Word: alsc
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Alter is president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), a band of resistance fighters against prevailing academic trends, mainly the ones--deconstruction, cultural studies, gender studies--that examine literature for its complicity in racism, colonialism, sexism and homophobia. Alter's group believes that lit-crit obsessions with race, gender and sexuality reduce imaginative writing to the sum of its crimes against humanity, losing sight of the ambiguous and magical ways in which novels, poems and plays really operate. (To make matters worse, a lot of that criticism is written in indigestible nuggets like "reification" and "de-contextualizing...
...ALSC has held two conferences of its own, where some of its 2,000 members heard papers on Dante and Dickens and reassured one another that it was still possible to discuss Auden's poetry without listening everywhere for the thump of his libido. They also try to offer an alternative job network for like-minded young Ph.D.s frustrated by the MLA job mart. "If young people didn't speak the language of race, gender and class studies, they couldn't get jobs," insists Professor Emeritus John Ellis of the University of California at Santa Cruz, an ALSC founder...
...Depoliticizing" literature is not that simple. A fourth of the ALSC budget comes from the very conservative Bradley Foundation, which has subsidized the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute as well as the authors of The Real Anita Hill and The Bell Curve. Alter insists that the foundation never interferes in his group's operations. A bigger problem for him is that ideological lit-crit is so popular within the profession. Can a small band of traditionalists hold it off? They look for signs of hope. In an issue last year of Lingua Franca, Duke professor Frank Lentricchia...
...while the liberals and white left maintain "U.S. out of Angola--MPLA." The peculiar instance of black groups supporting the party which the media had tagged as collaborators with the racist South African regime bears special looking into. Black organizations like the now clearly marxist African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC) have begun to take a more prodding look at the facts beyond what is presented in the press. ALSC has sent representatives to Angola to bring back firsthand accounts to the black community of what is really going on. Their reports are at total variance with the sophisticated information networks...
Zulu explained that the boycott is presently being called on a local level and that he has not notified the national ALSC, a group which grew out of the May, 1972 African Liberation Day protests...