WELCOME VISITORS. Thursday turned into a rain day, and Friday into an end-of-summer-research Hiawatha excursion, although the hits kept on coming.

Laura at 11-D wrote a post on public and private virtue that linked here; that post mentioned The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. The expansion on that subject attracted an Instalanche from designated poster Megan; some of those readers headed over here. The comments at 11-D provide several brief reviews of Unexpected Legacy for your perusal; I have moved that book up in the stack of 50 and hope to post a review before classes begin.

Scott at The Valve linked here to lead readers to a criticism of criticism on Opinion Journal. Perhaps my guests can help me make sense of this passage.

Why should that suppress internal criticism of theoretical within or across academic disciplines? Those who would so appropriate these arguments would have found grounds for criticism elsewhere because they actively seek them out. As I tell my students: If you go fishing in a novel you can almost always find the claims that you need to support the argument you were determined to make. The difference between a fisher and a scholar is that a scholar takes seriously what the novel takes seriously and analyses in accordance with its logic.

To my limited knowledge, that's thinking about the plot and the symbolism and the intent of the author, and it might add to the enjoyment of a novel or a poem. That, however, doesn't really bring the Journal columnist up short: what purpose does the notion of a sexed equation or a privileged velocity serve, in a close reading of a hypothesis about the way light propagates, and its implications for the rest, inertial, and relativistic masses of moving bodies? If anything, the misuse of techniques of reading fiction to obtain some sort of insight into the symbolism of theoretical or empirical investigation of physical phenomena and human action leads precisely to the pass Mr Kaufman reaches.

How has it continued to thrive in a political environs vastly different from the one in which it first evolved? From the perspective of those who would think Theory a bulwark against political conservativism, how are we to account to the vast rightward drift of the country when many of them would’ve taken their required English and/or Composition courses with instructors radicalized during the culture wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s?

I pose the Carrie explanation. They're all going to laugh at you. Experimental scientists have called out the junk science hidden in much application of critical techniques to their work much more effectively than I ever could. There's also a simple corrective for the introduction of primitive Marxian notions such as "exploitation" and "alienation" and "immiserisation." One simply has to pick up Marx's Economic Predictions and keep score of how many testable implications of Capital and other works have been falsified.