I recently read an article entitled “Death by Suicide: The End of English Departments and Literacy” by Mary Garbar. Garbar bemoans the rise of graphic novels as subjects of “serious” academic study. She believes that this academic decay began with deconstructionism and was reinforced by gender-specific studies.

Actually the gender studies theorists were the ones to put the final stake through writing, while viciously accusing it of “phallologocentrism.” They accused writing itself of following the trajectory of male sexual response in its “linear” goal-seeking of meaning. Grammar, logic, and universal meaning promoted the male, imperialist goal of subjugation. Writing, like male sexuality, was inherently rapacious.

As alternative, Elaine Showalter took her cue from Luce Irigaray’s notion of “labial thinking,” and advanced “uterine withdrawal and containment.” “Women,” Helene Cixous insisted, “must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes….”

I’m quite certain that if Percy were teaching today he would be chased out of most English department staff meetings. I wish he could have lived long enough to draft a follow-up to Lost in the Cosmos that addressed the unraveling of English as an intellectual discipline.

Tags: gender studies

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