The Beats were just beginning, Kerouac, et al., and we greeted them with a certain amount of suspicion, convinced that art was not that easy. Our standards were rather high, I think. The New Critics had filled us with an almost religious awe of language. We read Leavis, Edmund Wilson, and Eliot as well, taking it all very seriously, worrying over every little point as if Truth and Beauty hung in the balance. The conservatism that colored so much of our experience did not evaporate when we dealt with literature. We defended literary art as if it were a castle under siege, in imminent danger of being destroyed by the vulgarians. In every college or university I knew anything about the most hated course was Social Science, as much a result of the incredibly rotten prose of the text as it was of our disinterest in things social.... We were neat, very neat, and sloppiness of any kind irritated us.
Most of this will strike readers of this blog as unremarkable since so many chroniclers of and generalizers about "the fifties" set alleged Beat easiness against the rigors demanded by New Criticism. And the New Critics' hatred of Social Science seems to have persuaded aspiring young literati to join the crusade against sociological (and social-psychological) interpretation. And yet, when one steps even further back, one sees that the most influential social science - epitomized by Daniel Bell's End of Ideology - formed a great political alliance with New Critical formalism. In the former case, we're talking about conservatives (of Ransom's and Tate's and Donald Davidson's stripe) coming on as centrists; in the latter case - that of sociologists like Bell (shown at right) - we're talking about left-liberals moving rightward to the post-ideological center. In that context (and perhaps only that context) Conroy's recollection of being pro-New Criticism and anti-Social Science seems odd, and only points up the passion (I would say it comes from an exhaustion with political interpretation) with which the young generationally-unselfconscious writers of that day embraced aesthetics. But--again--this embrace was a function of an urge to gain distance from the merge of aesthetics and politics that had gotten so many in an earlier self-conscious generation into trouble.The result is the advocacy of "neat" and a distrust of "sloppy." Yet "neat" derived from victory after a very sloppy battle defending the castle against vulgarians. Think about how truly neat that could be.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
