Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense... Independence is loyalty... to ones self and ones best principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes...—Mark Twain
As part of my ongoing experiment testing the waters of democracy in Academe, this blog entry (wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com) was fashioned for the Creative Writing Program of the University of Oregon. Karen Ford, the director of the program, is urged to bring it to the attention of faculty members and students in the hope of instigating a little debate! The entry was inspired by my perusal of the Northwest Review website (www.uoregon.edu/~nwreview). The satirical cartoon arose from that site and might even be considered an unappreciated “hybrid form” (that seems to be one of the literary in-terms of the day), where engaged criticism is melded into art. It is likely far too “honest” and far too “unforgettable” for the review to publish.
What renders NWR quite unoriginal and sadly typical of academic literary journals are the self-serving comments of its purported greatness: “Among the nation's oldest and most esteemed literary reviews.” Well, I don’t “esteem” it at all. But I’m not a card-carrying member of the academic-literary established order that gets to do the official esteeming, kind of like the former Soviet Writers Union had done in the old USSR.
“The only criterion for acceptance of material for publication in Northwest Review is that of excellence,” notes the website, sadly however failing to define the term. Likely, most likely indeed, “excellence” as defined by the literary establishment is but a simple euphemism for “bourgeois acceptability”? “Excellence” is certainly not an objective term when applied to art and literature, though NWR certainly implies that it is. Besides, who ordained its staff to be the judges of “excellence”?
Finally, it is my humble opinion that not one English professor at the University of Oregon would dare display “disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes,” spoon fed to them by the academic-literary established order. What a bleak picture that paints of U. of O.! My experience has sadly supported the hypothesis that university English professors in America are essentially indifferent to such debate, intolerant to criticism, and entirely incapable of thinking out of the established-order box that pays them so nicely for that lack of capacity.
