Lee’s Reviews > The Groves of Academe > Status Update

Your department’s concerned with formal questions exclusively: Woolf’s method, Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, to detach from him a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce - a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content.