on the vexed question of the unreadability of much academic criticism: lamenting the loss of McDonald, Warshow, Agee, (even) Kael is useless and beside the point . . . they all wrote in and for a more or less shared and common culture . . . and even when they recognized the political implications of their cultural views and activities [as common in PR] they thought of the relationship between art and cultural as relatively stable we can't do that any more the opening up of the academy not only to outsiders who wanted to assimilate this common culture and thus become insiders, but also and MORE IMPORTANTLY to outsiders who cared about maintaining their own culture made the very terms and premises of the earlier ciriticism themselves the subject of the new academic investigations . . . so that the best critics today can not simply respond impressionisticaly to films (like Warshow and Kael) or even thematize them politically (like McDonald) because those very critical processes have become what academic ciritics are trying to understand and either condemn, justify, or adjust in short in an age with no or few shared cultural paradigms--an age, that is, like ours--the most interesting discourse is inevitably meta-discourse . . . and meta-discourse (like this message itself) ain't all that readable which is not to say that it con't be done better or to pretend that most academic elegant writers . . . in fact many of them write like plumbers . . . but it may be the case that in an age which wants to examine the pipes that deliver our cultural materials to us, plumbers are what is needed mike frank <[log in to unmask]> ---- To signoff SCREEN-L, e-mail [log in to unmask] and put SIGNOFF SCREEN-L in the message. Problems? Contact [log in to unmask]