Gratuitous English Major Geekery

This Slate article about the rise and fall of literary theory made me laugh. An excerpt:

With New Criticism, literary history was still being customized to fit the professor's expedient needs. In were the Augustans and the Metaphysicals and T.S. Eliot, whose poems supposedly reward close reading; out were the slovenly Romantics, whose poems supposedly don't. But something had started to change. The English professor himself was slowly evolving. The key to that evolution was what is sometimes called "the linguistic turn." Language is of course the necessary medium for all advanced learning; but after Wittgenstein, the default position of the tenured philosophe has been that only within language can we order and experience human reality. If the English professor is the expert in charge of understanding how we use language—how metaphors shape history, how history shapes our metaphors, etc., etc.—he holds a position of enormous intellectual authority on a college campus. For a brief period, climaxing with the reign of terror of the Yale Deconstructionists, the English professor appeared to have arrogated, not only all of literary history, but all possible knowledge to his own powers of interpretation. The English professor had completed the transition. He was no longer a sucker. He was now a con man extraordinaire.

I actually got off fairly lightly in my time at the Glorious Workers' Soviet of Middletown in the mid-80's, although I did get ambushed by Derrida and various other manifestations of Critical Theory now and again.

As to the author's later observations about cherishing the non-utilitarian nature of literary study, all I can say as an old Brit Lit shark is "Duh!" Of course an English major is useless. That's what law school is for.

Yips! to Ann Althouse.