Whitewashing Sexual Harassment: Creativity, Artistic Self-Expression, And the Commodification of the Bourgeois Subject

Memorandum April 20, 1995

To: Interested Colleagues At Syracuse University and Elsewhere

From: Donald Morton, Department of English, Syracuse University

-ONE-

The English Department of Syracuse University is one of the few institutions in higher education in the United States that has a written text about its specific practices as a place of knowledge-production and pedagogical inquiry. That text, “Not a Good Idea” (December, 1988), which provides the rationale for the new English and Textual Studies curriculum, is the product of several years of debate and contestation over “the adequacy of the curricular structures within which [the Department's] teaching occurs” (1). This document—which was the outcome of both local and national debates and discussions—requires that the faculty and students of the Department of English at Syracuse University—unlike the faculty and students of “traditional” literature and humanities programs—put ANALYTICAL and THEORETICAL investigations ahead of local inquiries/isolated interpretations. As the document indicates, the new curriculum signals a “shift from privileging a particular body of culturally sanctioned texts to emphasizing the modes of critical inquiry one can bring to bear on any textual object and the political implications of such modes” (1). Furthermore, it spells out the implications of the new curriculum for pedagogical practices along two important trajectories: on the one hand, it foregrounds the practice of critique (the goal of the new ETS curriculum is to produce “a student capable of critique—of actively pressuring, resisting and questioning cultural texts," [1]), while on the other hand it insists on the recognition of the relationality and contestational character of all knowledge-production and pedagogical and curricular activities ("At Syracuse, we have tried to construct... a curriculum... that foregrounds differences among modes of critical practice, acknowledges its own provisionality, and looks to its own further transformation” [1]). The injunction imposed by this text on the Syracuse curriculum (and the Department's faculty and students) to discuss issues relationally and always in contestation is quite widely known across the country and has in fact had such a national impact that now many pedagogues such as Gerald Graff (Beyond the Culture Wars) have turned its ideas into a new pedagogical principle: TEACHING THE CONFLICTS. This principle once again stresses that teaching and understanding are never isolated acts and that the concepts that are deployed in analysis always find their full significance in relation to, and in contestation with, other concepts.

-TWO-

In the last two weeks or so, we as a Department have been witness to the emergence of a number of contesting “explanations” (based on different conceptual premises) put forward to account for the events that led to Ms. Jennifer Cotter's filing of a formal grievance with the University about sexual harassment in the Department. Contrary to a recent individualistic satirical comment (see “You Deserve Emergency Funds Now," April 13, 1995), there have not actually been (there never are) as many views put forward as there are people willing to speak/write ("One person, one 'zine"). Instead the accounts fall into conceptual groupings along certain contesting and contradictory lines of explanation—among them, those couched in the legalistic and institutional discourse of “allegation," the therapeutic discourse of “addiction," and the petit-bourgeois discourse of “conspiracy."

