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Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities
In the span of less than a generation, university humanities departments have experienced an almost unbelievable reversal of attitudes, now attacking and undermining what had previously been considered best and most worthy in the Western tradition. John M. Ellis here scrutinizes the new regime in humanistic studies. He offers a careful, intelligent analysis that exposes the weaknesses of notions that are fashionable in humanities today. In a clear voice, with forceful logic, he speaks out against the orthodoxy that has installed race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of college humanities curricula.
Ellis begins by showing that political correctness is a recurring impulse of Western society and one that has a discouraging history. He reveals the contradictions and misconceptions that surround the new orthodoxy and demonstrates how it is most deficient just where it imagines itself to be superior. Ellis contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far from being skeptical of Western values, represents a ruthless and unskeptical Western extremism; far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, presents politics that are crude and unreal; far from being sophisticated in matters of "theory," is largely ignorant of the range and history of critical theory; far from valuing diversity, is unable to respond to the great sweep of literature. In a concluding chapter, Ellis surveys the damage that has been done to higher education and examines the prospects for change.
Ellis begins by showing that political correctness is a recurring impulse of Western society and one that has a discouraging history. He reveals the contradictions and misconceptions that surround the new orthodoxy and demonstrates how it is most deficient just where it imagines itself to be superior. Ellis contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far from being skeptical of Western values, represents a ruthless and unskeptical Western extremism; far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, presents politics that are crude and unreal; far from being sophisticated in matters of "theory," is largely ignorant of the range and history of critical theory; far from valuing diversity, is unable to respond to the great sweep of literature. In a concluding chapter, Ellis surveys the damage that has been done to higher education and examines the prospects for change.
262 pages, Paperback
First published July 21, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 30, 2013
A beautifully written, exceedingly well argued lament. In particular, Ellis laments the way we have lost faith in literature as a means to connect with the past, and with one another. He is not saying it's wrong to read a book from a feminist perspective or a Marxist perspective or a Post-colonial perspective, or whatever other perspective you may want to grab ahold of, when you read and experience great literature. But he IS saying that insisting on a narrowness of vision, or demanding that a work (what deconstructionists would call "the text") conform to a given set of ahistorical standards, is terribly wrong, and moreover it's disconnecting us from the best traditions of the past. He argues that the modern academic approach to literature is at its heart illogical, unlearned, and above all antithetical to the reasons we read literature to begin with. He decouples his arguments neatly from the edgy concern that a lot of us get, whenever someone criticizes feminist or other nontraditional approaches to literature--that criticizing these approaches is a manifestation of racism/misogyny/cultural imperialism. He allows the reader to get past the fear of being any of these things, and to look at the Humanities and how they are currently taught with fresh eyes.
I felt enlightened by this book. I felt enlightened in particular by the historical threads Ellis weaves together to argue that contemporary literary criticism, with its self-reflective, deeply critical take on works of literature, is merely the latest manifestation of a culture of self-criticism that the West has embraced, and passed through, from Tacitus to Rousseau to Marx to Derrida.
I was persuaded. This is a nuanced argument, unlike other books (The Closing of the American Mind comes to mind) that seem fueled primarily by reactionary backlash.
I felt enlightened by this book. I felt enlightened in particular by the historical threads Ellis weaves together to argue that contemporary literary criticism, with its self-reflective, deeply critical take on works of literature, is merely the latest manifestation of a culture of self-criticism that the West has embraced, and passed through, from Tacitus to Rousseau to Marx to Derrida.
I was persuaded. This is a nuanced argument, unlike other books (The Closing of the American Mind comes to mind) that seem fueled primarily by reactionary backlash.
March 18, 2026
Did you get the license of the truck that ran over you?
It's an old-time jest when somebody is blindsided, knocked flat, dazed and confused. That was my reaction entering a graduate school of education after 40 years in business. Foucault who?
It is a whole raft of PC truck and amazing license with the facts and the methodology of research, an immense gulf between theories of how people are and one's real-life experience. Ellis provides the service of describing, cataloging, and providing a history and analysis of the race-gender-class theories driving political correctness. My goal is to extract Cliff notes of the major concepts to share here and for my own reference.
