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type of “relic mongers” who sold Milton’s hair, bones, and teeth for profit, or, in the uplifting words of Kernan, a bunch of Marxists, feminists, and other radicals who “fight” over “the right to identify the smells arising from the literary corpse’’ (5).

Has literature been emptied out of meaning and “positive value,” only to be pressed into the service of what Graham Bradshaw demeaningly calls “ideological critique” (1993:6–7)? Are today’s critics irresponsible, self-absorbed “gay young blades” who pull the poet’s body to bits and sell the remains? These kinds of questions are misleading: they misconstrue the locus of literary value and modus operandi of educational institutions. But they are asked so often by influential people reaching large audiences that we do well to entertain them seriously.2 An American pundit like George Will, for instance, gets to announce in Newsweek, a publication that reaches an audience far beyond the sphere of academia, that “[c]riticism displaces literature and critics displace authors as bestowers of meaning” (1991:72). The study of literature, Will promulgates, is reduced to sociology, and sociology “to mere ideological assertion.” The ultimate goal of the radicals, as he sees it, is to discredit “the books and ideas that gave birth” to “Western Civilization.” And because Will sees the ideas contained in literature as those that shape the “national mind” of the United States—what Will calls our nation’s “real Constitution” —it is easy for anxious minds to link the death of literature to total anarchy and the end of civilization as we know it. George Will’s panicked hyperbole goes so far as to announce that Lynne Cheney (then chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities) had a more crucial role in our “domestic defense” than did her husband Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense. For, so says Will, the “foreign adversaries her husband, Dick, must keep at bay are less dangerous, in the long run, than the domestic forces with which she must deal” (72). What is more, this type of alarmist language is not unique to the far right. Harold Bloom, for instance, loudly echoed Will and, to a lesser extent, Kernan when he recently condemned political critics as “worse than the enemy [and as] desecraters of Shakespeare” (Bloom 1998a).

On the other hand, most of us would agree with George Will, and in fact insist, that there is an indisputable relationship between literature and society, and that critics and teachers play an integral role in the dynamic of that relationship. In the national mind, it seems that teachers and literary scholars are still revered. What is more, whatever respect accrues to those who teach against

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