Toward a Literary Anthropology

We may have noticed that the old books are gone

No one reads the old books anymore

The authors of the old books are dead

The old crotchety crotch-stuffers-- the old white men-

The Muppet critics snoring in the balcony of literature

Have become extinct

And so the task of the literary anthropologist

Is to discover what killed formalism

Where have the new critics gone?

Were the reader response critics killed off

By some natural catastrophe

Or were they hunted to extinction by over-zealous feminists?

My own theory is that the old critics died out

Because they failed to impress upon a new generation the necessity

That their torch of knowledge be carried further

The project of the old school codified and crystallized

The old critics simply died guarding their elaborate castle in the sand

This failure began in the 1970s when the old school

Refused to engage emerging feminism in a critical dialog

A dialog that some feared would legitimize feminism

They simply ignored the feminists and continued in the old vein

Never recognizing feminism as the vital force

In the criticism of the age

Then they promptly died out leaving no heirs to their throne

And feminism inherited the lordship of the lit. crit. mountain

Because the feminists were breaking new ground

They were the living coral rising from the skeleton of the old

Popping off new intellectual polyps

Filling the brine with the spermatozoa of their knowledge

And now have we come to the place

Where feminism itself has begun to calcify?

Is feminism repeating the mistake of the old dominant hegemony?

Is it trying to guard its finished castle in the sand

By resisting a critical dialog with emerging thought?

Perhaps criticism only thrives as it is rebuilt

The old dilapidated structures of thought

Need to be tested continually and torn down if necessary