police who hated Shakespeare so much). And yet Jacques, when he's wearing his masculine Halloween costume, claims to be a fan of Hunter Thompson. Thompson shifted diction registers faster than Jacques can change the subject (from intentionality to diction). I'll take Lester Bangs over Dr. Thompson, but in any case, code shifting is my style of choice, J-Dogg.

Then Jacques tries to make a point about "Against Theory" being an old article, but he distracts himself by going off on a tangent about my diction. His point makes no sense to me. So what that "Against Theory" was published in the late 1970s? My point concerned the issue of intention, and that all interpretations are only claims to represent as best as possible this intention without any means of ultimately adjudicating the truth of the interpretation. All we can do is make better interpretations; we can never be sure we've arrived at *the* intention behind the text. (Just as Popper said about science: we can falsify it, but we can never ultimately prove it.)

But in the end, Jacques sets up a paper tiger pinata and then blindly takes swings at it. I never defended poststructuralism, so I find it odd that Jacques tries to attack it as if it undermines my argument.

"But here is the table of contents of the most recent issue of PMLA, the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal of literary criticism."

Alvin, I will grant you the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe that you are not intentionally misrepresenting matters. The PMLA is the journal of the MLA. It is certainly NOT a prestigious journal. In fact, when my dissertation director retired, he literally could not give his away to libraries and schools desperate to build their research collections. No one would take them, even for free wioth postage prepaid. The MLA is a hiring clearinghouse, not a scholarly organization. If it did not have a lock on the interviewing process, virtually no one would belong to the MLA.

In addition, you stumble over further logical problems. First, it is impossible to draw any conclusion about the profession from one table of contents from one journal. With respect to this one issue, it's clear that identity politics have replaced scholarship: Four out of six articles here are pointedly political, not scholarly. Further, there is no way to tell how poststructuralism may be used in these pieces: Titles tell us nothing about method.

Mr. Dog: Libraries rarely accept donations of journals that nearly every library already owns.

PMLA is in fact a top journal. It's the most widely read peer-reviewed journal in the field of literary studies. The only better place to publish one's literary research would be in a top specialized journal (like *Speculum* for medieval studies).

Just in case Federal Dog has you believing that PMLA is not a widely-respected journal, here are the tables of contents of the most recent issues of more specialized literary critical journals. Again, you'll notice the emphasis on historicism, with not a single reference to a poststructural concept or term:

*English Literary History*
Construction Sites: The Architecture of Anne Clifford's Diaries
Joseph Addison's Opera Rosamond: Britishness in the Early Eighteenth-Century
Court Culture and Political News in London's Eighteenth-Century Newspapers
The "Dial's Moral Round": Charting Wordsworth's Evening Walk
Racism and Radicalism in Jamaican Gothic: Cynric R. Williams's Hamel, The Obeah Man
Spectacles of Disaffection: Politics, Ethics, and Sentiment in Walter Scott's Old Mortality
"Doing Business with Totalitaria": British Late Modernism and the Politics of Reputation
The Zemblan Who Came in from the Cold, or Nabokov's Pale Fire, Chance, and the Cold War
*****************
*Early American Literature*

"In Love with the Image": Transitive Being and Typological Desire in Jonathan Edwards
Circular Taxonomies: Regulating European and American Women through Representations of North American Indian Women
What Concernment Hath America in These Things!" Local and Global in Samuel Sewall's Plum Island Passage
"To Make a Figure": Benjamin Rush's Rhetorical Self-Construction and Scientific Authorship
Homicidal Envy: The Case of Richard Henry Dana, Sr.'s, Paul Felton

Note how offended M AL is by my alleged misinterpretation of HIS INTENTION to MEAN to sound silly in his "basically devastated" REFERENCE! (But you know Horace had it spot-on in "Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum"--non e vero MAL?--yes, you're stuck with this pitch!--I guess I just missed your INTENTION to be self-ironical!--well, "Es irrt der Mensch so long er strebt"!; now, how about the jock-talk metaphor?--did you INTEND to be ironical here as well?) Note too, how he fancies I missed the TRUTH he wished to defend about M Berube's MEANING! Tu quoque MAL (saving a space hereafter)! What critic (definitely including the recently deceased maitre a penser, M Derrida, master of cheap rhetorical tricks, pseudo-sophisticated paranomasiologist [e.g., Hegel-l'aigle, pharmakon etc.], and deliberate falsifier of others' works through misquotation, who seethed and hissed and spat out poison when others pointed out his vicious distortions and transmogrifications of great authors' works--but among "academic theorists" for a long time, this critical Nero [the Saussurean linguist and translator Roy Harris's REFERENCE], this fiddling theory-emperor had no foes) wants HIS or HER work to be misunderstood? As I've quoted before, I'm with Ungaretti on this faineant, body-stocking, bitch-slander of the dead: "Cessate uccidere i morti!" ("Stop killing the dead!").

Now, MAL, who are these neo-classical haters of Shakespeare? Rymer? Dennis? Johnson? Didn't these critics caution against using the Bard as a model more than they disparaged his works for their diction? Isn't it rather a modern obsession to include great writers (whom elsewhere our perfumed and prancing moderns disparage as "naive") in part of an intellectual proletariat they hypocritically identify with? Note MAL's snobbish ridicule of hypothetical praisers of the Bard's sublimity and tragic power--more sticking pitch, MAL?

When they've been caught out and called out, our academic poseurs can always (they fancy) nod in self-satisfied accord that our nation's war-time president's strategy for defending us is synonymous with everything not generally desirable--d'accord? Sorry, MAL--no dice. Read Joseph de Maistre on the horror and the necessity of the executioner--without him, thrones topple, governments dissolve, and chaos ensues (alors--Vive la Bastille!). Better to be instructed by Clawmute, Federal Dog and my VFW mates than your smarmy leftist colleagues on the global war on Islamo-fascism.

