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Some responses to the Yale article:
Modern writing I can easily stomach, notwithstanding my reservations about the kind of language it often employs, but modern criticism is like a brick wall that I can only bang my head against....But it was a joy to encounter a young female student thinking along similar lines. I found an article in an issue of the Sunday Times, "How the Ivy League Strangled Literature." It is by Helena Echlin, an Oxford graduate who went to Yale to study English. According to her review of the experience, all that she learned amounted to gibberish.
- Mursi Saad El-Din, Al-Ahram Weekly, February 15-21, 2001
You might have seen a recent article in The Sydney Morning Herald's Spectrum section by English scholar Helena Echlin, and its appearance sent me back to its original source in the Oxford journal, Areté. In painful detail, she outlines what postmodernism has done to literary criticism at Yale University. She talks about sentences becoming "baroque in their lengthiness; suffixes are added, like flourishes in music, to words considered too plain."...Echlin shows how books are not studied any more for pleasure or for meaning. Studying literature has become producing commentaries upon commentaries.
- Hon. Bob Carr, Premier of New South Wales, Australia, in a speech at the University of Sydney, March 7, 2001
I discovered the fiction of two American writers new to me, Dorothy Gallagher (unplanned parenthood in the recent bad old days) and Martin Krasney (a bar mitzvah in the early 1960s); and was a little shocked by British writer Helena Echlin's "Letter from Yale," which tells of the nonsenses being perpetrated by the English department there.
- Paul Levy, reviewing Areté magazine in The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2000
George W. Bush is famously incoherent. But he might derive some comfort from the fact that academics at Yale are no easier to understand. In a fascinating piece in The Sunday Times, Helena Echlin, an Oxford graduate, described how she went there to do a PhD in English and American literature, but gave up in despair, unable to fathom what she was being taught. Here is her account of one particular seminar. "'The ode must traverse the problem of solipsism,' a young man is saying. He pauses for a long time. Underneath the table one leg is twisted round the other. 'In order to approach participating in' - long pause - 'the unity which is no longer accessible.' My fellow students utter a long, soft gasp, as if at a particularly beautiful firework. 'Brilliant,' says the professor. 'Very finely put. But I didn't quite understand it. Could you repeat it?'" The reason for the professor's incomprehension, of course, is obvious. But this exchange, says Echlin, sums up the way English literature is now taught at Yale. This wonderful old university's English department, in her view, is now a place where "obfuscation is de rigeur" and where analysis matters more than the texts themselves. Literary criticism, here as in America, has been heading this way for more than 20 years. But it is sad to think it's reached this point. Echlin recounts one telling moment. She asked one professor what was on her bedside table. "The answer: a bestseller about physics. 'No novels?' Her reply: 'I don't read literature for pleasure any more.'"
- The Week
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