LETTERS

...The fact is that one Duke professor, Jane Tompkins, has been studying L'Amour and other Western writers as part of a historical study of the Western, a genre whose origins Tompkins views, largely negatively, as a reaction against the feminization of American culture in the late nineteenth century...

...The problem is that many Americans feel dragooned into this collective "our...

...Certainly there are nationalist elements present, notably the Estonian National Independence Party, whose declared goal is independence...

...However, it also has broad analytical implications insofar as understanding how it is, that Estonia has legitimately gone about pushing toward reform and tacitly receiving Gorbachev's approval, or at least being tolerated, whereas in Armenia, tanks have rolled in to quell disturbances...

...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...

...Luther, but not the Anabaptists...

...276) I emphasize that "there is no tool or factory too big for the worker to own...

...Augustine, but not the Manichees...

...Thus, we read Plato, but not the Sophists...

...Hawthorne bitterly denounced "those damn scribbling women," while Melville sought to emulate them in his singularly disastrous novel Pierre...

...There is room for common ground in the fact that all works, popular and the classics, should be put in a mutual context or both will lose much of their capacity for enlightenment...

...For the same reason, the folk songs, slave narratives, and popular traditions of the past, no matter how rough, are worth study as much as the classics...

...Bogdan Denitch spoke on the changing political scene in Eastern Europe...

...Women were extremely successful in this market, while the writers of the canonized "American Renaissance" —Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Whitman—were much less widely read...

...Literature cannot be considered a separate pristine category from history or theory, especially since it is nearly impossible to differentiate most premodern history from literature...

...Howe perpetuates the media myth that Louis L'Amour is being taught at Duke as a "great writer...

...He quotes my quote of Eric Gill as symbolizing my own favorite brand of socialism: "People work best when they own and control their own tools and materials," and then adds: "If Cort means, as he appears to, 'individually owns and controls,' then this seems a step over the line that separates a proper appreciation of human scale from nostalgia" [emphasis in original...

...The views, lives, and culture of the losers of cultural conflict are discounted so thoroughly that the past is constituted as a nonconflictual tradition whose structure is supposedly not challengeable on political grounds...

...Marx is read primarily because he is a cultural "winner" in the land of our chief military rival...

...the Federalist Papers, but not the anti-Federalists...

...From Socialist Youth Editors: The Democratic Socialists of America Youth Section held its annual winter conference at Columbia University in mid-February...

...Just as the Socialists refused to acknowledge race as anything more than a minor corollary to the problem of class in America, Howe dismisses the challenges to the canon over racism and sexism as a misguided populist approach to dealing with the problems of class...

...He attacks this movement, coming primarily from the campus left, with his wonderful parable of Big Bill Haywood proclaiming that "nothing's too good for the proletariat," meaning that the disadvantaged have the right to aspire to the wealth—economic and cultural—of the elite...

...No such violence has occurred in Estonia, primarily because the social (and psychological) causes are so vastly different...

...It was through a course dealing with many of these issues, taught jointly by English professor Andrew Parker and history professor Robert Gross, that I became truly fascinated by classic works...

...Shouldn't we make informed judgments on the actual case that, say, Marjorie Garber makes for Aphra Behn, rather than dismissing her claims a priori...

...The Greco-Roman-Anglo tradition may be a dominant factor in America, but it is not the only influence on our only partially assimilated society...

...This has become one of those stock items that get circulated as gospel among the herd of independent neoconservative minds...

...A society's cultural life has important historical and political implications, yet Howe seems to treat literature as if it is merely a benign window into the past...

...For Howe to state that questions about gender and race are not cultural issues of importance even in the narrow context of Western culture is an important political statement in itself...

...On a personal side, I find it ironic that Howe blames the canon-bashers for destroying interest in the classics...

...Attacks on the ideological implications of such intellectual division of labor lie at the heart of the canon-bashers' criticism...

...Tompkins's work, and that of many other recent leftists and feminists on mass culture, is squarely within the tradition of the kind of critical genre studies done in the forties and fifties by Robert Warshow, James Agee, Edmund Wilson, and Leslie Fiedler...

...We appreciate the role Dissent plays in our effort and look forward to future dialogue...