The most fundamental dichotomy is between humanity and society. People and the institutions they have built. PC sides with Rousseau in believing that people in a state of nature are fundamentally good but that society has corrupted them. If "man is born free, yet everywhere in chains," somebody is to blame. Political correctness, like Marxism which preceded it, is a blame game. It theorizes that a conspiracy based on race (white), gender (male), sexual persuasion (straight) and class (the capitalists) to exploit, demean, and abuse everybody else. Mankind will only be free when the millennium arrives and these "hegemonists" and the societies they have built are swept away to be replaced by new, shining, ideal institutions.
Rousseau's view inspired the French and Russian revolutions. Hobbes, Locke and the other philosophers who inspired ours took the opposite view. They hold that man is inherently selfish, and that we need the social contract and governments to hold our worse nature in check.
Society is not and never will be perfect. Nonetheless, looking around one can see that today's European or American enjoys more opportunity, wealth, health and other good things of life than any of his ancestors or any other societies on earth. It isn't perfection, but it is also not to be lightly discarded, nor certainly to be despised for its putative failings.
Ellis blames careerism for the curious fact that literary critics now tend to propound theories in the realms of philosophy, psychology, political science and sociology, and at the same time appear to have become indifferent to the aesthetics of literature itself. Critics find little new to be said about world's body of great literature, which has been analyzed ad nauseam. On the other hand there are exciting things happening elsewhere in academia. An academic career has to be based on fresh ideas, and the only place to find them is outside the field. Ellis enumerates borrowings from physics, anthropology and elsewhere, the authors of which often disown the half-baked theories literary critics have spun from their research.
Careerism alone does not fully explain political correctness. There is the traditional distain of the academic for the common man, and the traditional ivory-tower intellectual's inclination towards radicalism. The softer side of academia is also prone to embrace intellectual fads. Communism, existentialism, Oriental religions, Leary's dope philosophy and Scientology held sway when I was at Cal in the `60s. Some stuff Ellis talks about, such as critical race studies, feminism and queer theory, are more recent.
Ordinary intuition tells you that there are logical flaws in the politically correct bilge coming out of the academy. Ellis' service is to apply a nomenclature to their pretentious nonsense.
The Genetic fallacy is the notion that one's genetic makeup affects external reality, as in, "It's a black thing... you wouldn't understand." It drives the notion that only women can be professors of Women's Studies, blacks of Black Studies, etc. Scholarship does not rely on its own internal consistency and being independently verifiable and reproducible -- Francis Bacon's ideas formalized by John Locke during the Enlightenment -- but on the genetic makeup of the researcher.
The Intentionality fallacy claims that a literary text does not speak for itself. Instead, it is the author's intent that matters. Needless to say this is taken as a license to practice retroactive psychoanalysis and discover -- O!, shock! -- that straight white male authors had none but despicable intentions and misogynistic views of women and gloated in their superiority over other races.
The Affective fallacy holds that what matters is not the text itself but the reader's effect upon reading the text. Since this will surely vary from reader to reader, the text itself therefore lacks any intrinsic qualities apart from the very words themselves. It is meaningless to look for a common interpretation of the text. Presumably by this reading even allegory, metaphor and imagery are ruled out; certainly some readers will be ignorant of the referents.
One of Ellis' recurrent themes is that the race-gender-class theorists are thoroughly inconsistent. On the one hand they agree with the deconstructionists that any text, any reality, can be only be studied as a collection of minute parts, the relationships among which disappear in the deconstruction. No relationships, no constructed meaning. Or conversely, all meaning is constructed, chacun à son goût, at the whim of the author. In any case there is no permanent, transcendent meaning to anything. Or morality or anything else. But yet, yet the race-gender-class advocates theorizes there are some eternal truths, among them the malevolent intent of certain types of people towards other types.
Ellis returns again and again to the Enlightenment. What is unique about Europeans is not that they practiced slavery - everybody did that and many still do. but that western societies were the only ones to abandon the practice, and they did it on moral grounds, against their own economic interests. Societies throughout history have attempted to dominate one another. Once again, it was Europeans and Americans, following Enlightenment philosophy, who abandoned their attempts to build empire. In fact, the value of equality that underlies race-gender-class theory is a direct product of the Enlightenment. The difference is only a matter of degree. Theory paints issues in black and white. They tolerate no gradual transitions or residual inequalities. Theory would sweep away today's society, despite the considerable advances over where it was, and its considerably more equitable treatment of racial, class and gender minorities than other societies, in the attempt to replace it with a radically new and improved society. The theorists have learned nothing from the French revolution, and are both tragic and comic in their attempts to explain away the failures of Marxism and Communism.