And on Hunter S. Thompson, as with the ghoulish monster Lenin (incidentally, defended by some of your academic tribe of Marxist shills, MAL--witness the odious views of Frederic Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Eric Hobsbawm [sp.?] et multi alii), I'll occasionally take the gold out of Egypt and quote them (e.g., Lenin's desire to "Kill more professors!"--scherzo, MAL!--it's ironical!--capisce?), though I otherwise reject their expressed views and detest their influence--is that too complicated to interpret? Doesn't the Bard himself make his villians eloquent and even seductively right?--witness Edmund, Richard III, even the UNINTENTIONALLY self-ironical old fool Polonius (whose "To thine own self be true" we see chiseled on the facades of public buildings!)--it's CONTEXT, man, that counts here, nicht wahr? And doesn't this context become a little clearer when one studies the history and literary conventions of a period? Perhaps even a little (quelle horreur, MAL!--Brecht alert! Brecht alert! Preceeding author's IRONY, MAL!), um, biography and auto-biography to gain a FALLIBIST (imperfect) sense of authorial intention, but which is never absolute? So, MAL, put away your cheap rhetorical either/or fallacy ("*the* intention"--i.e., if you don't know EVERYTHING, you know NOTHING, because, according to the vulgar lit-cret transmogrification of the Leibnitzian principle of sufficent reason, everything is connected to everything else--you got caught using against us; now, look up fallibilism and poke your nose into a book by the sensible and wise Susan Haack) and grant some knowable authorial intention as you would wish to be understood, in part at least, yourself. I'm with Jesus and Kant on the moral imperative--how is this "naive", O great cham, O triple thinker? Je vous attends, monsieur!

And I attacked what Berube, in his arrogant pimping for this antinomian perversion, defends, i.e., post-modernism and post-structuralism. Got a beef with that?

As for staying up-to-date with the latest lit-cret ("typo" INTENDED here!) fads and follies--sorry MAL, I'll take the ancients, the greats and their traditionalist defenders any day. The Fraudian Bloom (who seems to have edited every major--and scores of minor--English authors, in whose "editions" HIS name sometimes appears in a bigger type-size than the great he's allegedly "editing"!!) and the malodorous musings of the Great Fish have never impressed me. I also fought against the Greenblatt "new" (read "smarmily-Marxist") historicists (my first graduate degree was in real history, not the selectively anecdotal parti-pris Marxist rubbish peddled by Greenblatt and his lit-cret epigones) when he was only spoken of in hushed, deferential whispers. Now these big but undeserved reputations (but perhaps some of Greenblatt's later work MAY redeem him--it's simply too early to tell) seem to have turned round to their followers to say, "I knew what I had to do to MAKE MY OWN WAY [like Albee's Honey]--that is, to turn on the greats and disparage their defenders . . . But why are YOU following me?" So, MAL, who are these new, up-to-date n' real cool and neato critical "guns" of world-historical significance you're touting? Any ethnic-gender "specialists" among them? Any "environmental" writers? "Body-studies" cognoscenti? Pop-culture "professors" (got game, pops?) Post-human "anthro-pols" (parse for INTENDED paronomasia, MAL), a la Geertz? Multi-culti diversity buffs? Feminist "logicians"? Greek- and Latinless comp/rhet "house-Marxist" nagging nannies a la Friere? C'mon, MAL, as Sir Philip Sidney's (Astrophil and Stella) sonnet-sequence persona has it, give us some meat!--who're these new polymaths and professorial comets? Will they "weep Iliads of [their] tragic woes" to us, like Samuel Daniel's Delia voice? Or . . .? C'est une veritable torture par l'esperance pour nous, MAL, mon ancien, mon Marullo!

Well, time to do a bit of editing and translating, MAL . . .

A bientot (sed fiat justitia, coelum ruat!)

Cheers,

Dr JA

Alvin,

Few, if any, people who would frequent a site like this would fail to know what the MLA and PMLA are and are not.

The libraries in question were in the ex-Soviet bloc and did not have the PMLA in their holdings. They did not want it either.

Finally, you are still not seeing the basic logical problem with your assertions, so you are simply going around in circles.

I don't see the point in trying to have a debate here. Federal Dog believes that a single anecdote about a professor trying to pass off a musty old stack of PMLAs to a former Soviet library is evidence that PMLA is not -- as I stated previously -- the most widely-read and one of the most prestigious journals of literary studies out. There's no logic there. And an n of one is no n at all, as any statistician will tell you.

Jacques, as usual, is off subject and making little sense to boot. First off, why should I not correct your misinterpretation of my intention? As I wrote, meaning is intention and vice versa. That's the whole point Knapp and Michaels established a long time ago. And yet, as your piss-poor and tone-deaf reading practice demonstrates, there is no safety net in interpretation. One always risks getting it wrong.

Jacques also makes the completely false claim that Derrida had no critics among academic theorists. Of course, every Lacanian had major problems with Derrida's work. Every Foucauldian theorist had major problems with Derrida's work. Every Barthesian semiotician had major problems with Derrida's work. Every Frankfurt-School-style critical theorist had major problems with Derrida's work. Every structuralist had major problems with Derrida's work. Jacques might want to actually read the back catalogue of *Critical Inquiry* and *Boundary 2* before talking out of his rear, like the devils in Dante's inferno who fart through their trumpets.

As far as Shakespeare's neoclassical critics go, I'll simply advise Jacques to do his schoolwork like a good boy. Read through:

1. Paul Conklin's *A History of Hamlet Criticism: 1601-1821*
2. Herbert Spencer Robinson, *English Shakespearian Criticism in the Eighteenth Century*
3. Brian Vickers, ed. *Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 1774–1801*

Jacques then claims that Berube pimps for poststructuralism. The ignorance of this claim is nearly funny. Jacques should actually read Berube's work before putting paw to typepad.

(And Jacques, I've read Haack, but I didn't need her to tell me about fallibilism. Popper taught me all about that, as did Dewey and James. It's called the scientific method. I think I learned about it in the 5th grade. Haack is interesting on Peirce, 'tho not nearly so as Thomas Sebok and the first generation anglo semioticians, or a poet-scholar like Susan Howe -- see her *Peircearrow*. But Haack simply gets Dewey and James wrong.)