Along the managerial axis, for example, lie the views of University officials. Administrators have generally taken the “judicial” approach to understanding these events, as has been reflected in their use of “legalistic” discourses such as referring to Ms. Cotter's “alleged” harassment. This managerial discourse is aimed at preserving the supposed “objectivity” of academic officials in the interests, on the overt and public level, of “humaneness” and “fairness” to all parties involved but actually, on the economic level, of protecting the institution and perhaps themselves against any and all possible legal liabilities. These predictable legalistic interpretations, however, are by no means the ones that have excited the greatest interest in the press or in the community at large, for the very reason that their effect is actually to retard explanation by proposing that no genuine “explanation” can possibly be offered until all the “facts” are in. Delay and deferral are “of the essence” so that the institution can be sure to work out its defense against any imputation that it is “implicated” in the charges. In other words, in this most candidly and rawly “empirical” reading, everything must “wait” on the delivering up—through official “procedures"—of these “facts." It is the institution itself which will “gather” them by its careful “methods”: facts, in other words, are not “facts” until they become “official” through institutional pronouncement and sanction. The method of “fact-finding” is closely bound up with the treatment of such issues on a “case-by-case” basis: those who oppose sexual harassment out of political principle (not simply because they have themselves “experienced” it) and solidarity—in other words, those who understand it as part of a larger system of social, political, and economic injustice to women—are delegitimated in this “case-by-case” “fact-finding” approach. They are prevented from making a sustained ARGUMENT in which these “individual cases” can be understood in terms of the system of which they are symptomatic. In other words, the “managerial” move results in a displacement of a political reading of the event and a consideration of the institution's connections with the event itself and instead focuses attention on “fact-finding." The institution's insistence on “fact-finding” is a tested method of erasure and substitution. Institutions have learned that people, in coping with the contradictions of their daily life under capitalism, have very short memories of events and injustices that do not injure them personally and cause unhappiness in them as singular persons. The “fact-finding” therefore acts as a system of erasure and protection of the interest of institutions and their allies. This mode of interpretation suits the administration, which has invested heavily in the Creative Writing Program and will resist seeing all its capital lost. This heavy investment (and the free reign given to the Creative Writing faculty) started under Samuel Gorovitz's College of Arts and Sciences administration—a legacy that is now, like all the legacies of that administration, proving to be highly problematic.

The popularly compelling “explanations” (that actually try to “explain") put forward most immediately are those appearing in the earliest newspaper accounts: in, for instance, the Post-Standard of April 6, 1995, where side-by-side on the same page ("SU Prof Suspended” A-2) we are told, first, that the entire incident is a result of “alcoholism” (Professor Dobyns's confessional letter situating the incident in the private space of “personal failure") and, second, that it results from a conspiracy of “Marxist students who are trying to discredit the creative writing program” (remark from his interview with Gloria Wright situating the issues in the public space of political struggles). Almost immediately a representational machinery was set in motion to elaborate, reinforce, and connect these seemingly contradictory views. One day after the confession of alcoholism," Professor John Crowley rushed to the support of the first reading by elevating the question of "mere alcoholism” to the conceptual level of “addiction” and a few days later Pam Greenberg not only reinforced the second “conspiratorial” reading by proposing that "the Marxist Collective has been virtually waiting for such an issue” but connected the two readings by implying that “Marxism” itself is an addiction (a form of “extremism") from which people need to “recover” (as she represents herself as doing). It is interesting that she never indicates just what it was in Marxism that failed her. In other words, was Marxism for her a fashion that suddenly lost its up-to-dateness and had to be abandoned as “bland"? Or was it a mode of class struggle in a changing society? If the latter, what changes did she see in capitalism such that she finds Marxism can no longer adequately understand and change capitalism? Does she embrace today—in opposition to Marxism—that liberal pluralism whose collapse is so evident in the last national election (those interested in this question may see my forthcoming essay, “Literary/Cultural Studies and the Crisis of Liberal Belief")? To these or other questions we are given no answers. She simply claims that she was a Marxist (What did she do as a Marxist? And if she is no longer one, why?). The claim she makes is, however, so much in line with mainstream bourgeois thought that, as usual, it does not need proof or argument—all she has to do is say what she says in order for her anti-Marxist tirade to become the “truth” and for all commonsensical heads to nod in approval. As anyone with a casual familiarity with Oprah and Donohue will realize, such discourses of “explanation” as the ones just mentioned (which basically situate everyone as "a victim” of something and thus effectively blur the lines between “aggressor” and “victim") are not the product of that rigorous analytical and theoretical inquiry and critique to which the Department has publicly committed itself but in fact constitute its direct opposite: a blatant anti-intellectualism that is bent on placing students in this Department in a position from which, as the Radical Tangerine has consistently proposed, all intellectual life and intellectual explanations are “silly"—worthy only of humor and mockery. True life is, in Oprah-oid discourse, the life of the heart and especially a heart unconstrained by such “silly” social conventions and impositions as political correctness, Marxist totalitarianism,... All that really matters is the vitality of one's raw feelings, welling up from inside in this New Age cult of gut-explanation. While I have already briefly addressed one of these discourses elsewhere (Morton “Addictive Explanation"), it is urgently necessary to open a more extended space for such an inquiry.

