To the Editors:
Never until now have I felt impelled to register dissent from a too-enthusiastic assessment of my work, but D. G. Myers’s review of Politics of Letters (“Marx and English,” November 1988) taps reserves of modesty I scarcely knew I possessed. I accept with a blush the personal flattery—“passionate intensity,” “unswerving analysis,” “a bravura performance,” “invaluable”—and will pass these phrases on to my publisher for use in advertisements. But Myers has been heartened by my arguments to a degree that is unwarranted—and dangerous, in that overconfidence may easily subvert our Left project before it has ripened. I caution him against seeing us as a “party in power,” just yet, as “the ‘center,’ the normative position, in the university.” If we believe, in his optimistic words, “that radical ideology can now be taken for granted as the common opinion of readers of literary scholarship,” we may relax our guard and leave an opening for liberals and conservatives who, though admittedly in disarray, still occupy a small, marginal space in the universities and even in literary scholarship. Until the last one of these mastodons has either retired or spent time in our re-education camps, they will nag, they will nip at our heels, they will bite like fleas. So, Myers: vigilance and steadfastness, until we have finally won the day.
Richard Ohmann
Middletown, CT
To the Editors:
D. G. Myers approaches review assignments with all the finesse of a Mafia hit man, as I found out when he
