The Prickly Irrelevance Of An Academic - How Lester Fine Parsed Himself Into Obscurity

Lester Fine sat atop the university's new Department Of Cross-Cultural Literariness, dean of a long-awaited locus of neo-deconstructionism, a new and exciting way of parsing literature and giving it meaning in a challenging world of diversity.  His dissertation had been this: 'Criticizing Criticism - A Textual Analysis Of Literary Exegesis'.  

Lester had been educated in the New Criticism. 'Read the text, and all will become apparent' - but fed up with the facile, metaphor-ridden imagery of the discipline, turned to Deconstruction where he found an immediate home.  There the emphasis was also on text but Derrida and Lacan insisted there was no point in fooling around with metaphor, simile and poetic license. Any meaning - if one could ever say legitimately that there ever was any anywhere - could only be perceived through the lens of historicism.  

 

There was no mystery or genius in Shakespeare, no room for Bardolotry or bowing and scraping at the altar at the Globe.  It was all a matter of race, gender, ethnicity and the historical imperatives of the time.  Queen Elizabeth and King James were what mattered, not some unique inspiration of a random individual.

As an Assistant Professor Lester was a whiz at adapting French Deconstructionists to the American genre of literary criticism.  He never backed off from their core principals, but felt he could - should - add something of the American idiom, and so was born the idea of The Criticism of Criticism, a novel approach to literature which would take Deconstructionism to its roots.  It was one thing to analyze texts from a perspective of exogenous influences; another thing altogether to deconstruct criticism itself.  

 

Harold Bloom had been one of the New Criticism's darlings and his textual analysis was virtuosity itself.  Parsing Blake's Tyger over three classes, adding Biblical, mythological, and literary references and blending them together in a marvelously complex but compelling whole, he was at the very top of his game. 

A PhD student wrote a dissertation on Bloom's approach to literature, but in so doing began to dismantle the very pillars of the New Criticism and open the way to Deconstruction. 'Parsing Synergy: The Faultline Of Positive Negativity' took Bloom to task for slavish idolatry.  Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge per se weren't worth a spit in the wind, and Bloom's faux intellectualism was the last straw.  On the basis of that doctoral work, the student was accepted at Duke and went on to a not insignificant career. 

 

Lester, although impressed with the student's scholarship, thought he didn't go far enough.  'Criticism of Criticism' meant taking the critic to task, not for his unearthing of poetic meaning (of which there was none) but his facile use of critical tools applying them in a carousel of sound and light but without rigor.

By the time Lester had completed his submission to the Harvard University Press, the had added layer upon layer of critical exegesis, displaying his own virtuosity in displaying the existential meaning of critical literary analysis, the seminal meaning of tools and implements. 

The Harvard Press turned him down.  In their reply they dismissed his theory as hogwash, an intellectual Ponzi scheme, a lot of promise but no beef, a pseudo-intellectual shell game.  They wrote:

Dear Dr. Fine, We are in receipt of your book (title here) and were a bit confused about your thesis, your academic intent, and your critical purpose.  What indeed was your chapter 'Co-significant Unpacking - the Sorcery of Meaning' all about in the first place?  Your failure to offer even a scintilla of opportunity for the serious academic who, by the way is fed up and finished with the faux, pseudo literary criticism of the past, its arcane, self-important nonsense and gobbledygook gibberish of the old chestnuts of Deconstructionism, alone disqualifies your book from consideration. 

Get with the program, Doctor, get out of the weeds.  What on earth is The Criticism of Criticism anyway? A self-referential portrait of a tangled intellectualism.....

The author of this intemperate screed was reprimanded by Harvard which, however, took no exception to its content, only its form and diction.  Please apologize to the good doctor for your intemperance, they said. 

Despite this cruel rebuff, the Department of Cross-Cultural Literariness continued on for some time, but because of the obscurantism of the place, the narrow definition of being, and especially the talk-to-each other Ponzi scheme fol-de-rol that was called academic literary criticism but was nothing but procedural nonsense, the Department collapsed on itself and disappeared. 

What happened? said Professor Fine who never knew what hit him.  He had done everything right. He had dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's of university academic protocol.  He was an academic's academic, deep into the arcane apocrypha of literary criticism and academic critical analysis.  He had given obeisance, sought counsel, tipped his hat and been the revolutionary the university had always sought, and yet here he was, cashiered, left on the curb, dangling from the loose cord of tenure where he was left to dangle until he dropped. 

He watched from the sidelines as his department was dismantled and replaced, God forbid!, but something which resembled New Criticism, a throwback to the discredited notions of 'inspiration, personality, and creativity.  How could they?  Once again Jesus would feature and so would Nature, and so would poetic ingenuity and spirituality.  

It amounted to a de-intellectualization of the discipline,  The beauty of critical complexity, synergistic linguistics, was being rejected by reactionary simpletons who thought that Mt. Blanc was beautiful!! That Shakespeare's villains were one-off Nietzschean heroes, not the historical postulates that any fool could see them to be.   

 

Gripe, cavil, and harp though he might, his time had come and gone.  What next, a colleague asked, but Lester, shocked and befuddled, the cradle of academia no longer rocking, no blankie to sleep with, said he didn't know.