Word: altered
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will be disappointed. Berkeley, Calif., is in no danger of becoming the colonial Williamsburg of the student revolution. Grass-roots activism doesn't leave much behind in the way of bricks and mortar. What has survived is the politics that once tied the place in knots. So Professor Robert Alter, one of the nation's best-known literary scholars, finds himself an officer in the culture war over the Western canon...
...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...
...scholars, many of them devoted to grievance politics as a critical method. For a while in the early '90s, reporters would cover its annual conference as a kind of fascinating academic comedy club, where nutty professors delivered papers on "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Three years ago, when Alter's group came together, some of the biggest names in American letters signed on, including scholars Alfred Kazin and Roger Shattuck, novelist Cynthia Ozick, poet Donald Hall and the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. "I don't think the MLA is the evil empire," says Alter, who maintains membership...
...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...
...regimen. The companies--Philip Morris Companies, RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., B.A.T. Industries PLC's Brown & Williamson and Loews Corp.'s Lorillard--reached a resolution with the attorneys general of nearly 40 states in which the industry will pay out $368.5 billion over the next quarter-century in compensation, drastically alter their marketing programs and submit to the regulatory heel...