Today, Nostalgia Is Almost As Unacceptable As

The German Philosopher Walter Benjamin Had The Curious Notion That We Could Change The Past. For Most Of Us, The Past Is Fixed While The Future Is Open.

An Enlightened Trust In The Sovereignty Of Human Reason Can Be Every Bit As Magical As The Exploits Of Merlin, And A Faith In Our Capacity For Limitless Self-improvement Just As Much A Wide-eyed Superstition As A Faith In Leprechauns.

What Was Needed Was A Literary Theory Which, While Preserving The Formalist Bent Of New Criticism, Its Dogged Attention To Literature As Aesthetic Object Rather Than Social Practice, Would Make Something A Good Deal More Systematic And 'scientific' Out Of All This. The Answer Arrived In 1957, In The Shape Of The Canadian Northrop Fryes Mighty 'totalization' Of All Literary Genres, Anatomy Of Criticism .

Modern Capitalist Nations Are The Fruit Of A History Of Slavery, Genocide, Violence And Exploitation Every Bit As Abhorrent As Mao's China Or Stalin's Soviet Union.

The Role Of The Intellectual, So It Is Said, Is To Speak Truth To Power. Noam Chomsky Has Dismissed This Pious Tag On Two Grounds. For One Thing, Power Knows The Truth Already; It Is Just Busy Trying To Conceal It. For Another, It Is Not Those In Power Who Need The Truth, But Those They Oppress.