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someone like George Will might think, I had been trying to transform my students into poststructuralist atheists, then it is quite apparent that I failed miserably. If this example is indicative of how students actually respond to atypical interpretations of texts, then this puts Kernan, Bloom, Vickers, Will et al. in a very odd position as they aim to save literature from the barbarians. For if most of our students do not see anything wrong with the way literature is taught, then literature continues to play a significant role in the university. But if the neo-conservative assault on new critical methods poisons the “national mind” —if parents and politicians are led to believe that all literature professors talk about is masturbation, homosexuality, imperialism, the death of the author, political oppression, racial oppression, and the oppression of women, and that it is bad or wrong to talk about those things—then they, in an effort to save a conception of literature that made and defined their careers, are well on their way to destroying literature’s cultural capital. Rather than accusing a whole generation of critics of being killers, desecraters, and relic mongers who fight over “the right to identify the smells arising from the literary corpse” (Kernan 1990:5), traditionalists should understand that they themselves are part of a process that was true long before the emergence of Derrida, Foucault, feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, and continues to be true: “The struggle for cultural supremacy is a war to the death, a war fought over the dead’’ (Taylor 1996:9).

Notes

1  

What we should infer from this is unclear; the body may be buried more deeply, at a depth of 17 feet (as tradition has it), or it may have rotted away entirely. Or it may not be exactly under the current gravestone, which replaced the original one that had crumbled by the middle of the eighteenth century (Hamilton 1985:4). It is also possible that the sexton disregarded the curse on the gravestone and tossed the poet’s remains in the “bone house” to make room for a fresh corpse (4).

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