The Associate Professor of English's Full Response
He concludes with rather faux, yet ironically apt, elegy,
And thus will the time be killed softly, with no cost to anything but the truth. (themondegreen)
The associate professor of English is like a little, jargonistic Jeff Dunham,
Perhaps the reason I do not call Morrison a “nasty little deceiver”—I mean, apart from the fact that I don’t actually believe any such thing—is that, as a matter of principle, I do not call names in lieu of advancing arguments. The assistant literary editor of America might have put in the effort to read a little more of my writing on this Commonplace Blog to discover that hard kernel of fact, but so much easier to substitute preconceptions for knowledge.
I have warned that a demand for respect toward racial and ethnic “difference”—the very sort of attitude displayed by our assistant literary editor, who abuses me for wearing “Oblivious White Dude Bifocals”—will reduce all arguments to ad hominem attacks (the very sort she engages in), but the warning cannot be heeded if it is not read. However, what possible reason could there be to read it?
It is all right to advance arguments [I was about to use “scare quotes” around the word ‘argument,’ but that would be such a formidable disservice to the esteemed word that I could not in good conscience use even an ironic version of it to describe the associate professor of Enlish’s work] words (eg, Morrison’s characters existed in a fictive world that pre-dates the Holocaust; a search of the MLA bibliography turns up a huge amount of Beloved scholarship) to say that Morrison is
- not sufficiently cowed by the Holocaust tradition of writing that is (a priori) the only tradition that is supposed to summon inside the reader a maximum amount of emotion; and
- Beloved is overrated
but petty name-calling, well, that’s beneath him. Just as Dunham’s puppet is a comedic device, but he himself is above hate speech. Notice that, then, that the associate professor of English tries to call out the assistant literary editor’s place of work and level of gumption for critiquing his un-critiquable position position, which amounts to falling back on the tired rhetoric of the Holocaust and a staunch resistance to perceived political correctness and “identity politics.” (I respect the phrase ‘identity politics’ more than your deployment of arguments words, associate professor of English).
