Essay - Theory, Literature, Hoax - NYTimes.com

We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.



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Essay - Theory, Literature, Hoax - NYTimes.com

Comments

Badri Raina said…
troubled issues; i only concede the point that post college of france groupies make that liberal humanism is also a 'theory' that for aeons masqueraded as the 'universal truth'; but Eagleton has good retractions in After Theory.
May 18, 2010 at 7:20 PM
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