Benj.
I got my Ph.D. in 1964, so I know the landscape you’re referring to. New Critics vs. post-structuralists? “Responsive to Humanity”?
This is not where the battle is at all. You don’t sound like you give much of a hoot about literary studies, which is fine with me.
That’s not the point here, in any case: the people I’m talking about are terminally raging with self-hatred, resentment, malice, and have the mentality of spoiled tantrum-prone three-year-olds imprisoned in the sagging bodies of middle-aged women. They are not pretty. They are, IOW, typical lefties who are determined to project their rage on anyone who comes along. I’m talking sociopathic symptoms here, as well as simply not very bright.
Omega-Paladin:
Ayers’ father was–don’t tell me–a rich, important, wealthy capitalist? And Ayers is angry at rich, important, wealthy capitalists?
Check out one of the major discursive ticks of lefties and feminists: sooner or later they’re going to regale you with the story of either (1) their lousy childhoods and how they hate their parents; (2) some really terrible thing that happened when they were adolescents, like (this is a true story) not winning an academic prize in high school, a non-win which was, of course, clearly unjust. And she never got over it–been raging at the “injustices” of capitalist society ever since.
The academic literature has made a literary sub-sub-genre of the dire childhood/adolescent stories of these people. Just read the prefaces to their books. The woman who is now chair of my former department includes–where are these peoples’ self-knowledge?–a story about how her mother doesn’t appreciate the fact that she has a Ph.D., and daughter is still raging about that. That’s in the preface to her first and only book-length piece of scholarship. It’s pathetic.
This is one reason why it’s so impossible to reason with them on the particular gripes they throw in your face–because these gripes are only displacements of something that happened when they were ten.
Yes, it really is that absurd, that ridiculous.
Ayers talks in a calm, reasoned way? Acts like an intellectual? And that impresses you? Been there, done that for almost half a century.