...I sometimes wish we could print in two colors, with the second one reserved for irony...

...Howe sees it as a cruel irony that just as mass numbers of American youths have attained the right to college education a thin cultural gruel is replacing the hearty literary banquet that their elite predecessors enjoyed...

...Locke, but not the Levellers...

...Several members of the Dissent Editorial Board participated in the conference as speakers and we thank them for their contributions to the success of the event...

...The sentence now reads, "When any person or faction exercises autonomy in a way that interferes with the equal right of another to do the same, the effect is a master-slave relation with that other...

...JOHN C. CORT Roxbury, Mass...

...Degrees of opposition, even the desire to "disparage" high culture, feed a greater engagement than a dry desire to read "the best that had been thought and said and done...

...Fall 1988) for accepting at face value some of the biased, second-hand accounts and straw-man arguments of irresponsible journalists and politicians who show little sign of having read the revisionist scholars they malign...

...Given the New Critical emphasis of public high school English classes, literature had appeared as a hermeneutically sealed arena, occasionally entertaining and provocative, but generally irrelevant to anything else...

...DONALD LAZARE San Luis Obispo, Calif...

...A repetition in the academy of the fracture on the left in the sixties is the last thing we need today with the challenges facing education and society in the future...

...Lazare should read more carefully...

...Does he classify worker cooperatives as individual ownership or a hopeless kind of nostalgia...

...More on the Canon Editors: Having graduated this past year from Amherst College, where the debate over Allen Bloom and canon formation has raged both in the English department and on the pages of student periodicals, I appreciate Irving Howe's stress in the Fall 1988 Dissent on the importance of the arguments underway on campuses over course curriculum...

...SUMMER • 1989 • 415...

...Where on Howe's list is the Quran, the Gita, Confucius, and other central cultural artifacts of the peoples of our nation...

...There is an eerie revival of the condescension of the Old Left toward the activists of the New Left in the sixties...

...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...

...Cooperative Ownership Editors: Many thanks to George Scialabba for his thoughtful review of my Christian Socialism (Winter 1989...

...NATHAN NEWMAN Editors: Shame on Irving Howe ("What Should We Be Teaching...

...For instance, the New York Times has gone so far as to suggest that Estonia is attempting to reestablish some form of "bourgeois nationalism" in its state...

...I must apologize for not being more clear on the question of cooperative ownership...

...This utterly misreads what the problem is all about...

...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...

...Just as many of those wounds are healing at the activist level, the same split seems to be reopening on the academic plane...

...The ethnic conflict between Estonians and non-Estonians (that is, primarily Russian immigrants living in Estonia) is present, but this conflict is based on changing policies that have threatened the use of Estonian language simply because the political process has been so extremely centralized...

...that, as he states, "The Bible, Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Shakespeare are central to our culture...

...The problem with this allegory, and Howe's whole argument, is that it is subject to the same criticisms that were leveled against Haywood's Socialist party...

...My book is so full of paeans to worker cooperatives that I would think no one could miss the fact that I do not mean individual ownership and control, although that should not be outlawed in small-scale production or distribution...

...The stress on the singular importance of "Western culture" not only takes a narrow and exclusionary view of the sources of American culture, it takes a parochial view toward our role as part of international society...

...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...

...Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World is worth study not only because it is a "valuable work," but precisely because it was popular in its own day...

...The phrase "great writer" occurred in my piece, not as an ascription to Professor Tompkins, but as my own ironic descriptive...

...Perhaps to "outsiders", the distinctions being made here may appear to be splitting hairs...

...This contrasts with a U.S...

...Yet who is included and excluded in a course labeled as the best in political and social thought is a judgment on historical importance and quality of thought that has tremendous political implications...

...Canon-formation is history, with winners and losers...

...This error continues to be perpetuated by the mass media who find it necessary to lump events in Estonia together with the considerably more "xenophobic" conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan...

...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...

...Even beyond that, texts replace a vision of honest democratic conflict in both history and politics with a vision of technocratic accommodation of interests...

...EDGAR KASLA Irvine, Calif...

...Howe writes that questions of race, gender, and class "are better dealt with in courses in history and sociology...

