A chara - In his review of New Voices in Irish Criticism (Weekend, May 27th), Gerry Smyth claims that what he really wants - and doesn't get - is a revolution. Mr Smyth accuses this volume of proceedings from the conference for younger scholars held at the Irish Film Centre in February 1999 (in which I participated) of not being revolutionary enough, of not significantly undermining the premises and voices of previous Irish criticism.
Mr Smyth only discusses the material itself in the broadest, most general, and dismissive gestures, finding it a grubby, greasy till of stagnant ideas. He claims that the main limitation of the student work represented in this collection is that it doesn't liberate its writers from the current catch-22 of academia, which requires young scholars to publish fast and furiously ("before they're ready," the wise old scions of conservative and "progressive" academia cluck patronizingly) in order to be recognized by the academy, i.e. in order to secure a job. Ah yes, blame the victim for the situation; that's aproven approach to dodging difficult problems.
And what better way to neutralize a potential revolution than to cast it as a sterile, bourgeois, capitalist enterprise? What an exquisitely ironic, self-serving invocation of Marxist rhetoric. What better way of preserving a strikingly traditional vision of criticism as "making things" - beautifully crafted, gentlemanly things borne of years of unhurried contemplation afforded by tenured positions acquired prior to "publish or perish" - than by calling its successors little corporate drones? It's a strategy by which the post-revolutionary intellectual can maintain power. - Yours, etc.,
Beth Wightman,
Dept of English,
University of California,
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1530,
USA.