-THREE-

A rigorous inquiry into the issues will have to begin with the observation that the “explanation” through the discourse of “addiction” presented by Professor Crowley (in terms of “white logic") actually confuses matters rather than clarifying them because while it states the “outcome” of a certain strand of contemporary clichés about addiction, in its naiveté it simultaneously suppresses the genealogy of that thought and refuses to put critique-al pressure on it. Crowley's “explanation” (focused on the trope of “white logic") situates the writer in what in traditional humanist discourses would be called an “ambiguous” space: as creative genius, the writer not only sees that “things are so dark” but also believes that this “seeing of the dark” (enabled by alcoholism) actually proves the writer to be “smarter," that is, able to see “the light” (McKeever “Alcohol Woes"). The problem is that the discourse of “white logic” is appropriated by Crowley in an eclectic “mixture” of therapy, literary history, and commonsensical sentimentality about the artist.

In his published interview on “addiction” and “white logic"(McKeever) as well as in his rejoinder to what he—resorting to a legalistic, institutional, whiter-still logic—calls my “scurrilous letter” (Crowley, “Morton Should Read"), Professor Crowley implies that he “recognizes” sexual harassment as a social problem and “identifies” with those who regard it as a decidable and socially unproductive behavior. However, by invoking the white logic of haze, indeterminacy, ambiguity in relation to the Dobyns case (the latest instance of “drunkenness” in a long “tradition” of such behavior among American male writers), Professor Crowley is actually invoking a practice of reading/writing which renders it impossible to ascertain the “difference” between the “aggressor” and the “victim” and thus makes the case “undecidable." Professor Crowley hints at being aware of some of the advancing contemporary theories of addiction, but in actuality these hints are a cover for what is essentially a very familiar explanation, an explanation that simply readjusts the prevailing system by minor annotations. He thus shows little if any awareness of the intellectual genealogy of “white logic” or its political implications. Readers of contemporary culture like Professor Crowley evidently believe that they can unproblematically put down side-by-side decidable “moral objections” to alcoholism, addiction, sexual harassment, ("Morton Should Read")... with an undecidable “white logic” which renders such “morality” completely irrelevant. Old-fashioned moralistic notions of “addiction” have been thoroughly problematized by today's dominant “ludic” (white) forms of cultural and social explanation: in her (at least) theoretically rigorous and consistent investigation of the issues (Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania), Avital Ronell—juxtaposing literature (Madame Bovary) against philosophy (Sein und Zeit)—shows clearly where “white logic” leaves one—she draws out its supplementarity by arguing that everyone is in fact an “addict”: “When some bodies introduce drugs as a response to the call of addiction, every body is on the line: tampering and engineering, rebuilding and demolition, self-medication and vitamins become the occupations of every singularity. Sometimes the state has a hand in it” (7). Commenting in a special issue of diacritics devoted to Ronell's work (Winter 1994), Jonathan Culler sums up Crack Wars as an understanding “of Being as addiction” (3) and James Slawney refers to "'addiction' as a unique possibility of the Dasein” (42) and of Ronell's pedagogy as teaching us to think “literature as structured by addiction” (49). If one follows the Derridean/Ronellian implications of “white logic” that lead to the conclusion that everyone is somehow an addict, then Professor Dobyns's confession of his alcoholism is nothing more than a new revelation of his own “humanity” (a humanity which in the case of the writer is “deeper” than that of others because of his supposed “creative genius"): in the indeterminate space of “whiteness," this “humanity” is as much to be celebrated as condemned. I say that such supplementary “white logic"—whether in the intellectually and theoretically rigorous form developed by Derrida, Ronell... or in the non-rigorous and common-sensical form produced by Crowley—is nothing more than a “whitewash logic” by which it is impossible any longer to decide any question whatsoever—in the particular case at hand, to decide whether we have witnessed a case of sexual harassment or not.

