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PARTISAN REVIEW
is to try to keep the students' minds open and to offer certain practical
help in the process of discrimination. There is obviously no single rec–
ommended procedure for doing this, and I would guess that Marjorie
Perlofrs way is different from mine. When students are encountering for
the first time a work as technically innovative as
Ulysses ,
special guidance,
from the elucidation of formal structures to the glossing of allusions, is
called for. Beyond providing such textual road maps, my own preference
is to remind students through manifold illustration that
Ulysses
is one of
the funniest novels in the English language and that the stream of con–
sciousness, whatever else it may represent, is an extraordinarily athletic
and amusing verbal game in which the agile reader is invited to partici–
pate by tracing the half-hidden chains of associations, spotting the puns,
and enjoying the sheer exuberant play of the mind.
Weare clearly not so literate a culture as we once were, and the
ideological intransigents in literary studies, some of them openly avowing
their distaste for literature, are themselves a high-level manifestation of
the erosion of literary cultivation. Nevertheless, there are still twenty–
year-olds capable of keenly appreciating Bloom in the butcher shop, as
his mind skids from hanging skirts of beef to female buttocks swinging in
skirts to plump melons in the Promised Land, and who can respond with
excitement to the gorgeous poetry of Molly's soliloquy. If there are
some people in the teaching profession, as I believe there must be, who
continue to serve such readers, the brave new world of academically in–
stituted barbarism is by no means inevitable .
BRIGITTE BERGER
Multiculturalism and the Modern University
Every so often I ask myself why I am so deeply skeptical about the multi–
cultural paradigm on the rise in the American university today. By every
measure of biography, education, and intellectual curiosity, not to men–
tion professional avocation, I should be favorably predisposed toward an
ordering principle that promises to enrich and enhance our knowledge,
if not our lives. Like multiculturalists, I am convinced that culture is an
evolving process, never complete, always open to new additions and
