@MWolf , you write in a way that’s comprehensible and your positions on these matters are perfectly tenable. You inhabit a world devoid of the concept of value, because you believe we are “insignificant as humans”, that our human insignificance renders the concepts of good and evil “ridiculous.” You really aren’t interested in works of the imagination. You don’t seem much interested in the human sphere. That sphere really only exists for you in terms of the hegemony of class over class. Those are good old Marxist precepts, and they have been around in the academy a long time. However, they are antithetical to any close observer of the human comedy and to any celebrator of nobility or grace or beauty in the human spirit - the quintessential preoccupations of literature, an art based in the human world, not the cosmic one. Thus, though you and I are unlikely to be intellectual soul-mates, at least we can talk.
I can’t say the same for another form of academic discourse, which employs a special language and esoteric concepts only comprehensible to the band of its true believers and retreats from any challenge into accusations of being misunderstood. George Orwell had choice words to describe that sort of obscurantism.
I speak for no one, of course, but my own tenderness is for the intelligent lay reader. Scholars were once the enablers and supporters of that reader - they taught the classics to the young who were struggling with the great questions of life and identity and world, and they did the research that created understanding of the books that most cogently dealt with these important matters. No two of them agreed on everything and critical standards were always up for debate. A lot of this debate concerned itself with value. Who was greater - Dante or Shakespeare, Donne or Shelley, Roth or Updike, Walt or Emily? It was not only a great parlour game but a way of stimulating engagement with all those wonderful writers. It made the world of thought - the world that intelligent people took away from their educations - vibrant and full. For many of us it was the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of the mysteries and beauties of the written word. Those pleasures and understandings occupied a place in working lives not otherwise notable for contemplative leisure. We of this band respected the band of scholars, even if their life was not our life.
But several decades ago something something began to change in that relation - the scholars of literature abandoned lay readers such as me, @teleia and @MITPhysicsAlum , in order to create their own cultish tribe where they talk only to themselves and hold nonsensical positions we cannot respect. There are no doubt economic and sociological reasons behind this retreat having to do with declining job markets and the search for novelty. There is also cultural decay, loss of confidence, and a simple dumbing down of the way we all live. However, this cultural malaise is not entirely new in the world. “The Wasteland” describes such a world approximately a century ago. Then, however, Eliot could find in the art of the past a way of “shoring these ruins” in his personal life and the life around him. Is that means still available to us today? Will it be in the future?