As some of you are probably aware, the Chronicle of Higher Education--nominally a trade publication--has lurched more and more to the right in the past year or so. The latest foray I noted here was the "symposium" on Ted Honderich, which was introduced by neoconservative Richard Wolin, who labeled Honderich as an anti-Semite. Honderich did not even know that this attack was being mounted and only found out about it after the fact from Jim Farmelant, a Marxmail subscriber.
The Chronicle also made the dubious decision to hook up with Denis Dutton's Arts and Letters website, a place that can best be described editorially as a mixture of the New Criterion and Frank Furedi's spiked-online. In other words, a call for a return to "standards" when the native knew his place and the blessings of DDT.
In the latest Chronicle, there's a rather nasty attack on Terry Eagleton by Princeton academic and middle-class feminist Elaine Showalter titled "A Champion of Cultural Theory?". Speaking of Furedi, her latest book "Hystories" makes connections between Gulf War Syndrome and alien abductions--just the sort of thing that spiked-online is preoccupied with.
Although the Chronicle is generally restricted to subscribers, you can read her critique at http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i20/20b00901.htm. Nominally concerned with themes in Eagleton's latest work "After Theory", an attempt to rally the academic and literary left, the review is ultimately a counter-response to his assault on the "triumphalist right".
She faults him for calling Britain's Labor government "craven overseas lackeys of United States power". She also thinks that he is stooping to "insults" when he refers to the "gang of predatory, semi-illiterate philistines" and "semi-fanatical fundamentalists" who rule the United States. It also perturbs her that he ascribes "reckless, world-hating hubris" to George Bush.
The other day on Doug Henwood's list there was an interesting discussion about the rightward drift of some 1970s and 80s feminists that was prompted by Phyllis Chesler's newly published book on the "new anti-Semitism". It is basically a valentine to George Bush and prompted by the same reactionary politics as Wolin's attack on Ted Honderich. It is obvious that this process has affected Ms. Showalter as well.
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
