Here's what I wrote in my thesis:

"The need for a creative response to artistic works cannot be underestimated. Searching for political or social meaning, versus creative satisfaction, is not the best defense for the study of the arts. It makes such works susceptible to the changing political climate, lending novels, stories, plays, and poetry a sociopolitical purpose while undermining the belief that these works should be studied simply because they exist. If the humanities cannot defend the essence of its discipline, it will lose the ability to defend itself at all." I still believe this. If English Lit isn't about, you know, literature, why not just let the sociologists and historians handle it?

And here is what Camille Paglia says in her book Break, Burn and Blow (I footnote her in my thesis): "[A] result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to 'read' anymore--and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students. Cultural studies, for example, despite its auspicious name, has been undone by its programmatic Marxism and is a morass of misreadings or overreadings. During the past quarter century, humanistic principles and honest practical criticism could more readily be found amongst low-paid adjuncts faithfully teaching service courses at community colleges than in the vain, showy professoriat of the
elite schools . . . I revere the artist and the poet, who are so ruthlessly 'exposed' by the sneering poststructuralists with their political agenda. There is no 'death of the author' (that Parisian cliché) in my worldview . . . The modernist doctrine of the work's self-reflexiveness once empowered art but has ended by strangling it in gimmickry."

She also writes, "English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in the United States, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust . . . I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals. My attentiveness to the American vernaculur--through commercials, screwball comedies, hit songs, and AM talk radio (which I listen to around the clock)--has made me restive with the current state of poetry. I find too much work by the most acclaimed poets labored, affected, and verbose, intended not to communicate with the general audience but to impress their fellow poets."

I love the part about low-paid adjuncts :)

Word.

I second William's "word." And the implication of Paglia's comment that "the general audience" matters and that if academia (which by and large includes many contemporary poets/poetics) can't grasp that, then what good can the humanities offer the world? (All things I think about daily, to one degree or another, as I try not to get sucked into academe's elitist undertow.)