Reader Jake Adam York writes in response to “Support our Truths!”:

Thanks, Dr. York, for reading and for writing in. I can’t speak for E. Hayot, but here’s my take on the issues you raise.

1) I think I know what you mean by a certain return to the aesthetic over the last decade or so. This would range from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (2001) to the kind of thing I suspect is contained in the Rand report (but I haven’t read and so don’t know). I’m not sure if anyone has tried to connect the last decade’s politically and intellectually diverse work on the aesthetic, but even a few gross generalizations would get us started. If nothing else, the sense of “return” that always seems to announce such studies would at least tell us what revolution has supposedly happened that we now need to look back before it. Speaking anecdotally and without examples (just bloggin’), “returns’ to the aesthetic seem to be as provincial in their examples as they are universal in their aspirations. At our historical moment, having a complex attitude toward beauty seems to me to be something like a moral obligation. This doesn’t mean killing it, much less denying it ever existed.

Specifically, I wondered, in writing last week’s blog, what exactly “conservatives” imagine literature professors should be teaching. I imagine a classroom a bit like the old “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Chris Farley plays a young Chris Farley-like guy with a cable access show who has somehow gotten Martin Scorsese on for an interview. The entire interview consists of Farley recalling classic bits from Scorsese movies (“You remember that time, in Taxi Driver, when DeNiro was looking in the mirror, and he was like, ‘Are you talking to me?’” etc.). Scorsese says he remembers. After a pause, Farley adds, “That was awesome.”

For a more high-brow formulation of the same thing, see Friedrich Schlegel: “If some mystical art lovers who think of every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then ‘wow’ would be the best criticism of the greatest work of art. To be sure, there are critiques which say nothing more, but only take much longer to say it.”

2) I have less to say about this one except to say that I’m sure you are right and that I think that the tendency to speak in generalities about “academia,” or even “the Humanities,” is part of the problem. Everything that happens at Harvard is taken as symptomatic (in various ways) of national trends, while someone like Ward Churchill can be promoted as a symbol of liberal academia by conservative critics. This tendency to generalize reflects, on the one hand, many academics' desire for a sense of a broader community and, on the other, the fact that mainstream representations of academia are so few and far between that even when there’s good will the examples necessarily take on the force of general truths. Those are my first thoughts anyway.