But it's obvious how out of touch Jacques is. He mentions Geertz, Greenblatt, and Harold Bloom as the latest literary critics! Oy vey! Let's party like it's 1985 all over again!

"I don't see the point in trying to have a debate here. Federal Dog believes that a single anecdote about a professor trying to pass off a musty old stack of PMLAs to a former Soviet library is evidence that PMLA is not -- as I stated previously -- the most widely-read and one of the most prestigious journals of literary studies out. There's no logic there. And an n of one is no n at all, as any statistician will tell you. "

If you lack the minimal honesty to accurately represent my position (and you repeatedly have shown that you do), then no, as I already stated, you are going around and around in circles without even reaching my point. You simply cannot mask your lack of logical skills by lying about me.

A palpoble hit, FedDog! This critical cucciolo (pup, greenhorn) fancies he's defender of the pulpy pile of left-wing dung called the PMLA!

And if you've read a bit of Susan Haack, cucciolo, then try Dr Tallis on for size and try to pass off his criticism as glibly as you fancy you've done with the eminently-sensible Haack--thanks, though, for the new names (yawn) on the block, though Brian Vickers . . .!? BV rejects, as far as I can see, your whole "ticker-tape" approach to lit-cret Shakespeare criticism. But MAL rarely deviates into sense (check Dryden here), so I suggest simply returning to the plays themselves to see whose interpretations seem to accord better with an actual reading of the plays. Better A.C. Bradley or even Coleridge than some recent parvenu(e) to give us a new cereal-box "vision" of WS. We'll leave the cucciolo to sniff out and "mark" the new for us after he has conned his Latin and Greek. Until then, I remain, an unmoved laudator temporis acti, cucciolo,

Dr JA

Federal Dog, this is what you wrote: "The PMLA is the journal of the MLA. It is certainly NOT a prestigious journal. In fact, when my dissertation director retired, he literally could not give his away to libraries and schools desperate to build their research collections. No one would take them, even for free wioth postage prepaid. The MLA is a hiring clearinghouse, not a scholarly organization. If it did not have a lock on the interviewing process, virtually no one would belong to the MLA."

Again, this is not evidence. This is an anecdote. When you learn the difference, get back to me. Your notion that the MLA somehow coerces people into joining makes no sense given the huge membership of regional MLA divsions: NEMLA, MMLA, and so on. You don't need to be a member of these regional divisions to attend the hiring convention, and yet thousands of literature scholars are in fact members. Finally, having served on literature department hiring committees, I can attest to the high regard of a publication in the PMLA. (My anecdote against yers, Mr. Dog.) PMLA is a highly regarded journal precisely because it's the publication of the largest professional organization of literature scholars. To publish in PMLA, one must compete against submissions from scholars of all historical periods, theoretical bents, language departments, and so on.

So I'll need evidence beyond one anecdote about your advisor trying to ship his collection of PMLA issues to former Soviet libraries. (PMLA is easily available to libraries via the internet anyway, so why a library would want someone's paper copies is beyond me.)

That Jacques is impressed by Fed Dog's reply to me is a sign of his own complete lack of intellectual standards. Perhaps Jacques can help Fed Dog actually mount some evidence that PMLA is not a highly regarded journal.

Notice how neither Jacques nor Fed Dog can actually deal with my original point: the fact that top journals in the field of literary studies rarely publish identifiably post-structural criticism anymore. We can debate the merits of PMLA until the cows come home, but what about ELH and the other journals I've referenced as evidence?

Finally, Jacques, I didn't reference Vickers as a "new name on the block." I referenced his work because he discusses neo-classical critiques of Shakespeare. Learn how to read. And I see no point in reading Tallis's attacks on theory. As I've written several times, and as Jacques simply can't comprehend, I really don't give a crap about theory. Let's not pretend that Tallis was the only critic of theory, some lone voice in the wilderness.

So let's tally the score: neither Jacques nor Fed Dog has made a substantial point about Berube's book.

Alvin,

Let me make this really clear: It was an opinion based on decades in the business. Stop lying about the nature and scope of my remarks: I commented on your sweeping assertions and lack of logical proof, not on Berube or his book. You are incoherent in your attacks, your logical difficulties are still heaping up, and repeatedly lying about me doesn't change a thing about your own fallacious reasoning.

Beyond obvious logical problems underpinning sweeping assertions about current literary scholarship, you cannot pretend to know anything about how widely-read the PMLA is or how prestigious it is because you have no evidence to back any of your declarations up. There are no subscription figures for the PMLA: It goes to anyone who pays dues to the MLA in order to participate in a job search. You have no way of knowing what percentage, if any, of those people actually read the free PMLA that they get with their membership. You therefore cannot know, as a matter of logic and evidence, how widely-read it is.

Further, you have precisely zero evidence about the "prestige" of the MLA's house journal. The fact that you have failed to furnish any evidence in that regard escaped no one's notice.

So pretending to know how widely-read the PMLA is or how prestigious it is is obviously bogus to anyone with minimal thinking skills. You cite no evidence to support any of your declarations, yet you seem completely oblivious to that very basic fact.

Why do you think that you are so incapable of representing matters honestly? Do you ever think about this? Does it matter to you? Why not just deal with matters on the merits?

Can you? If so, put up your evidence already and be done with it.

Fed Dog and Jacques, perhaps you'd be interested in leaving this right-wing echo chamber and testing your flawless arguments against the man himself. Michael Berube has replied to the NRO review on his weblog, revealing the depth of the reviewer's confusion and perhaps intentional misrepresentation of Berube's arguments. You can join the conversation at:

http://www.michaelberube.com

STILL A LOAD OF HOOEY

If Mr. Berube really believes in his malarky -- why doesn't he leave the prison of government-funded academia? And speak out full time against Horowitz, et al.?

Answer: he's afraid to. Mr. Berube knows, he has a sweet deal, he knows if he left that 10,000 well-qualified applicants could be found in a few days. And the taxpayers know it, too.