-FOUR-

A further level of contradiction: while readers like Crowley (and along a still more commonsensical line, Pam Greenberg) use “white logic” to erase (or minimize, in the case of Greenberg) all distinctions including that between the “aggressor” and the “victim," they are very busy using a Cold War logic ("party line") to reinstate the distinctions between “reasonable citizens” (like themselves) and “political extremists” (like Ms. Cotter, the Marxist Collective of Syracuse University, and me). It is quite telling that those who insist that a reference to a woman's “breasts” in a hostile social encounter followed by a physically aggressive act ("throwing a drink in her face") is sexual harassment are labeled “extremists” by those in the community—including those women and men who call themselves feminists—who are at the same time busy minimizing the event as if nothing short of gang rape can possibly be called “sexual harassment." To these “feminists," what happened to Ms. Cotter was, in Catharine MacKinnon's phrase, “only words." Evidently, if they have to choose (and they apparently do, even when they situate themselves in the space of the undecidable), there is something finally much worse than mere sexual harassment.

That “much worse” thing that lies behind the discourse of “conspiracy” is Marxism. Not an “authority” like Crowley on “white logic," Pam Greenberg is an “authority” on “good writing” (which, while she nowhere defines or explains it, she champions against the “bad writing” of Ms. Cotter) and “Marxism” (which is also so self-evidently unmittigatedly “bad” that, again, no explanation of its “dangers” could possibly be required). At one moment Ms. Greenberg conflates the discourses of addiction and conspiracy to suggest that Marxism is, like alcoholism, a kind of irrational behavior to be “recovered from." But it is immediately clear that Marxism is decidedly much worse for her than mere alcoholism could possibly be because it is not an “addiction” at all (would that it were, from her point of view, for then it too would deserve “compassion, forgiveness, support” ["Students Want"]) but a set of much-too-rational “principles"—an “agenda"—which, according to Ms. Greenberg, a “good” writer is absolutely forbidden to have by definition. Ms. Greenberg's own “agenda” is evident. She whitewashes the sexual harassment issue by proposing that there is an unbridgeable gulf between “writing," on the one hand, and “politics” (action), on the other, and in her eagerness to escape “political correctness” makes a plea for the absolute “autonomy” of the writer: although she admits that "[i]f Dobyns is guilty of harassment, consequences should surely result," she clearly leaves it to someone else—never the creative writer like herself—to decide on that issue (writers should be “washed” clean, not bothered with, such messy issues). Ms. Greenberg claims that the writer's business is “the complexities of human emotions," but she offers not a clue as to how those complexities are produced or how they are to be understood. They are simply “pre-given” much like, for example, the “pre-given” irresponsibility of welfare recipients, according to Newt Gingrich.

It is more than a little too late in history for any university student, but especially one in the Humanities Departments and especially one devoted to “writing"—and what is true of the student is still more true for her teachers—to pretend that the past 30 years of intellectual work on reading/writing simply have not occurred. Nowhere is there any hint in Ms. Greenberg's letter of the idea—which appears even in the pages of the AWP Chronicle (in the essay by Martin Schecter, for instance, in the September 1993 issue on “Deconstructing the Guardians of Nostalgia"—Shecter even calls on creative writers to help "'reinvent' our institutions” [20])—that there is no form of writing whatsoever that is empty of an (ideological) “agenda," even if we are talking about a purely “experimental” and “aleatory” writing where the “agenda” is to let the writer's (ideologically produced) desire “play."

