“But I never have, because, when push comes to shove, ‘I see the point he’s making here’ isn’t exactly the highest praise I can give to a piece of fiction.”

So much of modern literary fiction evokes exactly this response.

On the subject of the SFSignal mind-meld, Gene Wolfe has a fantastic quote that I’ll paraphrase. When people ask him why he doesn’t write more respectable fiction, he asks them back if they’ve ever heard of *such-and-such* — someone I’ve never heard of nor remember the name of. When they of course say no, he tells them *such-and-such* is a writer who won the nobel prize for literature . . . in the same year that H.P. Lovecraft died. Point made.

Now, my suspicion (having been away from academia for a while) that the new trend is equally dogmatic in its approach, although rather than put specific authors and works on a pedestal, it instead prefers particular attitudes and worldviews and avenues of expression. If my doctoral thesis on the subtext of cereal boxes is perfectly acceptable, then at the same time, my straight-ahead lit crit paper on F. Scott Fitzgerald would probably be summarily ignored.

My impression of academia, which is admittedly jaded and from afar, is that it’s just like any competitive group, fraught with jealousies and cliques and ways of responding to things that are either approved or frowned-upon.

But hey, I got to write a paper on V for Vendetta for my Postmodernism class, so I ain’t complaining.