A friend of mine tells the following story: her son, an aspiring writer who is matriculating at an Ivy League university, was witnessing the classroom deconstruction of some classic text or other when a soft-spoken fellow student raised his hand gingerly and made a modest proposal. “Why,” inquired the classmate—who had apparently been moved considerably by the masterpiece that was nominally under discussion—“do we have to take this approach to everything? Why can’t we talk about this book in some other way? Why can’t we discuss how it affects our emotions, and how it manages to do that?” The professor’s response to this respectful suggestion was dismissive, if not downright contemptuous: “If you want to have that kind of conversation,” he sniffed, “you might as well go back to high school.” And the deconstruction proceeded apace.

Increasingly, that’s the sort of intellectual atmosphere you’ll find in university English classes nowadays: from the very first meeting of the freshman Introduction to Literary Analysis, professors make it clear to their youthful charges that the only intelligent way to think about literature in the late 1980s is to buy into one of the currently fashionable critical theories. It doesn’t matter which brand of foolishness one chooses to pledge allegiance to: one may become a Marxist (and explain every aspect of a given work in socioeconomic terms) or a feminist (and reduce everything to sexual politics). Or one may become a deconstructionist, and subscribe to the notion that works of literature are closed