Marxism does not dismiss creativity, as Ms. Greenberg implies, but unlike her, it doesn't take it for granted either (Trotsky, Literature and Revolution). Unwilling herself to entertain the possibility that there may be connections demanding exploration between “creativity," “sexual harassment," and “political correctness," Ms. Greenberg simply attacks those who insist on such explanations—those Marxists who are fomenting a conspiracy and are “out to get” the Creative Writing Program. In these moves, Ms. Greenberg both inflates tremendously the significance of the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program as a local entity (the fate of the world hinges on its survival) and trivializes the globally significant recent incident which has taken place within it. “What does this mean?" Ms. Greenberg asks of Ms. Cotter's suggestion that it is time for a “thorough rethinking of 'creativity' in Creative Writing at Syracuse University." It means that there is a danger for Creative Writing students, like any others, in not continually and rigorously critiquing and questioning their own practices as students and those of their teachers. The intellectual danger is the growing irrelevance of their work in a historically changing world (even while it may “sell").

-FIVE-

The institutional danger implicit in Greenberg's own discourses is that a “creative” provincialism (already settled in and demanding further autonomy)—by which what is taught is only the “craft of writing” (that is, the practical skills and knowledges needed simply to “get into print” and “perform” as a writer) and not any inquiry into the philosophical, conceptual, and theoretical dimensions of the practices of reading/writing—will lead the Creative Writing Program in its search for autonomy not just out of the Department of English but altogether out of the College of Arts and Sciences (a site of intellectual productivity) and, if it remains in the University, into a professional school such as Visual and Performing Arts with a different orientation. If David Whyte has his way, Creative Writing would appropriately become a part of the School of Business and Management. A productive inquiry into this possibility might begin with a critique of Whyte's The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, which candidly recommends that—since capitalism is utterly “irresistible"—the “poet” must simply come to terms with the “corporation”: “The poet," Whyte argues, “needs the practicalities of making a living to test and temper the lyricism of insight and observation. The corporation needs the poet's insight and powers of attention in order to weave the inner world of soul and creativity with the outer world of form and matter” (9). It is time, says poet Whyte, clearly impatient with tired, romantic notions of writing and eager to announce and embody the birth of the Neo-Con Poet of Late Capitalism, “to bring the insights of the poetic imagination out of the garret and into the boardrooms and factory floors of America” (10). Whyte wants to sell poets to corporations on the grounds that they have the “creative fire” (79) corporations need in today's climate of accelerating commercial and economic change. And what does “creativity” in this “creative fire” mean?

-SIX-

Although they have their “differences," as I have tried to show, in the end the main competing explanations carried in the discourses of “allegation," “addiction," and “conspiracy” converge finally on the political plane: all three readings operate by idealizing (de-materializing) and de-historicizing the Dobyns case. In the discourse of “allegation," the empirical facts which administrators are judiciously seeking are posited as truths that exist in a reality “out there” that transcends historically produced frames of interpretation. In the discourse of “addiction," the causal factor is either a very local matter of “personal disease” or, more grandly, the nature of Being-as-addiction itself—in either case highly subjective/"Subjective." An equally subjective account is the one produced through the discourse of “conspiracy," which imagines that the whole thing is just a matter of one group of people being “out to get” another group of people. A historically productive reading will begin by accounting for this incident of sexual harassment (and for the historicity of the concept of sexual harassment itself) as a result of an urgent contemporary crisis in the social formation produced by changes in today's cybercapitalist mode of production. It will show that “creativity” is not some transhistorical “essence" bestowed on special individuals called “creative geniuses” but is rather a changing ensemble of historically constructed social practices in which—in a free society—all citizens will be able to participate freely but which—in the present class society—is reserved to a particular privileged stratum of workers in the social division of labor.

