Quaintly insightful …

… Robert Spiller’s American Literature for old fogeys… | Progressive Culture | Scholars & Rogues. (Hat tip, G. E. Reutter.)

Those trained since the revolution that made criticism more important than the literature it is supposed to be critiquing may find it shocking at first to have a scholar/critic actually write about writers and their work as if those writers and their work actually matter and are not just products of deep psycho-social structures that reduce the literary artist to a cipher, a tool, an outlet for the historical and cultural forces of his/her time will scratch their heads and say, perhaps, “slightly benighted, but certainly some interesting stuff here.”

Spiller taught some of the people who taught me, so I guess he was an indirect influence on me.