Why did this cause so much seething at the time?
>>25341596For much the same reason that Tom Wolfe’s "The Painted Word" caused seething — it pointed out (correctly) that the output of many highly-praised contemporary "artists" was at best a waste of time and very often actively pernicious.
Because the sacred rule of the literary side of academy has been and is that you can write about anything and it is all literature. To go against this rule is to go not only against all the writers in academy but all of the people who spent thousands of hours analyzing the post modern writers
