But put all that aside. Mr. Atlas is a good reporter, and this is an important story. I’ll cut to the chase: Mr. Atlas is on the side of G. K. Chesterton’s “democracy of the dead”; on the side, as we say, of the angels. When the Great Books are gone, when we are steeped in the relativism of multi-cultural diversity, what then? ‘We are producing a generation,” Mr. Atlas writes, “that has no stake in our society; its ways and customs mean nothing to them. . . . The fabric of America’s social order is wearing thin.” This he proffers lest we imagine the debate over which books are read in our colleges, and how literature is taught, is merely an abstract tempest in an academic teapot.
The great value of The Book Wars is less in its argument than in its presentation—design excepted. Mr. Atlas, with no apparent difficulty, has been fair to both parties in the controversy: the traditionalists and the deconstructionists. The former teach courses called “History of American Literature,” while the latter offer “Dominance, Hegemony, and the Modes of Minority Discourse.” Traditionalists discuss the elements of a work (plot, character, etc.) in terms of literary history. Deconstructionists analyze books according to “signs”—usually indicative of various modes of oppression—that stimulate critical opinions not infrequently having nothing to do with the book or its author. Thus we encounter what Mr. Atlas rightly labels “militant neologisms: Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, logophallocentrism (why not Eu-rophallologocentrismT).”
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