A Practical Policy

Julia Stein on Dickens’ Bleak House:

What’s great about Dickens’ he makes judgments: against lawyers corruption, against the corrupt Court of Chancery, against the brutalization of the poor and the homeless. Well, right now the United States is also a Bleak House dominated by corruption: the corruption of the Iraq War totals billions. What is missing in a lot contemporary fiction is Dickens’ moral judgments.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel which won a recent Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but the well-written novel has a father and son trying to survive in post-apocalypse America. In many ways I thought the Road was metaphorically saying this country is now so bad off all a decent person can do is suffer it–I find that a huge cop out. Give me Dickens any day of the week instead.

Or Lib Lit.

They suspected everyone but themselves. They were the good people, respected by the respectable. They were the responsible class. They were the unwitting and witting minions of the monied class, the status quo. Some doubted themselves, but they believed their actions to be good, and good enough. If they believed anything else they could in no way facilitate the great crimes as very much as they did, these people.

More often than not they were people with more money than others. Some were the many faceless intellectuals who had been well trained and quite thoroughly mentally cleansed. Some were the acolytes of frenzied demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity busy duping and poking out the eyes of part of the populace. These people were often cheery, or dutiful, while others went numb or played dumb or otherwise could not care less.

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The Amis-Eagleton controversy
The British literary elite and the “war on terror”

By Ann Talbot 

In giving Eagleton a kicking, the British literary elite are sending a message to younger and less well-established academics, to aspiring writers and to students that Marxism is not acceptable and that they had better adopt the same degenerate stance as Amis if they expect to be published, get promoted or be awarded any grade above a gamma minus.

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