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Life Before Theory (or the Time of Tweed). Roughly 1930-1975. The scholar's life was predominantly male and upper-class (less so from the middle-sixties on). [...] Ideologically, the dominant was New Criticism and its modernist cult of the aesthetic. Literature as religion. There was also, signific…

[...] Many of the books currently being manufactured as part of a "Generation X" "movement" have at their dead cold centers the vacillating heart of the advertising executive. Kept aloft--that is, "relevant"--by a constant barrage of moronic platitudes concerning the meaninglessness of life (as if …

There's also the possibility that in a society as deracinated and stripped of tradition and continuity [...] as our own, the void that emptily exists where common experience would ordinarily repose is filled by elements of popular culture so anchored to a specific time that they become part of the …