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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Wendell Berry

Oh, how I love Wendell Berry. For your enjoyment:

The cult of progress and the new, along with the pressure to originate, innovate, publish, and attract students, has made the English department as nervously susceptible to fashion as a flock of teenagers. The academic "profession" of literature seems now to be merely tumbling from one critical or ideological fad to another, constantly "revolutionizing" itself in pathetic imitation of the "revolutionary" sciences, issuing all the while a series of passionless, jargonizing, "publishable" but hardly readable articles and books, in which a pretentious obscurity and dullness masquerade as profundity.

2 comments:

joel said...

I love him too. I can't believe that your husband had never heard of him before Matthew and I forced a couple of WB books on him.

His verse is so straight-forward but not flat. It makes me wish that I could sing.

E.g.:
"And in the corrective gaze
of men now dead I learned
to flesh my will in power
great enough to kill me
should I let it turn."

RW said...

oh jenny.
over here.