Character and continuity …

… One Unsparing Eye | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

David Ellis’s marvelously engaging memoir relates that the career of a Leavisite could be lonely, especially with the rise of “theory” in the 1970s. Studying with Leavis just before his retirement, Ellis discovered that the opposition no longer consisted of philologists (Anglo-Saxon remained part of Oxford’s English degree to keep it from going “soft”), biographers tone-deaf to their subjects, or clever poem-crackers for whom analysis seemed an end in itself. The new theorists were initially structuralists (“What is the grammar of the language?”), then deconstructionists (“How can the text’s apparent meaning be flipped and shown to be something quite different?”), and, finally, under the aegis of cultural studies, ideologists (“Where does the text reveal the oppression based on gender, race, class, or sexual preference that’s made our history a nightmare from which we still haven’t awoken?”).

Talk about tracing decline.