Critical Mass has a new blogchild. Here's an excerpt from Litskunk's mission statement:

This blog is here to help me work on my issues in a public forum, which is the one current practice in literary criticism that appeals to me. In no special order, here are the peeves:

Iím flummoxed by the over-the-top politicization of literary studies, despite my profsí protests that the culture--and science, and canon--wars are soooo 1990s. When Terry Eagleton abjures Theory not because itís pointless or internally incoherent or disconnected from literature but because itís failed to destroy capitalism, Iíd say the battles are at least still simmering.

Iím bugged by the dominance of a monomaniacal social constructionism which in other parts of the educated world has been laughed out the door. Steven Pinkerís Blank Slate brought the news to the crossover market, but people in the anthropology and cognitive sciences departments have known about human universals for over a decade (and suspected them for a lot longer).

Iím aggravated by Theoryís overall denial of science, and by its latent lysenkoism, two-chord jingle-ism (the refrain that runs, as Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick says, ìkinda subversive, kinda hegemonicî), recidivistic (post)Freudianism and out-to-lunch Marxism.