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the critical and cultural grain is probably misplaced because much of it stems from university administrators and non-academics who still believe professors of literature to be time-honored guardians of transcendent wisdom and knowledge—they just do not know what we really do. But how long will even this misplaced trust continue if people start listening to Will, Kernan, Vickers, and like-minded voices who portray radical teachers as enemies of the people? Now it should be clear that Levin, Kernan, Pechter, and Bradshaw are well to the political left of Will. Their criticisms of the various new approaches are, for the most part, also more local, subtle, fair-minded, and sophisticated than Will’s uninformed, wholesale condemnation of seemingly all members of the Modern Language Association. But their work is highly receptive to appropriation by anyone with an ax to grind against “dangerous” critical approaches and the current trends in English departments and universities.3 For anxious minds, it is easy to (mis)read Richard Levin’s attack on certain aspects of feminist criticism as an attack on feminism in general.4 How big a step is it from there to Kernan’s death of literature and from there to Will’s decline of the national mind? A giant leap for some but only a teensy step for the George Wills, William Bennetts, and Allan Blooms—all of whom address vast audiences—of this world. How long will we last if we are portrayed as “killers of literature,” as “grave robbers,” and “desecraters of Shakespeare’’ in politically conservative election platforms? How long will literature last in institutions of higher education?

Depending on which conservative critics you read, radical critics are charged with interrogating, torturing, mutilating, and “distort[ing]” (Levin 1988:136; see also Will 1991; Vickers 1993: 415) texts until they yield meanings that confirm the critics’ political proclivities. In these accounts, enough violence is perpetrated to kill or, at the very least, to maim beyond recognition, the literary text of old. But that is of course only half the story. While Kernan brings to view literature’s death, Vickers, Bradshaw, Will, and Levin insist that when the radical critics are done butchering the text, they reanimate it, not with the original life with which the author first infused his creation but with a false, ideological life (see also Levin 1990:501 and 1997:533; Vickers 1993:415–16; Bradshaw 1993:34–124; Will 1991). The radical critic thus emerges not merely as the mutilator and relic monger of literary bodies, but as a literary Dr. Frankenstein who stitches the

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