DESPERATELY SEEKING TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS. Daniel at The Valve and Richard at Unlocked Wordhoard react to a lengthy review in Policy Review by Peter Berkowitz of Theory's Empire, which is not currently on the stack of books to review. I'll focus on a few sentences toward the beginning of the review.

Literature takes time, but these days women as well as men work long hours, and for many, the satisfaction they derive from their jobs provides an essential component of happiness. Literature requires leisure, but more and more adults, to say nothing of children, live frenetically paced, ruthlessly scheduled lives and learn to survive by multitasking — on the job, at home, out on the town, on the road. Literature needs sustained concentration, but TV and film have conditioned us to take our entertainment in one helping: Even in the movie theater, which shuts out distraction, we grow antsy if the tale requires more than two hours to move from beginning to middle to end. Literature calls for calm, reflection, and the ability to be alone with oneself, but the telecommunications revolution, proceeding from telegraph and telephone through radio and film to TV, cassette tapes, video, CDs, DVDs, email, Internet, cell phones, instant messaging, and podcasting, enables us to surround ourselves with an endless flow of entertaining stimulation that serves as a buffer between us and our thoughts.

Arguably, so does installing a decoder in a model locomotive, or playing interactive Diplomacy. (Then, there's the tradeoff. The state of calm and reflection is arbitrarily close to the state of sleepiness. I'm going to antagonize some people and recommend Jane Austen to make the transition.)

But there's something else afoot.

In these circumstances, it would be advantageous if our universities provided a haven from the forces so inimical to the love of literature. To do this, they need only live up to their official mission, which includes safeguarding knowledge of the cultural and intellectual treasures of the past, transmitting an appreciation of them to today’s students, and, at the same time, equipping students to challenge authoritative interpretations and think for themselves. Unfortunately, the teaching of literature at our universities today routinely makes matters worse, burying knowledge of the classics, deadening students’ literary sensibilities, and demanding students’ assent to a partisan, dogmatic, and incoherent system of beliefs.

Sometimes, it's worse than that. The economics major includes a capstone paper requirement. I strongly suspect that for many of our seniors, that capstone paper is the ONLY writing they have done. I'll leave it to others to argue over whether modern methods of criticism have crowded out careful thinking and writing.