Word: epstein
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...another consequence of university control of contemporary literature is an abundance of esoteric criticism, far removed from the substance of life and history that make literature rich and relevant. With authority that must be the envy of any undergraduate, Epstein notes the ubiquitous "demonstration of techniques for proving that reality doesn't exist. It is all very ingenious this work of structuralism, semiologists, Foucaultists; it is also all very boring...
This attack is somewhat ironic coming from Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University and editor of The American Scholar (the voice of Phi Beta Kappa), but Epstein's prose is refreshingly free of academic cant. In fact, he attempts to puncture the diseased, pseudo-critical language he calls "blurbissimo"--swollen with hyperbolic vacuity and written more or advertisements than reviews...
Another short-changing of literature and life to which Epstein object is ideology at either the heart of a novel or the core of criticism. Borrowing Clauswitz's definition of war, he accuses Doctorow and Coover of using literature to wage "politics by other means." He devotes four essays to rehabilitating the reputations of James G. Cozzens, John Dos Passo Var. Wyck Brooks, and Willa Cather, all of whom be considers unjustly neglected by the prejudice of liberal critics. Cather he "rescues" from the crown of lesbianism...
...STRANGELY, Epstein himself clearly judges novelists on extra-literary, political grounds, admitting, "I may be blinded by my own politics." This is an understatement. After reading a sentence such as "Like the fly and the dunghill, left-wing sociology and left-wing sociology and leftwing fiction feed upon and replenish each other," the reader may find his politics difficult to miss. In fact, most of the essays in this collection were published first in Commentary or New Criterion...
Politics, it becomes clear, is inevitably a facet of literature. The most benign, introspective meandering can always be read as an endorsement of self-centered capitalism and possessive individualism. Epstein is arguing for a particular view of life, the traditional liberal humanist ideology, when he says that gravity is essential to great literature, and gravity depends on the spiritual. Clearly, Marxism will not appeal to Epstein. Accepting the inevitability of politics in novels, even in masterpieces by Dostoyevsky or Conrad, he resists literature blind to the rich variety of life...