What She Said

Camille Paglia on the flight of literature-lovers from the academy:

I feel that post-structuralism has deadened not only the students, but the professors themselves, to literature. There’s been over 30 years of it now. Over 30 years. Where is the great work of criticism by any of these people? Where is the great critic? What have they produced? Nothing.

It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook, all reflecting each other. There’s no single great work that’s come out of criticism in the last 30 years, in the way Cleanth Brooks’ Well Wrought Urn has that kind of relationship, a book you could recommend to let someone know what’s happening in literary criticism. It is such a dead end, a terrible dead end, and what has happened is that talented people have fled the graduate schools. People have to wake up to this. The people at the top now, people from my generation, who are in the Ivy League, from coast to coast, to Berkeley, their work is mediocre. They have not done what they claim to do, and what they’ve done is driven out talented people.

I meet them everywhere, people who started graduate school and left it, OK? They’re in publishing, they’re in media, they’re in all kinds of jobs, because they couldn’t stand it. They wanted to study literature and art, but had every obstruction put in their paths. They not only had to read Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, who had nothing to do with literature, but they had to read critics talking about Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, none of whom are philosophically trained, okay?