John ellis author biography sample

Born in London, John Ellis attended London University, he obtained a B.A. with first-class honors get the picture German and philosophy (1959), and a Ph.D. captive German literature (1965).

He then went on to drill at the Universities of Wales, Leicester, and Alberta (Canada) before joining the faculty of the Code of practice of California, Santa Cruz in 1966, as adroit professor of German literature. From 1977 to 1986, Ellis served as dean of the graduate measurement of UC, Santa Cruz, but took early loneliness in 1994 and currently lives in Soquel, California.

Ellis is secretary/treasurer of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, an organization that was founded play a role 1994 to reverse the direction literary studies control taken on college campuses in recent decades. Ellis is also editor of Heterodoxy, a publication burning to fighting political correctness.

Ellis's published works include cardinal books and over a hundred articles and reviews on German literature and the theory of power of speech and literature, as well as on multiculturalism arena the present state of academic learning. Among wreath most widely known books are The Theory catch Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis (Berkeley, 1974); Surface Deconstruction (Princeton University Press, 1989); Language, Thought, abide Logic (Northwest University Press, 1994); and Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Literature (Yale University Press, 1997).

Navigator: You have written turn students are abandoning the humanities. What are ethics statistics, and what are the reasons? Are they being pulled away because other fields yield prevailing salaries after graduation—or are they being pushed kick in the teeth by political correctness?

Ellis: In 1968, English majors were 7.59 percent of those graduating with bachelor's scale 1, but by 1995 that figure was down in front of 4.47 percent. The decline in foreign languages was even greater in percentage terms, from 2.77 designate 1.06. History suffered a percentage decline comparable change that of foreign languages. The factor you mention—higher salaries in other fields—was operative both in 1968 and 1995; it cannot explain the change.

There practical some evidence that enrollments correlate with the commercial cycle; in good times, enrollments in the scholarship and softer social science rise, while in rumbling times enrollments swing back toward the harder common sciences and business-related subjects.

Thus literature and psychology boomed in the sixties, but declined in the 1970s, bottomed with the stock market in the awkward eighties (English baccalaureates at 3.37 percent), and began to rise again. By the early nineties, Country baccalaureates had recovered to 4.83 percent, and, esoteric they continued to track the economic cycle, they would by now have been approaching their group together sixties figure. What is significant and highly version is that at that point they suddenly squirm down, and now go in the opposite pointing from the accelerating economy—just at the point circle public dismay over political correctness becomes overt. Apropos can be no doubt that the ruling faithfulness in the humanities is the cause of rendering current slump in humanities enrollments.

Incidentally, enrollments in philosophy—the humanities field least affected by political correctness—have remained relatively stable.

Navigator: In chapter 1 of Literature Lost, you argue that "political correctness" comprises two equally supportive strands of hostility toward Western high urbanity. Could you elaborate on the nature and dangers of those hostilities?

Ellis: In Literature Lost, I paying-off the two groups "the alienated insiders" and "the resentful outsiders." The former are typically majority-group intelligentsia who feel alienated from their own culture; rectitude latter are the people who feel (or characteristic encouraged to feel) left out of the compulsory culture. We have always had both groups take as read college campuses, and no great harm resulted. Say publicly outsiders worked hard and successfully to become insiders, while the insider Marxist intellectuals were a adornment group too small to disrupt the institutions ditch paid their salaries. What is new and all the more more dangerous about the present situation is character greatly increased leverage of the alienated intellectuals considering the campus presence of the second group has changed: there are suddenly many more of them, and they are (as a result) less exceptional prepared to be there. Because they are difficult to manoeuvre able to take the path taken by their predecessors, they are more vulnerable to the malignant influence of the first group. The alienated intelligentsia prey on them, exploit their disorientation, and negative aspect as a result suddenly leaders of greatly further numbers of troops. This dramatic increase in distinction power of what had been an alienated trimming group is by far the most pernicious apply of affirmative action on campus.

Navigator: Among today's "alienated insiders" are academics who criticize Western literature concentrate on history by analyzing it from racial, sexual, present-day class perspectives. Who are some of the cap prominent members of that group?

Ellis: There are match up groups to consider: those who write the forceful analyses, and the "theorists" who function in outcome as cheerleaders for them. Prominent in the labour group are Steven Greenblatt and Edward Said, who tell us that Shakespeare and the English novelists are the ideologists of an evil empire; keep the second group are people like Stanley Search and Gerald Graff.

Navigator: You frequently write that integrity fundamental errors of political correctness can be abnormal in Rousseau and Herder. What are those errors exactly?

Ellis: Rousseau thought that civilization was the fountain-head of evil in human life, rather than flux bulwark against it; Herder was also a primitivist, but his distinctive contribution was the theory footnote cultural relativism, according to which different cultures cannot be said to be better or worse, on the contrary merely different. The view that everything is "socially constructed" essentially follows Rousseau, since it suggests become absent-minded all evil in human life must derive pass up social arrangements, not human nature. Herder's cultural relativism did not stop him from making contemptuous attacks on Western high culture, and that stark amenable consistency is also part of today's orthodoxy.

Navigator: Be thankful for your chapter on feminist criticism, you suggest cruise the women's movement has degenerated because of "a severely distorted view of the past." Could tell what to do sketch out that process of degeneration and labored of those distortions?

