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Popular Culture Review
exclusively grounded upon the dogmatic affirmations of postmodern theoretical, often
ideologically motivated inquiries, and are at risk of dissolving into the lyrical over
conceptualized rhetoric that characterizes most of today’s critical inquiries; as observed
elsewhere, postmodern theoretically oriented scholars tend to consider the dogmatic
affirmations of any given renown theorist as axiomatic, and so, some of the most absurd
claims of postmodern theory—such as radical relativism or the confusion between
criticism and literature—are no longer open for debate, having been accepted once and
for all as universal and unquestionable truths (see Mark Bauerlein, “Social
Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace”).
^ See Rene Welleck, The Death o f Literary Studies and Other Essays; Juan Luis Alborg,
De criticos y critica; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory; Jonathan Culler, “Literary Theory”
in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures; Lucien Goldmann,
Le Dieu Cache and Structures mentales et creation culturelle; Jacques Derrida, Glas.
^ Among the most thought-provoking—or preposterous, depending upon our view of
things—affirmations of deconstruction is the notion that everything is a social
construction and therefore submitted to an hegemonic system which needs to be
unraveled at all cost to benefit the silenced social, sexual, and racial minorities, hence
serving the political correctness agenda in its most elementary principles. That might not
be enough to actually define what in the world we are supposed to be doing today as
practitioners of a human science which seems to have abandoned the illusion of defining
its object of study as if it were some unattainable chimera, probably promoted in the first
place by the imperialist epistemological priorities of the dominating class. The formalist
and structuralist attempts to define literature, which only succeeded in shifting towards
linguistic considerations surrounding “literariness,” had at least the merit of their
intention; such project would be today considered as unacceptably objective and
politically misinformed, if not downright reactionary.
^ We cannot ignore indeed Shakespeare’s contribution to poetry, however, it is
undeniable that his most universally known works belong to theatre.
^ The very word “literature” comes from the Latin lit(t)era, “letter” and refers to
“learning, writing, grammar.”
^ Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, authors of the popular Fantomas novels or Preston
and Fairchild, authors of the Pendergast series are good illustration of dual authorship;
Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, John Patterson, and John Grisham all seem to be working
with a collaborator these days; however, one may wonder if rather than a team effort,
those jointly written novels are the result of mere market analysis and capitalize on the
name of those famous authors rather than upon their imagination. There is also the case
of “assembly-line” writing, illustrated by pulp publications of the earlier 20^^ century,
such as the adventures of the “American Sherlock Holmes,” Harry Dickson, which
employed an undetermined amount of authors for one serial, all to remain anonymous, a
wide spread practice in the U.S. publication industry; as to be expected, the quality of
these type of publications varies a great deal from issue to issue and even within a single
installment.
^ The case of Les Essais by the renowned 16^ century French writer, Michel de
Montaigne, exemplifies the arbitrary character of the so-called literary canon, for not only
are Les Essais exclusively composed of personal reflections but they were never actually
written: they were dictated, that is orally improvised. To consider a transcribed one-way
conversation with oneself as a “literary” master work does require some imagination;
however, Montaigne is unquestionably included in the literary canon by what appears
today to be a fossilized tradition. Incidentally, both Montaigne and Pascal are listed in