On The Shame of the Professor's Summer Vacation
Ugh, just because this article is rather obnoxiously written doesn't mean that academia isn't "real" work, or ridiculously stressful. The real issue here is that unlike Prof. Dettmar here, who is a chaired professor and entered academia under drastically different circumstances, young scholars today can't even entertain the idea of not taking a vacation out of some stupid, antiquated notion of "glory" - they literally just can't. Publish or perish is REAL, and with the job market as horrifying as it is, if you're a junior professor and you're NOT working on a manuscript (or two!) in addition to your teaching responsibilities (and remember, for every class session there's several hours of prepwork needed) and your service responsibilities (and junior professors do all the bitchwork) and giving conference talks, forget about tenure. Of course, you might not get tenure for a lot of other petty institutional and departmental reasons completely out of your control. If you're a woman or a person of color or queer or could be called in any way "radical" or too "political" by alums/the old white men who probably make up your tenure review committee then the process is even more daunting. (Also a side note: vacations on a junior professor's salary are often not to Tahiti for more mundane reasons as well.)
All of this is assuming that you've already secured a tenure-track job, which in this market is already kind of a miracle. Grad students are already feeling the pressure to publish, and that's on a ridiculously low stipend budget. And given the rapid corporatization of American universities, it's not going to get any easier.
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On 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' or, The Democratizing Principle of Literature
"Literature's a democratizing force. Its power makes so much of the world accessible to anyone who can read, equally, without regard to anything about "who we are" or where we came from or any of that. If you want to participate in the world of letters, all that matters is your ability to make yourself intelligible, when you write, and to apprehend what is being said, when you read."
How can you say that? The parameters of participating in the world of letters and being able to make oneself "intelligible" are already Western and patriarchal. All forms of cultural production and consumption - TV, the Internet, etc. - are informed by societal structures, including racism, sexism, etc. Why should literature be any different?
Also why is it that every time someone is stating a "colorblind" opinion it always has to end with a sentence like "I don't care if you're black, white, or [insert animal, object, alien, etc.]"?