The bourgeois notion of “creativity” (the operative one for the Syracuse University Creative Writing Program) and its allied theory of pedagogy is essentially one of the technologies of social engineering under late capitalism. This idea of creativity is a very thinly disguised ideology of consumption: the creative person is the stand-in for the person of desire who asserts his freedom by breaking all laws of need—that is, the laws of commonality and collectivity, since he is “different." On the surface this seems simply to be a defense of individuality, singularity, and difference. In actuality, however, the difference/individuality/singularity of the creative is the difference in taste, sensuality, and appetites... the difference of lines of flight of desire and trajectories of (what Baudrillard calls) "seduction." The creative in this narrative is the one who has less inhibitions, permits fewer obstacles to get in the way of the satisfaction of his desire: has to obtain the object of desire, regardless of the social consequences for the “other." The creative person is, according to this theory, not a person of community and collectivity, since such regard for the collective will rob him of his creative individuality and turn him into a “commoner"—just a person like others of mere “need," instead of what he aspires to be, a prince of “desire." The prince of desire is an eccentric, a singular, and irreplaceable being. The creative person, in this narrative of seduction, provides a model of subjectivity: he is the pedagogue of nomadic subjectivity, one who “models” by acquiring unique objects of desire and always remains elusive, in a never-ending series of consuming self-displacements. In this logic, all subjects who aspire to creativity then become subjects of desire. In the “high bourgeois" theory of Ronell, the alibi for proposing that endless consuming is finally “irresistible” and “unavoidable” is articulated in existential terms whereby Being itself is a mode of (inescapable) addiction. In this scenario written for today's "post-al” historical moment, addiction is the stand-in for unbridled consumption and the rebel-subject is the subject of consumption without restraints or borders. Out of this there then emerges the sublime form of post-al subjectivity: consumption as the very essence of the “Me” in its transcendence of the social. Addiction therefore becomes an alibi to underwrite the unleashing of any and all the consumer-subject's "desires." And in the ruling aesthetics of the 1990's (elaborated so clearly in Whyte's book), the poet, who represents the quintessence of Being itself, is the “genius” who leads the way towards ever greater and more ingenious forms of consumption (self-expression): his/her “right to self-expression” is an absolute “right to the pleasure of consumption"—of things, events, people, whatever. In a commodity society, the only “check” permitted on the subject's "free” consumption occurs when it becomes an obstacle to others who are also trying also to seduce and consume. Hence, the poet's "free” pursuit of pleasure (like the drive of the entrepreneur) is not bad in principle, but only when it appears in the form of overly “conspicuous consumption” (as gang rape rather than a verbal attack). The pleasure-seeking subject can live compatibly with “moral” limits, since in a changing society those limits are very “flexible” and get reset every day. What the pleasure-seeking, self-expressive bourgeois poet-subject absolutely cannot live with is any rigorous form of “political correctness”: it becomes his/her “worst enemy," because it calls for the restraint of the poet's “all-consuming” desire through reasoned principles for the sake of social solidarity for all. “Political correctness“ is the name of that process that questions not the individual desires of the desiring subject but a social order based on the principle of unleashing desire (and neglecting the question of need).

Something historically significant has occurred here: the assumptions about creativity that have acted as the un-said of the Creative Writing Program of Syracuse University have all collapsed. In light of this crisis, it is urgent to make a new beginning—a beginning which (if anything is to be learned from the past) must start not with simple notions of “self-expression” but with serious and rigorous inquiries into the conditions of possibility of creativity and the political economy of creative practices. The time would seem right for a student-organized and student-run summer forum for all those interested in pursuing theoretical questions about creativity based on the reading and critique of major theoretical texts on creativity. It might productively begin with Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution or, if that text is not available, with the recent collection of Trotsky's writings on Art and Revolution. In the meanwhile, those students who are interested can stop by my office during office hours, TTh 1:30-3:00 and pick up a xeroxed copy of a section of Literature and Revolution: this is a very straightforward, non-technical text focusing on the global picture—the relation between the writer/artist and socio-historical conditions. Another text that such a forum might want to examine critically is Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature?: there the idea of “engagement” is fully developed and the engaged writer is theorized.