Employing a Hegelian term of which the Marxists are fond, Ellis says that the PC crowd preaches historically but judge ahistorically. They judge American actions at the 1789 Constitutional Convention in the light of modern PC standards. Yet they give the savagery of genital mutilation, slavery and intertribal genocide in today's third world a pass.
Theorists claim that the "truths" of the literature of dead white males are invalid. Ellis question is, "what truths?" He contends that literature does not attempt to express eternal verities so much as eternal questions. In doing so it is almost always regarded with suspicion by the powers that be. Literature such as Madame. Bovary, Candide, Gulliver's Travels, On the Road, Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn and in fact almost any great work that comes to mind, tends to challenges orthodoxies more than establish them.
Tenaciously held theory supports action, not analysis. Action is antithetical to the purposes of the University: research and debate in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. Activism implies dedication to a cause, hence an outcome, and hence rejection of research that doesn't support the activists' theses. Activists shout down their foes, subjecting them to withering ad hominem attacks rather than logically rebutting their points. Larry Summers treatment by the women of Harvard is a classic example.
Ellis concludes with the sad prognosis that the corruption is now so deeply engrained in the Universities, with whole departments dedicated to race-class-gender issues, that it will be around for a long time. I propose it is the AIDS of the meme community; it has compromised its hosts' defenses (American universities) to the point that they may never shake it. I shudder to imagine the consequences to the country when the United States loses its leading position within the global scholarly community.
It's an old-time jest when somebody is blindsided, knocked flat, dazed and confused. That was my reaction entering a graduate school of education after 40 years in business. Foucault who?
It is a whole raft of PC truck and amazing license with the facts and the methodology of research, an immense gulf between theories of how people are and one's real-life experience. Ellis provides the service of describing, cataloging, and providing a history and analysis of the race-gender-class theories driving political correctness. My goal is to extract Cliff notes of the major concepts to share here and for my own reference.
The most fundamental dichotomy is between humanity and society. People and the institutions they have built. PC sides with Rousseau in believing that people in a state of nature are fundamentally good but that society has corrupted them. If "man is born free, yet everywhere in chains," somebody is to blame. Political correctness, like Marxism which preceded it, is a blame game. It theorizes that a conspiracy based on race (white), gender (male), sexual persuasion (straight) and class (the capitalists) to exploit, demean, and abuse everybody else. Mankind will only be free when the millennium arrives and these "hegemonists" and the societies they have built are swept away to be replaced by new, shining, ideal institutions.
Rousseau's view inspired the French and Russian revolutions. Hobbes, Locke and the other philosophers who inspired ours took the opposite view. They hold that man is inherently selfish, and that we need the social contract and governments to hold our worse nature in check.
Society is not and never will be perfect. Nonetheless, looking around one can see that today's European or American enjoys more opportunity, wealth, health and other good things of life than any of his ancestors or any other societies on earth. It isn't perfection, but it is also not to be lightly discarded, nor certainly to be despised for its putative failings.
Ellis blames careerism for the curious fact that literary critics now tend to propound theories in the realms of philosophy, psychology, political science and sociology, and at the same time appear to have become indifferent to the aesthetics of literature itself. Critics find little new to be said about world's body of great literature, which has been analyzed ad nauseam. On the other hand there are exciting things happening elsewhere in academia. An academic career has to be based on fresh ideas, and the only place to find them is outside the field. Ellis enumerates borrowings from physics, anthropology and elsewhere, the authors of which often disown the half-baked theories literary critics have spun from their research.
Careerism alone does not fully explain political correctness. There is the traditional distain of the academic for the common man, and the traditional ivory-tower intellectual's inclination towards radicalism. The softer side of academia is also prone to embrace intellectual fads. Communism, existentialism, Oriental religions, Leary's dope philosophy and Scientology held sway when I was at Cal in the `60s. Some stuff Ellis talks about, such as critical race studies, feminism and queer theory, are more recent.
Ordinary intuition tells you that there are logical flaws in the politically correct bilge coming out of the academy. Ellis' service is to apply a nomenclature to their pretentious nonsense.
