Mary Graber at Pajamas notes that pomo English profs are making Solzhenitsyn disappear. Apparently he did not toe some party line or something. It's a sad piece to read. A quote:
...under “classroom strategies” in the Norton instructor’s manual, teachers are told that they are likely to encounter the problem of students accepting the “truth” of what Solzhenitsyn has to say: “Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction.” Here we have the apologists for communism directing teachers: All that you’ve heard about the brutality of communism is merely part of our “myths and preconceptions.” Students must be reeducated to “resist” the testimony of Solzhenitsyn as dramatized in his fictional account.
The fine rant below is from a commenter on the piece:
I know the tone and tenor of that barbaric gibberish–and that is precisely why I am not in graduate school. Pure shit, from theory to practice, from Lacan’s bunghole to their mouths, this highfalutin’ jargon is a daily testament that the university has gone slumming right off solid ground and into a nihilistic miasma. This is the language of decadence and exhaustion, of cowardice and self-loathing; it is the cadence of suicide, the scholarly language of insanity.
I do not feel pity for people who write and talk like that anymore (but imagine how diseased and fallow their souls must be like to have these pale shadows of ideas running around in their minds all day and night); I feel contempt toward their presumption to teach, and anger at their pestilential influence on the world around them. Word by word, phrase by phrase, they are putting young souls to sleep, droning on while the great project of human completion dies on their watch. To Hell with them, dead souls, empty-headed, clarifactors and frauds, apologists for evil, over-ripe fruit, they are the last men, the enemies of Rabelais and Goethe, they should be put in stocks and have rotten tomatoes thrown at them.
Bravo, commenter. Well-said. Solzhenitsyn himself warned about such fashionable nonsense in his famous 1978 Harvard Commencement speech (audio and print). If you haven't read or heard it, I recommend it.