Taxpayers should encourage Mr. Berube and his kind to leave the awful bondage of government service. Cut funding for soft-side academia by 80% and use community colleges, quality online, teaching colleges, and AP courses.

Au contraire, MAL--forget the proximate occasion of this debate--i.e., a review of Berube's book--the debate has actually been about the widespread intellectual dereliction of those "professing" English and their shameless promotion of antinomian social and political causes (whether post-structuralism or ethnic-gender-Marxist-body studies-eco-radicalism spawned by post-structuralists like the miscreant intellectual Foucault) via glossy throw-away journals like the PMLA. As FederalDog (among many others) has noted, the MLA "thrives" because it runs the largest cattle-car interviewing system for job candidates, who must pay their own way to the convention. It should also be noted that the "intellectual content" of the vast majority of MLA convention sessions is beneath contempt and nearly beneath ridicule.

MAL makes a specious defence of what has become a national intellectual scandal and embarrassment (the "profession" of English) by presenting a "People"-mag-style "Who's in--Who's Out" gossip column tout of the latest lit-cret fads, fashions and follies. Would that he would apply this capricious practice of shilling and panning to those moribund grey-beards, Marx and Fraud!

Of course MAL is not interested in engaging the ideas of Dr Tallis, who is not only a scientist and medical practitioner, but a serious contributor to intellectual debates in philosophy, linguistics and literary criticism (not to mention several successful forays into fiction and poetry). Contra Berube's defence of post-structuralism, there is Tallis:
For ideas that are based on incompetent
philosophy and worse linguistics, are
internally inconsistent and have little
or no explanatory force or real specific
application, and are often expressed in
abominable prose, they have really had a
better run for their money that they
deserve.
Tallis calls on defenders of post-structuralism to get off the international gravy-train and be retrained as useful citizens, rather than continue to enjoy their unearned privileges as champagne hipsters and millionaire Marxists publishing politicized "criticism" in what amount to academic vanity presses.

Yes, MAL, I've read Brian Vickers, who generally castigates those you defend for their treason to Shakespeare (in "Appropriating Shakespeare"), though, like most partisans of rhetoricians, Vickers is unfairly hostile to Plato.

But what about a closing commentary summarizing the whole current field of English, and this time not by some kept critical drone in an English department, but by an actual writer of the best literature, or so voted a Nobel prize committee:

I think they're fairly calamitous, these
English courses . . . They're actively
destructive of civilization and thought.
When I was at Oxford in 1950, I think we all
knew that English was not a serious subject
of study, not worth a serious degree, not
worth a physics degree. Now what has happened
is that this NON-subject has been taken over
by very politically motivated people.
Universities have become places where free
thinking is not allowed. Nowadays people read
very, very little and they have elaborate
theories. This has particularly damaged the
newer countries, the lesser cultures, who at
great cost have produced intellectuals. They
send them to Oxford, Cambridge, they send
them to American universities, and they come
back spouting dreadful political tripe.
They're corrupt! (V.S. Naipaul, as reported
by Paul Theroux)
Leave it to a Nobel prize winner like Naipaul to find les mots justes.

Dr JA

"Fed Dog and Jacques, perhaps you'd be interested in leaving this right-wing echo chamber and testing your flawless arguments against the man himself. Michael Berube has replied to the NRO review on his weblog"

What does Berube have to do with the PMLA? That (and your comments about it) was the subject of my remarks. Repeating intentional misdirection that has already been repeatedly noted doesn't help you.

Well Federal how *do* you propose to measure PMLA's prestige? A quick look around suggests historic rejection rates well over 90%

http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/raw/Subversive.Proposal/who-payspiper.08.harnad-odlyzko-okerson.acceptance-rate

and

http://www.mla.org/pmla_advertising

*library* (not member) subs of 2400, which are very good numbers for a journal. So much for "no subscription figures." If you have access to the Arts and Sciences Citation Index you can use it to compile citation figures, which are the best way of assessing impact. You're welcome to dispute the data I found in two minutes of googling, but you might then want to do better. An "opinion based on decades in the business" is not, shall we say, an impressive basis for argument.

And as Lucier notes neither you nor the other blowhard are willing to discuss evidence of what PMLA actually publishes. It's all sweeping, angry dismissal.

Having the time of my life blogging with Berube's boobs over at his website--anyone else, as they say, got game?
Cheers,
Dr JA

Atomic Dog,

Spare us all the petty name-calling. It's not as though people here do not understand how library accessions work. Or the difference between accessions and circulation. Let's see your evidence about actual circulation of those holdings. LOL!

Further, since when is it somehow impermissible to have an opinion? I realize that academics are terrified of dissent, but that fear is completely irelevant to me.

It's fun watching Jacques get his ass handed to him over at Berube's blog. If only the author of the original ACTA post on Berube had the courage to join Jacques in his suicide mission. But, as Berube has said, apparently reading a book is not necessary grounds for reviewing or commenting on it. I can imagine the ACTA press release now: "Conservative intellectual organization declares students no longer need to read the books they discuss in class. End of homework forever!"

Opinions are fine, Federal, but anyone can have an opinion. Having presumed to lecture AL repeatedly about evidence and logic, you fall back on the weakest dodge there is – it’s just your opinion and nobody can talk you out of it.

I offered you a very easy way to assess a journal’s readership and influence: citation counts. That’s what folks in the sciences and social sciences use. Log on (if the “business” you claim to be in is in any way academic you have access) to the Arts and Sciences Citation Index and do some counts. It's easy. You can compare PMLA's citation counts to whatever humanities journals are your favorites. With a little more work you could probably produce impact indices. But even a quick dip into the database will give you ample evidence that the thing is being read widely, and not just by deadbeat grad students but by people who actually do the work necessary to get published themselves.

Jim Delater here has it figured out: never make a claim to which evidence could even be attached!

"Having presumed to lecture AL repeatedly about evidence and logic, you fall back on the weakest dodge there is – it’s just your opinion and nobody can talk you out of it."

