The CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Faith-Based Literary Theory, and Ivy League Professors Who Lie about Evidence

FAITH-BASED LITERARY THEORY AND WHY THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION HELPS IVY LEAGUE REVIEWERS GET AWAY WITH LYING ABOUT AND SUPPRESSING ARCHIVAL EVIDENCE

From Gary Davenport in THE SEWANEE REVIEW (Summer 1985)—review of Hershel Parker’s FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS:

Parker properly avers that the view of a text as a verbal icon has persisted even into an age that rejects the New Criticism. This fact should not be surprising: a sense of textual reality is obviously far too universal to be identified with any particular critical movement. This notion endures because of the common realization that the idea of the text is absolutely necessary--even if it is only a necessary fiction--for the study of literature to make sense. Otherwise the object of study be­comes the vague heterogeneous "construct"--comprising all extant ver­sions and parts of a text, together with any stated or presumed "intent" of the author--that comes to occupy the consciousness of the researcher (one can no longer call him a reader). This situation would be highly flattering to the ego of the critic, who thus comes to have the same im­portance for the text that Bishop Berkeley thought God had for the universe. But we do not have to be Luddites to see this view as inimical to the higher values of literary culture that have survived, somehow, from the beginnings of literacy to our Age of Information. This view is pernicious not primarily because it puts literature in the custody of "professionals," but because of the reductive assumption that what lit­erature embodies is an intent which may be grasped through a study of data.

You see what Davenport’s theory entails. Agree with Davenpoet and we have to read, say,  PUDD’NHEAD WILSON as if it made perfect sense, even when we encounter passages written when Tom acts as he does because when the words were written he was all white, even when we encounter passages which made sense when the Italian twins were conjoined but not when they are now not so described in foregoing passages. We have to believe in the verbal icon or chaos is come! Data is evil, and professional scholars who resort to data are to be suppressed, as Davenport suppressed me in 1985.

After the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION sandbagged me on February 11, 2013, outright fabricating grievances I supposedly had about reviewers who had lied about me in the New York TIMES and the NEW REPUBLIC, I have been thinking about why it is so important to the CHRONICLE to protect chaired professors in Ivy League schools from the consequences of their misdeeds. [See, for a minor illustration of such misdeeds, what Carl Rollyson says about Delbanco’s use of my evidence that Melville was the country’s first literary sex symbol—WALL STREET JOURNAL,” “The Hunt for Herman Melville,” March, 30, 2013.]

This week we have a rogue’s gallery of Republican Senators saying they will filibuster any gun control legislation. Then we have always with us Republican Senators who deny global warming. Then we have with us always Texans and other Americans who deny evolution. What could the CHRONICLE have in common with these people?

Does the CHRONICLE understand that it is endorsing faith-based approaches to literature when it hides the way professors from elite schools have denounced a biographer who worked with archival evidence and discovered information that ought to change our view of a great writer’s life and work? (And also, of course, in disguising what Brodhead and Delbanco did as reviewers the CHRONICLE puts its faith in them and the 1921 biographer Raymond Weaver, who did not know that Melville wrote a book called POEMS—something revealed in 1922 and known to everyone since that time.)

Does the CHRONICLE think any scientific evidence, any documentary evidence, should be sacrificed in the interest of the “higher values of literary culture” embodied by elitist professors? The CHRONICLE not only protected Brodhead and Delbanco. Oh, no, it did worse: by interpolating the second paragraph containing false reasons for my grievances the CHRONICLE made everything I was later quoted (accurately) as saying look like unjustified ravings. I had real causes for resentment such as the lie that I only knew about POEMS (in my “black hole,” Brodhead said) and that I had merely surmised it and was therefore not to be trusted anywhere in any volume (as Delbanco said). No reader of the CHRONICLE could see that I had any cause for objecting to lies by chaired professors in Ivy League schools.

I ask again. Does the CHRONICLE think any scientific evidence, any documentary evidence, should be sacrificed in the interest of the “higher values of literary culture” embodied by elitist professors?