Or, bits of loose mental fluff that were never enough to make a whole post by themselves:
The thing about obsolete tools for critical argument is that nobody ever bothers to box them up and put them away after acquiring a shiny new set. Instead, they’re left lying around out in public where untrained amateurs can pick them up and use them for god-knows-what.
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I’m not sure whether the Cult of the Western Canon is the result of the tendency of (mostly male) literary critics to turn everything into a dick-measuring contest an emergent property of the patriarchal nature of western institutions of higher learning, or the natural consequence of there only being room in a two-semester survey course for so many books.
(It’s always a bit unsettling to open a new edition of a familiar anthology textbook, and see which authors have been thrown out of the lifeboat…
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