Professor

Donald Morton

Department of English

Syracuse University

__________________________________________________________

APPENDIX

April 15, 1995

Fred Fiske, Editorial Page Editor The Post-Standard Herald Square

TO THE EDITOR:

It is very strange to see those who reject the points I made about Professor Crowley's discourses (not about him as a person--I do not know him nor have I any familiarity with his personal opinions--we don't have "personal" communication) attacking me as a person in your pages. Professor Crowley, who feels "maligned," regards me--as a person--as an instance of institutional bad luck (my colleagues are "unfortunate" to have me among them) and refers distastefully to those I work with as "ilk."

In pointing out the "whitewash" effect of "white logic," I was acknowledging that no one can afford today to be consciously for sexual harassment. However, the appeal to "white logic" in the name of "empowerment" is a "whitewash" because it legitimates an alibi at another level (by saying, for instance, that since alcoholism is pretty much a tradition among American male writers, one should hardly be surprised when it appears today). This secondary logic allows the aggressor to get away with a "slap on the wrist." So the function of "white logic" is not in providing an overt justification for sexual harassment; it is historically too late for that. "White logic" provides an "apology" acceptable to the dominant, so that the aggressor gets away with a reprimand, a paid vacation called suspension. Admission of wrong-doing on one level becomes an excuse on another.

It might interest your readers to know that in its Winter 1993 issue (p.12), the ALTERNATIVE ORANGE published a memorandum by Professor Crowley (who now feels "maligned" and wishes for more civilized discourses in the institutional setting) in which he referred to two of his English Department colleagues as "clowns." Having so much enjoyed personalizing discourse at an earlier point, how he can now suddenly become "outraged" and feel "maligned" is beyond ordinary logic--maybe this is part of the mysteries of "white logic."

That was my point before: the white logic that underlies Professor Crowley's comments in your pages is a whitewash logic: it removes the historicity of practices (and allows him to use double discourses whereby he can deploy a personalizing discourse when it is convenient for him and reject it when it isn't) and just represents his dominant and commonsensical views as truth. This "double logic" is the logic of Newt Gingrich and his reactionary allies. When Gingrich was a mere (back-bench) member of Congress, no attack he could launch on opponents was too unreasonable, irrational or malign, but after years of character assassination, the Gingrich of today now wants everyone to be "civil" and "reasonable"! Moral appeals have a strange way of serving the most retrograde elements of society.

Sincerely,

Professor Donald Morton Department of English Syracuse University

References

Cohan, Steve, et al. Not a Good Idea. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Department of English, 1988.

diacritics. Special Issue on the Work of Avital Ronell. 24.4 (Winter 1994).

Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education. New York: Norton, 1992.

Greenberg, Pam. “Students Want to Learn Writing, Not An Agenda."The Post-Standard, April 12, 1995: A-11.

McKeever, Jim. “Alcohol Woes Often Afflict the Creative, Says Prof." The Post-Standard, April 7, 1995: C-4.

MacKinnon, Catharine. Only Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.

Morton, Donald. “Addictive Explanation Uses 'Whitewash Logic.'" The Post-Standard, April 12, 1995: A 11.

—. “Literary/Cultural Studies and the Crisis of Liberal Belief." (forthcoming)

Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Literature? & Other Essays. Trans. S. Ungar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990.

Schecter, Martin. “Deconstructing the Guardians of Nostalgia: A Defense of the 'Young Writer.'" AWP Chronicle 26.1 (September 1993): 1, 14-20.

Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. New York: Russell and Russell, 1957.

—. Art and Revolution. New York: Pathfinder, 1992.

Whyte, David. The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1994.

Wright, Gloria. “SU Prof Suspended Following Complaint." The Post-Standard, April 6, 1995: A-1-2.

Bibliography