THE CORE CURRICULUM AS INTELLECTUAL MOTIVATION
415
knowledge. Precisely because it is so strong an instrument of analysis, it has
to be employed with considerable tact and urbanity-which unfortunate–
ly it often is not. For it is only one moderately short intellectual step from
the measured historical relativism of this perspective to the lamentable
reductionism of a considerable portion of identity politics-to the asser–
tion that one's personal or group situation-class, race, or
gender-determines everything substantial that one thinks and believes.
And from this point it is merely one step to the claim that "everything is
political." Or, rotated to yet another side, the affirmation that the political
bearing of a work of literature is the most important thing about it-or
that such a work is first of all merely another text in some historical nego–
tiation over power-is equally ruinous. Or to mount the constructionist
argument in an extreme form: to claim it as axiomatic that since all knowl–
edge is socially or culturally constructed, no transcontextual validity is
possible is equally stifling, even as there is the silent exclusion from that
remark of the very axiom that it is stating.
Yet the point to be grasped, I believe, despite such serious drawbacks and
unacceptable intellectual groundings, is that we now are also undergoing
another shifting in the internal configuration of the disciplines that consti–
tute the humanities. History, culture, literary analysis, and other thick
pursuits, now that grand theory has receded, have been let in again through
the back door, so to speak. A new range of topics and themes has been legit–
imately started. To be sure, we are by no means out of the ideological woods;
some of the more heated opposing groups are still having it out, and there
will continue to be unpleasant scenes and episodes. Nevertheless, there is a
growing sense of need for new intellectual departures and an intuition as
well that the connections and discontinuities between generations of teach–
ers and scholars need attention and repair. And there is a sense communicated
by younger scholars of an awareness of intellectual and disciplinary
fragmen–
tation
of both perspective and knowledge and of the need for new shapes of
intellectual
integration.
My own intuition of the current situation is that we
must take such new projects as they come, one by one. For the present, it has
to be sufficient to commit oneself to the notion that the intellectual excel–
lence of the individual scholar or program has to be the basis for judgment.
Cultural projects with overtly political purposes or principally ideological
ends must be regarded as suspicious
if
not outrightly dangerous objects. The
inner reconfiguration of the humanistic disciplines of study at the end of the
twentieth century will take place whether we want it to or not. Our respon–
sibility at this time, it seems to me, is to make that transition to new purposes
and perspectives as honest and open, as flexible and inclusive, as possible. If
we turn ourselves to this work, we will be doing what it is appropriate for
scholars and critics at any time to do.