You are suffering from yet further logical confusion. There is a huge difference between expressing an opinion and stating what purports to be objective fact, but citing no evidence to support the assertion.

You do understand this difference, don't you?

Fed Dog, so you believe that opinions don't require evidence to support them? That's pretty ridiculous. Even if it's a matter of taste -- a music review, say -- you need to support your opinion with some evidence. Just stating the obvious, natch.

Alvin,

As in the beginning, the burden remains on you to prove your initial assertions that postmodern theory is no longer a strong influence on contemporary literary faculty. You cannot shift that burden by pretending I don't have the right to an opinion. After all this long, rambling thread, you have still failed to bear your burden of proof.

No one has failed to notice that fact.

To my fellow right-wing bloggers:

MAL's got it all wrong, of course. He's merely one of Berube's hit-roaches, who did the personal-oppo-smears on me by committee (dont je m'en fous!), though outing my name (Dr. James Albert DeLater, author of Translation Theory in the Age of Louis XIV [Manchester UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2002], which has got more scholarship in it than MB's whole corpus) it didn't help Berube, who had to ban me from the website to save his and his minions' sore a--es from being kicked any longer! Take a look, guys, and laugh at His Serene Mandarinity, AKA, MB, who takes on the whiney voice of a Bitch-Gossiper.

To continue exposing M. Alvin Lucier's risible lies about what actually went on over at His Serene Mandarinity, Berube's website:

His "High-Knee" MB even dropped his guard enough to get nailed for admitting liberals' goals (comment #99) are to indoctrinate especially their grad students and doctoral candidates, who become financially and professionally dependent on their surrogate daddies and mummies of the faculties, who in turn profit from tuition rakeoffs and/or cheap comp labour exploited by these shady prof-scam pyramid-schemers or shakedown racketeers. For, sad to say, English and other "humanities'" (like Rousseau, the scammers feign to love all humanity, but they also seem to hate people and show it everywhere in their blogging!) doctoral-degree granting departments have come to a pretty rebarbative post-human state these days. According to MB's slip o' the tongue, it seems the libs aim is to turn them out as fawning epigones of the hard academic left. He also got caught in a cheap ruse when he claimed he wasn't teaching this year and thought it funny that I trusted his word, i.e., lie, which he subsequently admitted. Guess that was all the humour he and his roaches could muster before they banned me from the site, a virtual admission of a "no . . . mas" wimp-whimper of exasperation and defeat. I also want to thank ACTA (whose light the roaches scurry away from--save at least the plucky--though in full wrong divinity--M Alvin Lucier, perhaps MB's "scout", or worse) for their stimulating and informative articles that bring their leftist enemies to such a point of desperation. On les aura! We'll get 'em!

Cheers for ACTA, jeers for MB and his leftist epigones over at the MB's website of chump-ions,

Dr JA

Dele the "the" (no stutter that!) in the last line

Fed Dog, I provided evidence that top journals, including top specialist journals in English literary studies and American literary studies, aren't publishing overtly postsructural criticism. For a blog comment thread, I'm really not going to go digging for more evidence than that. If you have no *counter*-evidence, then I suppose we can assume my evidence prevails?

(The fact that Fed Dog mistakes poststructuralism for postmodernism is further evidence of his lack of substanial engagement in either intellectual area.)

Jacques simply can't read for tone. I'd say he was tone-deaf, but that would be an insult to the brave deaf folks ACTA is in the processing of crapping on elsewhere on this blog.

Here's is what Michael Berube actually wrote in the comment (#99) Jacques references above; "But the long-term goal for liberals is clear: once people enter college, we have to keep them there. The indoctrination programs clearly don’t start to kick in until year seven or eight."

Jacques couldn't comprehend that Michael might be joking here. No, he imagines that this a 33-word slip of tongue, an accidental confession of some liberal academic conspiracy.

Jacques missed irony elsewhere. After he accused Michael of being an irresponsible teacher who cancels class to lecture at other universities, Michael jokingly replied something like, "Jacques, don't you know, I never teach cuz I'm an overprivileged professor?" Jacques didn't get the joke, couldn't see the irony dripping off that comment, and believed that Michael never actually taught. First, this calls into question Jacques's ability to interpret the written word. Second, it further establishes that Jacques knows nothing about Berube's book -- you know, the book under review at the beginning of this blog thread, the book not read by the ACTA author or by Jacques. In Berube's book, he discusses his teaching at length. So Michael was not "lying" to Jacques, as Jacques claims above. He was mocking Jacques' ignorance of his book, and further mocking conservative attacks on "tenured millionaire professors."

Jacques concludes his comment above with a glad-handing of ACTA. Now, ACTA hasn't had such good luck lately. Their blog has championed a *National Review* review of a book that the blog author hasn't ever read. The scholarly wretchedness here is obvious. Then, they willfully misrepresented the protests at Gallaudet University (much as the NR reviewer willfully misrepresented Berube's argument). 0 for 2 . . .

On MAL, our three min. more than al dente spaghetti "scourge":

Par. 1: MAL opens w/several faineant and undeveloped insults. Note generalising "can't" rather than case-specific "didn't".

Pars 2 & 3: Note specious defence here: the trivialising "slip of the tongue" absurdity w/the jokey acknowledgement of what may be "expected" of all "proper" Berubians who have "some" association w/"our" dept.

Par 4: MB didn't say "something like" "NEVER"; he said he wasn't teaching, and we all know there are grants and fellowships that frequently relieve BIG-REP Laputan "wheels of cheese" of the onerous burden of having to dust off their young but yellowed notes once again to drone them before students who sleep like fish w/their eyes open, so THEY can be free as fish in the sea to pen their next articles on the influence of SOMETHING on SOMEBODY for the Charles Tansley Review. And I DIDN'T miss the irony in MB's "As a rule" (smirk, nudge, wink) "I don't miss class" (except for those sun-belt winter conferences, or, failing those, the week-long schmoozes, er, intellectual "retreats", at such high-cultural centres as Aspen, Sun Valley, and Iron Mtn., etc--"got fully-stocked port-a-bars there, MB?".). He's admitted skipping out on his mid-term as well. I once spent 45 lovely minutes holding one of my students' babies while she sat her mid-term untroubled w/infant care, for her babysitter couldn't make it at the last minute and she'd no alternative--Got a beef w/babies, MB and MAL? (Brechtian irony arrow added for MB and MAL only). I said from the outset I hadn't read but MB's phony and condescendingly sneering remarks about David Horowitz's modest reform programme--bet MB hasn't read MY books either--hmm--wonder who makes the greater scholarly contribution? I also wonder how many leftist profs' total assets exceed a million. . . . Start w/Noam Chomsky, perhaps? ("since 1994, I'm feeling better about my stash of Krugerrand . . .")