The Genetic fallacy is the notion that one's genetic makeup affects external reality, as in, "It's a black thing... you wouldn't understand." It drives the notion that only women can be professors of Women's Studies, blacks of Black Studies, etc. Scholarship does not rely on its own internal consistency and being independently verifiable and reproducible -- Francis Bacon's ideas formalized by John Locke during the Enlightenment -- but on the genetic makeup of the researcher.
The Intentionality fallacy claims that a literary text does not speak for itself. Instead, it is the author's intent that matters. Needless to say this is taken as a license to practice retroactive psychoanalysis and discover -- O!, shock! -- that straight white male authors had none but despicable intentions and misogynistic views of women and gloated in their superiority over other races.
The Affective fallacy holds that what matters is not the text itself but the reader's effect upon reading the text. Since this will surely vary from reader to reader, the text itself therefore lacks any intrinsic qualities apart from the very words themselves. It is meaningless to look for a common interpretation of the text. Presumably by this reading even allegory, metaphor and imagery are ruled out; certainly some readers will be ignorant of the referents.
One of Ellis' recurrent themes is that the race-gender-class theorists are thoroughly inconsistent. On the one hand they agree with the deconstructionists that any text, any reality, can be only be studied as a collection of minute parts, the relationships among which disappear in the deconstruction. No relationships, no constructed meaning. Or conversely, all meaning is constructed, chacun à son goût, at the whim of the author. In any case there is no permanent, transcendent meaning to anything. Or morality or anything else. But yet, yet the race-gender-class advocates theorizes there are some eternal truths, among them the malevolent intent of certain types of people towards other types.
Ellis returns again and again to the Enlightenment. What is unique about Europeans is not that they practiced slavery - everybody did that and many still do. but that western societies were the only ones to abandon the practice, and they did it on moral grounds, against their own economic interests. Societies throughout history have attempted to dominate one another. Once again, it was Europeans and Americans, following Enlightenment philosophy, who abandoned their attempts to build empire. In fact, the value of equality that underlies race-gender-class theory is a direct product of the Enlightenment. The difference is only a matter of degree. Theory paints issues in black and white. They tolerate no gradual transitions or residual inequalities. Theory would sweep away today's society, despite the considerable advances over where it was, and its considerably more equitable treatment of racial, class and gender minorities than other societies, in the attempt to replace it with a radically new and improved society. The theorists have learned nothing from the French revolution, and are both tragic and comic in their attempts to explain away the failures of Marxism and Communism.
Employing a Hegelian term of which the Marxists are fond, Ellis says that the PC crowd preaches historically but judge ahistorically. They judge American actions at the 1789 Constitutional Convention in the light of modern PC standards. Yet they give the savagery of genital mutilation, slavery and intertribal genocide in today's third world a pass.
Theorists claim that the "truths" of the literature of dead white males are invalid. Ellis question is, "what truths?" He contends that literature does not attempt to express eternal verities so much as eternal questions. In doing so it is almost always regarded with suspicion by the powers that be. Literature such as Madame. Bovary, Candide, Gulliver's Travels, On the Road, Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn and in fact almost any great work that comes to mind, tends to challenges orthodoxies more than establish them.
Tenaciously held theory supports action, not analysis. Action is antithetical to the purposes of the University: research and debate in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom. Activism implies dedication to a cause, hence an outcome, and hence rejection of research that doesn't support the activists' theses. Activists shout down their foes, subjecting them to withering ad hominem attacks rather than logically rebutting their points. Larry Summers treatment by the women of Harvard is a classic example.
Ellis concludes with the sad prognosis that the corruption is now so deeply engrained in the Universities, with whole departments dedicated to race-class-gender issues, that it will be around for a long time. I propose it is the AIDS of the meme community; it has compromised its hosts' defenses (American universities) to the point that they may never shake it. I shudder to imagine the consequences to the country when the United States loses its leading position within the global scholarly community.
