Date: Fri, 13 Mar 1998 09:07:45 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: [H-BLOOM] Western Canon University (www.westerncanon.com) The Online  Renaissance


Well, George, so you've hopped aboard the jollyroger!  I never would have
guessed you were a conservative revolutionary -- see their mission statement:
"HOW THE WWW IS ENABLING THE CONSERVATIVE LITERARY REVOLUTION"  in which one can
read such gem-like statements as:
	"Our primary mission as the new guards of literature is not to review the
inferior products being     produced by liberal writers like Douglas Coupland,
Russel Banks, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates-- that's the job of THE NEW
YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. [Bet the New York Times missed that!]  We're here to
write Great Books, but this does not expempt us from our duty to comment upon
the liberal forces that prevent our Great Literature from being published."

Or:

 "The thing is, though, Joyce, Russel, Toni, and Doug are not writers, in the
same way Bill Clinton is
not a leader. What you have to realize is that they came of age in an era where
words do not mean things-- all that is of consequence is one's gender, race,
liberal brown-nosing skills, and superficial sound-bite appeal. In other words,
all is politics. They came of age in an era where the critic is held in higher
esteem than the creator, and the collectivist sentiments of the liberal
bureaucracy are deemd superior to the truth. Thus Russel was hired as the "safe"
token white male at Princeton, while Douglas Coupland was hired because of the
title he ripped off of a Billy Idol Album--"GENERATION-X," and to round things
out, Joyce Carol Oates was hired to represent the feminazi contigent, while Toni
was granted the obligatory multi-cultural-Nobel-Prize
winner-make-liberal-university-presidents-look&feel-good postion."

	The guys who put up these web sites sound like they are stuck in a bad episode
of TV's blessedly defunct "Fantasy Island."  They announce the upsurge of
"Conservative Literature."  Does anyone have any idea what 'conservative poetry'
is?

Ciao,
Reg


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