And then there're the scholarly contributions of MAL to consider, or are those still Platonic, MAL?

And how do you explain MB's banning me from his site, MAL? Wasn't it that the jealous attention-sponge himself wasn't getting enough fulsome oohs and aahs from his epigones like yourself? The only oppo-commentator staying on task in the debate, Prof. Protevi, has opened a private correspondence with me, which I hope will prove fruitful for both of us. My general question is--what does post-structuralism or post-modernism add to our experience of literature? And my following question is: When are you and MB going to start studying it?

I was disappointed that y'all didn't take up me'n me lit-moll Cendrine's offer to meet in Hell (Michigan) for a debate at the Dam Site Inn. We were there waiting. Couldn't get a last-minute all-expense-paid grant? Or jes' 'fraid they wouldn't let y'all leave? (mauvaise foi?)
OK, one last chance: my post's VFW fish-fry tomorrow at Post 1224: And I'll buy the first pitcher . . . Fair 'nuff? Bring MB along too, parce que j'honore le principe venerable que "qui m'aime, aime mon chien" . . . Multa cetera desunt. . . .

A bientot, MAL

Dr JA

Alas, poor "Jacques" just digs himself deeper with every foolish comment.

MB didn't say "something like" "NEVER"; he said he wasn't teaching

You know, you can find what I actually wrote on the Google -- or, for that matter, on my blog. The sentence was this: "Everyone knows I don't teach classes." Not that I am not teaching: that I do not teach. Since my blog mentions my teaching and my book is largely about my teaching, the sentence "everyone knows I don't teach classes" is a little like the sentence "everyone knows I am black." I simply wanted to see if "Jacques" here was so full of insane resentment and bile that he would fall for it, and guess what? He did.

So yes, you did indeed miss the irony, Jacques. You clearly need to get with the "programme" -- is that how they spell the word in the DeLater household? Or is it a particularly pretentious "scholarly" affectation?

And as for this:

"As a rule" (smirk, nudge, wink) "I don't miss class" (except for those sun-belt winter conferences, or, failing those, the week-long schmoozes, er, intellectual "retreats", at such high-cultural centres as Aspen, Sun Valley, and Iron Mtn., etc--"got fully-stocked port-a-bars there, MB?".). He's admitted skipping out on his mid-term as well. I once spent 45 lovely minutes holding one of my students' babies while she sat her mid-term untroubled w/infant care, for her babysitter couldn't make it at the last minute and she'd no alternative--Got a beef w/babies, MB and MAL?

What a strange series of things to say. (It is for completely unhinged, gratuitously insulting material like this that I banned you from further commenting on my blog.) What I actually said was this: As a rule, I do not cancel classes for personal reasons. (The idea that I have to be present for the "sitting" of a midterm is ludicrous. I will be grading those midterms on Monday and returning them Tuesday -- for our next class.) But yes, I have cancelled classes in the past -- not because I have a beef with babies, Jacques Programme D'Epigone, but because I had two of my own. I cancelled class the day Jamie was born (we did not know he would have Down syndrome; he was in the ICU for three weeks), and occasionally he and Nick, when they were little (Nick had quite severe asthma), forced me to cancel class when they were sick or hospitalized. It happened only four or five times in the course of a decade, but still.

In closing, Professor O'Connor, I turn to you. This is, after all, your blog. I can understand your desire to land a position somewhere in the right-wing culture-war circuit, having lost all interest in your scholarly career (while retaining at least some interest in keeping your tenured position at Penn, despite your announcement in 2004 that you were renouncing all such worldly goods for the joys of teaching at a private high school). But this is the life you're looking at: a series of "thoughtful" posts on reviews of a book you haven't read, and a series of cheers and salutations in response from the likes of "Jacques." Consider, if you will, whether you have chosen wisely.

I'd like to direct everyone's attention to a post I just put up about commenting on this site. Please, everyone, either debate the issues or hold your tongues. Comments are more than welcome on this blog; nastiness for the sake of nastiness is not. I have not deleted any comments from this thread or any other--as should be most evident from the level of incivility and ad hominem to which threads such as this one have arrived--and don't want to have to start. But that depends on all of you.

I'd have begun, "Dear Broob, I think . . .", but I'll stifle this response in deference to the latest and justest message of Professor Erin O'Connor that we academics ought to stay on task--yea, despite the sustained vicious personal attacks on me on MB's own website that he did nothing to deter. I took all of 'em on, including MB, and won! And his appeal to you, while seeming lacrimose (as if I've no children of ny own) was also seething with hate--
false sike diagnoses:--"insane resentment and bile"--we'll revist this site tomorrow=

Chers,

Dr JA

"then I suppose we can assume my evidence prevails?"

No, not logically anyway.

Two things:

First, you must present reliable evidence proving your contentions, not two tables of contents in isolation.

Second, two tables of contents in isolation do not logically create any rebuttable presumption in your favor.

I fully understand your reluctance to actually research the matter, but that fact does not prove your contentions, which remain unsupported by facts and logic.

