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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Cold War and the Reagan era, and finally the explosion of ethnic
hatred and cultural nationalism throughout the world have powerfully
demonstrated the need for despised liberal values like pluralism, tolerance,
and diversity, which never fared well in the apocalyptic atmosphere of
modernist culture.
The general opprobrium heaped on political correctness in the last
two years doesn't mean that PC culture is a thing of the past. A whole
academic generation that came of age in the seventies and eighties re–
mains deeply invested in post-structuralist theory and the separatist poli–
tics of
diJfhance.
A pointed display of the current generation gap can be
found in Mark Edmundson's recent collection of autobiographical essays,
Wild Orchids and Trotsky.
Recoiling from the excesses of PC-style criti–
cism, older contributors to the volum.e like
J.
Hillis Miller, Harold
Bloom, Frank Lentricchia, Edward Said, and William. Kerrigan shift to
higher ground and renew their links to canonical writers like Milton,
Arnold, and Eliot, while the younger critics seem shipwrecked in feminist
rage and deconstructive hostility to dead white European males.
The same conflict is played out every day in debates within academic
departments, with younger scholars opting for a theory-based, radically
decentered, highly politicized curriculum reflecting current fashions in
ethnicity, postmodernism, and gender politics, and older teachers retiring
early, feeling depressed and beleaguered .
In
my own undergraduate de–
partment last spring there was a strong push to eliminate the whole core
curriculum, including basic survey courses in English and American litera–
ture. At meetings I asked if there weren't at least a few writers all
English majors should be required to read, Shakespeare perhaps? Not a
chance.
Where the insurgents' motives weren't overtly political, they were
anti-hierarchical and anti-elitist. "You're saying that some books are
more important than others," I was told, "and therefore some people's
courses are more important than others." Though the revisionists claimed
to be devoted to history, they rejected the historical approach for a the–
oretical one, whether or not our students were equipped to handle it.
They were determined to surround literary works with ideological
markers, like road signs warning of dangerous terrain. Control of the
curriculum meant shaping the mind of the next generation.
Through this whole debate, none of the proponents of a new cur–
riculum said one word about their political motives, since political cor–
rectness is on the defensive today. Institutional power was the real issue
yet the discussion remained on the highest educational plane.
In
other
contexts one now hears remarks prefaced by, "I know this sounds like a
really PC comment, but...." A trace of bad conscience has infiltrated