...We cannot have a democracy that reserves judgment on our culture solely to a "community of learning which a faculty ought to be...

...History and literature came into existence as separate academic disciplines in the nineteenth century, not coincidentally at the same time as mass-market fiction began to circulate...

...Michael closed out the conference for us with a survey of world socialism and how we fit into it...

...But in the context of social history and popular culture of the past, such classics take on an excitement and vitality that they lacked on their own...

...If a man as bright as Scialabba couldn't catch my drift, I fear for the general readership...

...DINAH LEVENTHAL Brooklyn, N.Y...

...In my case courses that emphasized canon-bashing fueled interest in the classics...

...The present is seen as a teleological culmination of the past, with the words "power" and "domination" playing no part in the narrative...

...Joanne Barkan spoke on the Swedish road to economic democracy...

...If so, he should read up on the Mondragon movement in Spain, where, out of 103 cooperatives founded between 1956 and 1986 in all kinds of production and distribution and involving now 414 • DISSENT 20,000 workers, only three have failed...

...It is wrong to suggest, as the media do, that events in Estonia, including the recent declaration of sovereignty, are intended as steps toward independence based upon some collective nationalist sentiment...

...The fundamental objection to Howe's view lies in the idea that we all sup at the same common culture...

...Howe notes the lack of engagement with the past that our primary and secondary schools encourage...

...Victors of any conflict get to rewrite history to place themselves at the teleological endpoint and culmination of all that came before...

...This call for change appears to be more a problem of democratization than of what can properly be called nationalism...

...In contrast, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is more clearly founded on mutual nationalist, historical resentments...

...However, there is a chaos beneath the apparent continuity that the canon, possibly for pedagogical as well as ideological reasons, attempts to conceal...

...Fred Siegel spoke on crime and criminal justice, and Irving Howe gave about one hundred activists a remarkable forty-five-minute tour of socialist thought from Karl Marx to Michael Harrington...

...For it turns out, if his letter is accurate, that Louis L'Amour is taught (as I wrote) at Duke, where Professor Tompkins studies "the Western...

...Understanding how past popular cultures connect with the SUMMER • 1989 413 mass culture of our own age, including MTV and westerns, is a valid province of academic study...

...Maybe I don't catch Scialabba's drift...

...Does George Scialabba have something else in mind...

...This has led to mass demonstrations and outbreaks of violence...

...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, Please do it quickly...

...Understanding the interaction between the everyday life of mankind and elite politics and culture will only come through the same vigorous debates and divisions in the academy that must mark any democratic order...

...In pursuit of a democratic society, and especially a democratic socialist system, the attack on the canon is an important movement...

...But anyway, thanks, George, for the kind review...

...On the whole, however, the immediate goals are much more humble...

...There are a multitude of disjointed genealogies tracing nonelite counter-cultures, but the only linear "tradition" that can be constituted is that of elite continuity...

...If literature does serve to connect us with experiences of the past, as Howe argues, would it not be worthwhile to read novels with which contemporaries of that past identified rather than just the neglected works that today appeal to our modern sensibility...

...Obviously such ownership would have to be through a cooperative, which, incidentally, is also a form of private property, socialized private property...

...Estonians are more concerned with gaining some measure of control over the decision-making process, which till now has tended to centralize power in Moscow...

...Howe is appalled that Stanford's core curriculum was subject to political bargaining by "constituencies...

...But what is not needed is for allies on the left like Howe to team up with neoconservatives who bemoan the populism and nihilism of the academy...

...IRVING HOWE Replies: Before pointing his finger of shame, Mr...

...And in the section on Reinhold Niebuhr (p...

...rate of firm failure of 80 percent within five years...

...Estonia Editors: There is a fundamental misunderstanding concerning recent events in the Soviet Union, brought to my attention again in Irving Howe's recent article on glasnost ("The Earth Still Turns", Fall 1988...

...ERRATUM The word in the last line of the first column of Robert Athearn's article, "The Constitution, Taste, and 'Violence of Factions,' " in the Spring 1989 issue of Dissent should be interferes, not interfaces...

...The most radical ideas contained in the classics will fail to disturb this passive view of history and culture if these ideas are fenced within a "tradition" that emphasizes continuity over conflict...