"Alas, poor Broob, I began . . .", but I shan't finish or post that rather longish piece I'd done last night on what I regard as MB's repeatedly intemperate remarks about me (e.g., "full of insane resentment and bile", or "completely unhinged"--interesting that what seems like lay sidewalk diagnoses of "mental illness" [surely a reified metaphor] should be employed as insults--in any case, let it be known that I am utterly indifferent to such slurs against me, though NOT to slurs against those close to me). Thanks, Professor Erin O' Connor, for your message counseling REASON--d'accord! But please to note that MB did not publicly rein in his personal-oppo-research dogs on his site 'till they'd had what they thought was a "hit-bio" on me (right down to sexual taunts--see "Foucault"'s "contributions", e.g.), and he even added his own gratuitous insults to the mix ("Ignoramus!" he shouted, or exulted, when I hastily penned a Latin quotation with one incorrect vowel). I knew nothing at the time of his personal situation, and I certainly wouldn't wish to cause him or anyone any personal hurt, even by memory. And I should hope those would be M Berube's sentiments vis a vis me and my family as well. Perhaps my wartime military service (molti anni fa) and familiarity with agonistic rhetoric have inured me a bit to such personal but yet blindly impersonal (in the sense that those who attack me know nothing of me) assaults. But isn't it often the case that those who are better-known are granted sensibilities (in the 18th c. sense) that their nameless opponents are denied? Except, of course, the few conservative or right-wing academics and public figures, whom the academic and political left routinely disparage in the vilest and most personally offensive manner. In any case, M Berube took personally what I treated as a "type" of mandarin academic leftist--fact is, I neither know nor care about M Berube's personal life except to say that I wish him and his family, as everyone, good fortune and health. Would that he and his "associates" on his website could wish the same to their adversaries!

Nevertheless, M Berube HAS issued a few charges against me, and I'll answer them as respectfully as I can in a following post.

Until then, je suis
votre humble serviteur,
Dr James Albert DeLater ("Jacques Albert")

Fed Dog, I invite ACTA's readers to browse the ToC of major specialist journals in literary studies. Top journals like *English Literary History*, *American Literary History*, *American Literature*, *PMLA* haven't been publishing too much overtly poststructural work. You will regretfully continue to find poststructural work in journals on contemporary literature, mostly because hires in contemporary literary study usually include poststructural theory as part of one's teaching and research responsibilities (i.e., teach the intro to theory course).

Regular attendance at literary studies conferences, regular contact with 50-75 literature professors across the world, and my own research all attest to a shift from poststructuralism to historicism (and within historicism, a shift from "new" to "old").

I cannot post more evidence than this to a blog comment box (that is, I'm not about to cut and paste five years of peer-reviewed scholarship from top journals). Yet the failure of anyone around here to cite even one counter-example is telling. Hell, *I* could cite a counter-example (the recent issue of *Callaloo*, one of the top journals of African-American literary scholarship, is on hip-hop cultural studies -- not overtly post-structural, but not overtly historicist either).

Finally, on the subject of ad hominem attacks: We all need to separate ad hominem logic -- which is false logic in the form of "one's truth claims are invalidated by one's biography" -- from critiques of a rhetor's appeals to ethos and his or her motivations.

Para #3:
MB's explanation of himself here is of course plausible--yet I thought he might be doing a year's research or even a deanship (I've a friend doing the latter at a large midwest university, and he's no teaching responsibilities during his tenure as dean). My first response I think an entirely plausible explanation before MB's explanation that it all was some cheap ruse (cui bono, MB?), yet my response to his ambiguous statement is hardly evidence of derangement, nicht wahr?

"Para" 4:
"programme"--I'll ignore the gratuitous sneer about my "household" this time, but comme d'habitude, MB is way off base. Although I've not lived in Canada for years, MB could easily avail himself of the fact that I've a British publisher and thus use British orthography and punctuation. I'm also preparing an article to submit to Translation and Literature, another UK journal. Or I could have been British, or have lived there for some time. Perhaps, though, by the time MB wrote out his last blog attack on me, it's also possible that MB's oppo-dogs had located my actual name.

In deference to Professor O' Connor's request, I'll avoid attaching some sarcastic comments I could make to MB at this point.

Of course one needn't be present at EVERY kind of mid-term; it simply depends on what kind it is. As with some of my short-answer parts of mid-terms, students are often keen to know how they performed on this section before leaving the exam room, so I mark them as they're submitted. Not an uncommon practise. But my experience holding a baby for most of the mid-term period once or twice WAS uncommon, so I related it tout court for the delectation of readers. Note that MB cut off the following parenthetical remark clearly identifying the previous sentence as ironical. Would that MB had marked his ironies so clearly. And either he missed it (tu quoque, MB!) or worse (an attempt to deceive readers into thinking I'd accused him of disliking babies or some such rubbish). Of course the welfare of his family trumps his attendance at his lectures; yet I required no attendance card from him. Perhaps he at once wished to show he's a loving father (I'm sure he is) and has an exemplary attendance record of only 4 or 5 absences in a decade. If true, it is, and mine is as well. I've never cancelled a class in deference to a conference, period.

I won't comment much on what I consider downright insolence shown to Professor O'Connor in MB's ultimate paragraph.

One last question to MB: Sir, you've made several allusions to my doing myself harm or damage--both on your site and Professor O'Connor's--care to make these veiled threats more explicit? . . . Sir!

Off to my VFW post in an hour with me mum and me lit-moll Cendrine. By the way, at no time during this debate with MB did I feel the least anger--only keeness to make my points--that's agonistic rhetoric, MB!

A stanza from Ungaretti and a lesson for MB and other cocky and noisy partisans of the new (which is, as Joseph de Maistre has it, the perishable part of things):

Cessate d'uccidere i morti,
Non gridate piu, non gridate
Se li volete ancora udire,
Se sperate di non perire.

("Stop killing the dead,
No more shouting, do not shout
If still you want to hear them,
If YOU hope not to perish.")

Cheers and soon, beers,

Dr JA

Addendum: on MB's rhetorical use of pathos in his penultimate paragraph reminds this old soldier of the practise of Roman ex-legionnaires of baring their breasts to show their wounds to Roman senators whom they petitioned for land and soldiers' bonuses. I couldn't resort to it, since my only permanent service wound was in my sinister hand.

Nice sparring with you, MB. Guess there is an hors-texte for you. Glad to hear it.

