Flutterby™! : A Reader's Manifesto

As I just mentioned, I read B.R. Myers' A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose on the ferry this morning. I'd first run across Myers' article in the Atlantic, but only recently seen the larger book form. Every few years someone attacks what currently passes for literature, often with good reason, so it would be easy to dismiss this as yet another cyclical rant. But Myers lays out a good argument that the literary establishment has fallen prey to something I see in the society at large: A sort of everyman elitism which says "if I can't understand it, it must be brilliant". This is what leads to things like Alan Sokal's hijinx with postmodern criticism (in Flutterby back in 1998), and the recent hoaxing in modern physics (Flutterby, last month).

What's even more telling is how clearly the rebuttals to Myers, at least some of the ones he chooses to recount, prove that irony is really dead.