From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: BHA: Cornel West// "Brains soaked in brine"
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 12:26:54 -0500 (CDT)


    Are there any Ivy League Professors on this list who could argue
whether or not tenure at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, is not
a sort of brine solution?

Carrol Cox

I include Brown because one of the foremost Milton scholars in
the U.S. today, Barbara Lewalski, was first at Brown, now at
Harvard, and in the thousands of pages she has written she
has hardly ever used any scholarly or critical technique other
than slightly disguised fiat. It is so! E.g., in her book on
Pardise Lost she simply proclaims that Adam and Eve are (a)
poets (after all, they speak in blank verse), and (b) Adam is
a better poet than Eve. Evidence: Barbara Lewalski says so.

Back in 1974 she also produced an article entitled "Milton on
Women--Yet Once More," in which she argued that while of course
Milton accepted the hierarchical view of his day he wasn't really
a male supremacist because, well, you know, "The great poets are
usually right about the most important things."

Sorry, just shooting off a little venom.


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