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Toward a Radical Middle
| Article
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10479 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1993 |
2,882 Words |
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Thomas DePietro
Thomas DePietro is a senior contributor to the Kirkus Reviews
whose reviews have also appeared in Commonweal, the Nation,
the New York Times Book Review, and many literary
quarterlies.
His first book, From Mad to Maus, a study of comic books
written for adults, will appear next year. |
DOUBLE AGENT
The Critic and Society
Morris Dickstein
New York: Oxford, 1992
256 pp., $24.95
THE CRITICS BEAR IT AWAY
American Fiction and the Academy
Frederick Crews
New York: Random House, 1992
192pp., $20.00
By now, we all know the story. Western civilization is going down the tubes, and it's being shoved there by tenured left-wing university professors. When these illiberal educational commissars aren't trashing the Great Books, they're indoctrinating our kids in political correctness. Recent conservatives visitors to the academy tell us the same thing: In humanities courses from Stanford to Duke, hip professors no longer discuss the timeless verities of beauty and truth but proselytize about the topical troika of race, class, and gender. No wonder those of us who care about literature and ideas have felt the need to choose sides in this raging Kulturkampf. But have these well-meaning reports from the front lines been misleading those of us in the rear guard?
Both Morris Dickstein and Frederick Crews believe that to be the case. And they should know. As distinguished professor of English one in multicultural New York, the other in the People's republic of Berkeley--they're right in the thick of the action. By the same token, these two self-proclaimed critical "pluralists" have an obvious self-interest in assuaging our worst fears of what goes on bicoastally in prominent English departments. If the conservative yahoos clamoring at the gates are demanding equal time for traditional studies, then even the liberal Crews and Dickstein might be tempted to close ranks with their left flank. After all, who wants to get the silent treatment at the departmental coffee urn?
We needn't ascribe such venal motives to either Dickstein or Crews: Both aspire to a level of critical disinterest that allows them to follow ideas wherever they may lead, though, in practice, they have little use for what Dickstein calls the "know-nothing assaults" of neoconservatives on the latest theoretical trends. Crews, at least, appreciates the "Spenglerian thrill" of cultural conservatism, with its apocalyptic scenario of decline.
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