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Sherman Alexie's avatar

I wonder if framing Tom as being a “conservative” academic is fully correct. Can we separate someone’s literary politics from their voting politics? I have many professor friends who are of the political left but who share Tom’s pessimistic views of what the study of literature has become in universities. I am of the political left but I think, in terms of literature, I have become far more of a classical liberal—a sorta libertarian when it comes to artistic vision. But, in this era, having any classical liberal view would mark me as a right winger in English departments.

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A. Jay Adler's avatar

I don’t want to be repetitive in my comments, but they have to be grounded in the sense that despite your generous introduction, Josh, you and Tom were engaging two different conversations – yours truly open and exploratory and his off-putting almost from the very start with tendentious ideological resentments. I don’t doubt for a moment that working as a political conservative in a college English department these days is an unhappy experience and that the source of those resentments is real. Speaking from a politically liberal perspective, yet as someone also out of sympathy with so much of what Tom criticizes, I found the atmosphere oppressive, which is one reason I’m glad I’m no longer teaching. But the kind of exchange you were seeking requires some greater effort at disentangling the felt resentment from the ideas.

For instance, Tom writes, “Reading closely is fine, unless reading closely is equated with reading critically, as it now most assuredly is. Why? Because ‘reading critically’ has come to mean ‘uncovering the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.’"

Well, yes, reading closely does mean reading critically, and for many scholars and professors of literature it has “come to mean” only what Tom says. But it doesn’t have to mean that at all. I am myself currently in the midst of a series on Substack that I call “The Close Read.” The second in the series appears tomorrow. I am close reading some essays of memoir *by creative writers*, and I am not doing so from the perspective Tom cites at all. Rather, I’m exploring the situatedness of the memoirists as biographers and creative writers at the same time in relation to their subjects – people who may not know themselves as well as they think or wish to be as revealing as they purport. This isn’t to say that it is an error to uncover “the political unconscious of the text, the narrative buried under and obscured by ideology, which is always the product of the ruling class.” (I’ll dissent from the “always.”) For many decades, scholars read texts completely unmindful of those realities. If Tom believes that was good, that they aren’t realities, and we should return to that state of affairs, he can take note that the prevailing critical regime has changed before and can again.

But Tom has been so overwhelmed (it appears, in reading him here) by defeatism that he comes to dismiss not just the tendencies he opposes but the value of the whole educational edifice, not just the humanities, but the whole enterprise of liberal education and teaching. It’s a wonder Socrates didn’t tell all those pests following him around who didn’t know what they were talking about to stop bugging him and go read a book. Tom pays lip service to teaching in the spirit of Mathew Arnold, but it doesn’t seem he really believes in that either. And to a large extent, that seems the result of that frequent strategy, across the ideological spectrum, of arguing that because a practice, policy, or act didn’t succeed completely, it didn’t succeed at all. Because meaning is unstable and truth uncertain, there is no such thing as meaning or truth. Because English departments and the humanities (like every other human endeavor) fail at ridding the world of ignorant assholes, they fail completely and aren’t needed.

I think Tom may be ready to be a recovering academic.

Now, go and misread the human condition no more, said the secular priest.

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