Dr JA

Well, I'd just like to suggest that people refrain from making claims about What's Liberal? without having read it.

As for standards of civility: I seem to recall that it was you, Professor O'Connor, who accused me of "intellectual bad faith" on this site -- in a sentence that was itself an example of intellectual bad faith:

to cite a moment when Horowitz could not back up a claim of classroom bias as proof that any such claim made by any critic is wrong is to engage in a sort of intellectual bad faith that Berube would not tolerate in one of his own critics.

My citation of Horowitz's false statements about Fahrenheit 9/11 did not attempt to discredit every critic and every claim about academe. It simply made the uncontroversial point that Horowitz is not to be trusted.

Then there's this:

Penn State English professor Michael Berube campaigns tirelessly to discount the idea that the documented political skew of the American professoriate--particularly as found in humanities disciplines such as his own--means anything.

This too is false, as even a cursory reading of my book will demonstrate. And when you read the book, you'll also find that I make common cause with FIRE in cases such as those of Steve Hinkle at Cal Polytech and Thomas Klocek at DePaul. I also call for more conservatives to seek careers in the arts and humanities, and I'm on record with Inside Higher Ed (in their podcast) as saying that my field would be healthier if it had more people like Mark Bauerlein in it.

Then again, I think that anyone who goes around promoting a document like ACTA's "How Many Ward Churchills?" has committed herself (or himself!) to intellectual bad faith as a way of life, and seeing that always makes me sad. But about that, I believe, reasonable people can disagree.

Finally, about "Jacques." He's not really an ignoramus, though he is rather too fond of saying uninformed things that embarrass him when he runs into people who know what they're talking about. From here on out I wish him well -- so long as he stops making unhinged remarks regarding my professional behavior.

Addendum: on MB's rhetorical use of pathos in his penultimate paragraph reminds this old soldier of the practise of Roman ex-legionnaires of baring their breasts to show their wounds to Roman senators whom they petitioned for land and soldiers' bonuses. I couldn't resort to it, since my only permanent service wound was in my sinister hand.

Nice sparring with you, MB. Guess there is an hors-texte for you. Glad to hear it.

Dr JA

Of course, Professor O'Connor's problem is that she aspires to standards of civility and fair play that are an ideal, rather than an attainable goal.

Professor Berube, on the other hand, aspires to standards of incivility and nastiness that he has accomplished with ease.

When Professor O'Connor fails to meet her own standards, she is found wanting.

When Professor Berube meets his "standards," he has merely lived down to expectations.

Asymmetrical expectations lead to asymmetrical disappointments.

Clawmute

MB seems to have some serious "anger management" probs. That's perhaps why he projects "insane resentment and bile" on others. Well, MB, welcome to the world of agonistic rhetoric and in utramque partem (or just utrimque) argumentation! Don't we wish we'd majored in classics?

Para 3:

From his ambiguous statement, I simply thought MB may have been doing research for a year or so or perhaps doing a deanship (as is a friend at a large midwestern university, a gifted teacher of Renascence literature; these positions often do not require any teaching). See below on how MB handles CLEARLY-MARKED ironies. Sorry, MB, no "insane resentment and bile". Don't flatter yourself too quickly next time.

Para 4:

I'll let the snide remark about the "Delater household" go this time, but in future please address your sarcasms to me, MB. They're about as effective as sponge-tipped Parthian arrows with me. No, I've not been watching overmuch BBC drama, though I generally like it. You see, MB, though I've not lived in Canada for 15 or so years now, I've a British publisher (comme vous bien savez from your oppo-research dogs) who requires British orthography andd punctuation; furthermore, I'm now preparing an article for Translation and Literature, another UK journal. Savvy? Tutto e confusato per il Suo argomento sottile--non e vero, MB?

Para 5:

I'm glad you prefer classes to conferences, MB--nous sommes d'accord; and you've only six or so absences in a decade--I'll accept your word as a . . .um, gentle-person on this, since, unlike you, I haven't a kennel of oppo-researchers to check up on this. Readers please note that I didn't accuse MB of disliking babies, for that was what the "Brechtian irony arrow" reference (that MB omitted, naturellement) was for. Either MB missed the irony (a tu quoque) or he deliberately falsified its intended meaning. Or? I don't dislike babies either--especially the three I've fathered. And I told the story about holding my student's baby simply because I thought it was cute. Sorry if it wasn't to your taste, MB. Some mid-term exams lend themselves to administration by proxy-monitors, some don't. Ca depend. But the rhetorical pathos aimed for in this penultimate paragraph reminds me of the Roman ex-legionnaires who tearfully and histrionically bared their naked breasts to the public show their battle scars to all before the Senate was to vote on a land or money allotment bill for war veterans. Now that's some rhetoric!--Have to tell my fellow-VFWs about that. Of course family health crises trump class attendance--Quid verbis? And so this whole controversy (BBC-accented voice emphasises second syllable--just for MB!) seems to me superfluous.

Ultimate paragraph: I'll let Professor O'Connor handle MB's buffoonish show of hauteur and insolence. Che di nuovo, buffon'? sings the chorus to Rigoletto, or, still got game, MB?

I guess MB is one post-structuralist partisan who DOES believe in an "hors-texte". Perhaps the new (i.e., as Joseph de Maistre has it, the perishable part of things) of the post-humans of theorrhea isn't all it's cracked up to be, and, as The Grand Wizard, Maitre D' Derrida says somewhere, we can act as if post-structuralism never mattered in the least if we choose to. Let's. Charles Peguy knew that a scrap of Homer was worth more than a ton of yesterday's newsprint. Lets forget the fiddling, fads, foibles, farce, farrago and follies of noisy theory for a moment at least to read a stanza of Ungaretti together:

Cessate d'uccidere i morti,
Non gridate piu, non gridate
Se li volete ancora udire,
Se sperate di non perire.

("Stop killing the dead,/No more shouting, do not shout/If you want to hear them still/If YOU hope not to perish")

For the good of all, I am closing comments on this thread.