July 12, 2019
If you're triggered by the notion that might might make right this is surely for you. A thoroughly quintessentially midwit take on neo-maxist post-modernism. Their failing is they're actually, to great surprise, insufficiently humanist nor substantively feminist and they DESTROYED the intellectual melting pot of American universities which we can only hope be restored to previous glory by mandatory hate-in sessions on tropical cannibals and desert genital mutilators (surely to attract screeches of anti-Semitism in the contemporary climate so be sure to be explicit you mean Muslims). Although you get a nice long shit on feminist theory with plenty of rabid snorts directed at Joseph Stalin and associates one's left feeling a lot herein is really just ad hominid... really "teenage sophists"??? Come on. If you're really going to be drilling it into their heads that the Western canon isn't boring you need advances in pedagogy beyond mere attempts at depoliticizing methods of inquiry.
February 28, 2015
Hell with it - five stars - great book. Lays waste to theorists from F. Jameson to A. Dworkin and everyone in between. The people that one star this probably think Beloved is some great literature and that Twitter should be a grad course. There is nobody left in higher ed with this level of erudition and argumentative skill, but the humanities have been extinguished at any rate. The last place to find diverse thought or a deep base of texts is at a university; sadly everything Ellis forecasts here came to pass both in higher education and popular culture. Worth reading but will probably depress you more than anything. Recommended.
May 31, 2011
Enjoyable reading, if not completely frustrating. The exchange of critical thinking for mere indoctrination in our schools, higher education and otherwise, is not a cause for despair, however, it is a call to action. This book should awaken a sense of indignation for anyone interested in reforming culture through truth, beauty and goodness.
October 6, 2020
An articulate analysis of the disintegration of American higher education by critical race, gender, class theorists. It provides an intellectual history of the movement and a vocabulary and arguments for those willing to push back against its insidious infection of American culture.
February 28, 2010
Worth reading to everyone who cares recognizes the need for intellectual honesty.
July 2, 2019
Very compelling arguments put forward in this book from a couple of decades ago. I'd love to read an update of where he thinks we stand today if the author is still around.
March 5, 2025
This book was quite frustrating. At first, I had some hope that it would be intellectually stimulating, rational if not unerring, but the chapter on feminist theory firmly eliminated that foolish notion. Ellis here goes beyond critiquing the current state of the academy, which I agree is over-politicized and betraying its original purpose. He proposes that the existence of patriarchy – that is, of the history of the oppression of women by men, of discrimination via sexism – is a conspiracy theory made up by harping feminists. He has a lot of claims like that scattered throughout this book. It’s disappointing, because he makes some valid points about the existence of objective truth, about the genuine literary value of the classics, and about the fact research should by motivated by a desire for truth regardless of the social and political implications of the researcher’s findings. Originally, when envisioning the review I would write after finishing this book, I planned on saying something along the lines of, “There was just as much I disagreed on in this book as things I agreed on,” but as I went on, the scales tipped decidedly, and now I can only say, there were some paragraphs in this book I agreed with, but far more I questioned, rejected, or outright laughed at. I suppose this is good practice – exposing myself to disparate viewpoints and reminding myself to always question my beliefs instead of remaining insulated. I would not recommend this to anyone considering reading it, though. Some of Ellis’ legitimate points are completely discredited by the outlandish conclusions he comes to, and though he criticizes followers of the “race-gender-class orthodoxy” (his term) for sneering and using dismissive insults instead of confronting the ideas of those who dissent, he does something similar, with his own offensive comments – though he also does do much criticizing of their ideology. In the chapter on “gender” – on feminist theorists – he almost sticks entirely to employing Straw Man Arguments, however…Very, very frustrating, as I said.
May 22, 2019
Incredibly prescient
October 3, 2022
Thick analysis as to how the classics lost their place in education as a result of the social agenda and postmodernism.
February 1, 2008
Sometimes you have to step back and clear your head-that's what this book did for me. It explained very well how anti-Western thought periodically arises within western culture. In fact, a bad attitude or super critical hatred toward western civilization happens every few centuries, so regularly that it could be seen as a distiguishing feature of western culture itself. Also a good description of literary criticism theories and how they've taken over the intellectual discourse in universities for the last few decades. If you want to understand the hypocrsiy of so many academics who hate western civilization and give the benefit of the doubt to some pretty questionable cultures, then you should read this.
October 8, 2011
Mostly persuasive, this book is still relevant even though it was written over 15 years ago. The poor Humanities.... Sometimes my cheeks grow soaking wet when I think of what has been done to Romeo and Juliet.
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November 21, 2009None
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews