Sir, - Once more into the breach charges the redoubtable John Boland in his flailing assault on "Professor Frank Jameson" (Bookworm, May 31st). It is indicative of the poor state of Irish literary journalism that:
1) the "Bad Writing Contest" should be reckoned worthy of the attention of one quarter of a literary opinion column in The Irish Times;
2) either Mr Boland, or Dr Denis Dutton (the latter of the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand), or both, should succeed in misquoting and misnaming the object of their derision: the quotation from the introduction to Fredric Jameson's book Signatures of the Visible, should read: ". . . thinking about its attributes becomes an adjunct to that [my italics]; not ". . . thinking about its attributes becomes an attribute to that . . ."
3) the work of as major a critic as Jameson should come to Boland's or Dutton's attention only after five years, Signatures of the Visible having been published in 1992.
This becomes all the more pathetic when one recalls that, as recently as November 1996, Fredric Jameson, one of the few Anglophone cultural thinkers alive of comparable stature to Adorno or Foucault, was the chief guest speaker at a major conference ("Projecting the Nation") held at the Irish Film Centre in Dublin. However, it may offer the comfort of good company to Eibhear Walshe and his colleagues (if they need it), whose collection of essays, Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing, was the subject of Mr Boland's last display of his credentials as lumpen-intellectual.
The real question, of course, which it presumably never crosses the mind of Mr Boland to examine, is why professionals in the field of cultural study are to be taken to task for the deployment of a vocabulary that is, admittedly, sometimes refractory and complex. Does Mr Boland never experience difficulty understanding the effusions of lawyers, or economists or philosophers, or astrophysicists? Does he expect academics in these fields always and everywhere to reduce their discourse to his level?
What is it about literary study that seems to generate in Mr Boland the assumption that, since books are what are at issue, the study of them must never rise to a level higher than that of the general reader? Or is he simply content to go along with the general impoverishment of the public sphere that waddles under the banner of anti intellectualism? - Yours, etc.,
De Vesci Court,
Dun Laoghaire,
Co. Dublin.