Emperor Without Clothes Dept.: Literary criticism in the Disneyland cloisters; a year at Yale for a British PhD student in literature:

“I write the sentence down in my notebook, like everyone else in the seminar. The ode must traverse

the problem of solipsism before it can approach

participating in the unity which is no longer

accessible. When I have pieced it together, I realise

he is talking nonsense. I am struck by the thought

that literary criticism – at least as it is practised here

– is a hoax. And the universities that offer it, and the

professors who in America earn large salaries

teaching it, are fraudulent, wittingly or not.”