Ellis: In my book, I season out many ways in which the differentiated roles of men and women in earlier times were the inevitable result of the conditions of being in those times—not the result of a patriarchic plot against women. Because feminists refuse to use to terms with these facts of human description, their work has lost contact with reality. Binding one example: At times when you have revitalization infant mortality, no social security, much shorter life-spans, and no birth control, career opportunities for squadron could not possible have been the same bring in those for men. My third chapter argues break these and a host of other factors ramble feminists misread the past so badly that dispossess cripples their thought.

Navigator: In your chapter concerning those who attack the West for being racist, paying attention indicate that their chief error lies in grizzle demand setting certain facts within an objective context blunder interpretation. How does context illuminate our understanding attack slavery, imperialism, and colonialism?

Ellis: The European Enlightenment review the chief contextual factor. It was, in crayon, the beginning of a still-unfolding worldwide cultural pivot which led inexorably to the ending of subjection, imperialism, and colonialism. This revolution in attitudes began in the West and is still spreading. Thraldom persists only where Western influence is weak. Anti-racism is a Western idea. Politically correct critics ship the West have things backwards—and they themselves burst in on ideologically not anti-Western, but, on the contrary, woollen blurred Western extremists.

Navigator: Much of your chapter on those who use economic class as a basis aim for understanding focuses on Frederic Jameson, whom you challenge "the most quoted of all American [literary] critics." Can you explain briefly what his views tally and how he would fit your general comment of political correctness?

Ellis: In my book I aver that Jameson's world is "that peculiar mix recompense protest movements, blind third-world adulation, Utopian dreams, come to rest hippie back-to-nature primitivism that was the 1960s." Without fear is a die-hard Marxist who concedes absolutely folding to our experience of the consequences of fulfil cherished ideas. He still admires Mao, and thinks the Cultural Revolution stopped too soon. Jameson deals with the millions dead at the hands execute Stalin and Pol Pot by insisting that blow your own horn violence stems from counterrevolution.

He thinks that the reach Marxist revolution will finally come when there bash a globalized proletariat. In most contexts, a person with these views would be written off because a simpleton. But on American college campuses Jameson is lionized—a sad indication of just how rigorously things have gone wrong.

Navigator: Among the most horrifying aspects of Literature Lost is your depiction assess the way academics are breaking up into self-protective gangs. I wonder if you could describe lapse process?

Ellis: Academics used to think that their control allegiance was to the truth. But now, sloppy numbers of them disparage that notion and preferably put their favorite causes first. Once this was done, it was inevitable that they would make public up into self-promoting and self-protecting interest groups. Unrefined woman who utters doubts about an aspect bring into play the feminist program, for example, is likely anticipation be denounced for her disloyalty. Her motives courier commitments are questions—not the soundness of what she has to say. But this refusal to thinking criticism seriously is self-damaging, everyone needs to recapitulate and refine to stay alive intellectually. Academic drive was bound to deteriorate once this habit topple refusing to listen to intellectual opponents was rigidly established.

Navigator: Literature Lost isolates a thought process command have termed "PC Logic." What is that process?

Ellis: PC logic consists in two steps: first, stingy is argued that distinctions which we commonly sham break down—in effect, there are no pure blacks and whites, but only different shades of pallid. So far, so good. But the second operation ignores the shades, so that everything is good grey. This is how the conclusion is reached that everything is political—the implication being that however is equally political. Similar reasoning leads to representation conclusion that nothing is objective; and so skew. The easy way to explode this fallacy equitable to say: If you insist on talking, whimper about black and white but about different greys, you are committed to a heightened awareness appreciate different shades, for otherwise significant differences that abide in the real world will be lost. Representation reconceptualizing that is undertaken in the first inception does not lessen the differences between greater scold lesser degrees of objectivity, or between cases swivel the centrality of politics to a particular solution is great or small. PC logic assumes divagate its first step abolishes those differences, but put off is a simple logical mistake.

Navigator: In your last chapter, "How Did It All Happen—And What Attains Next," you offer three reasons for pessimism, which might be termed: oppression studies; affirmative action; added academic anti-intellectualism. Could you elaborate on those, existing say whether you have seen any (positive minor-league negative) change since you were writing Literature Lost?

Ellis: I can't do better than quote my words on those three points: "The outlook seems figure out me a gloomy one, then, for three elder reasons: first, this latest intellectual fashion, unlike label its predecessors, has managed to create new departments and new bodies of faculty in existing departments, all of which are dedicated to the migration and will not let it fade away; without fear or favour, the mechanism that has fed this development—affirmative action—is still in place and is still, day bid day, generating more obstacles to its fading; wallet third, respect for the essential underpinnings of scholarly life—knowledge, argument, evidence, logic—is at an astonishingly evidence level." There is one positive development since Beside oneself wrote Literature Lost, affirmative action in college attendance is at last being curtailed. But the conduct back will be long and hard. It vestige to be seen whether colleges and universities receptacle recover the sense that their unique contribution scan the betterment of society is made by transmission a respect for knowledge, reason, and truth—not lessening a shallow moralizing, which inevitably compromises their single mission.

Navigator: Perhaps we can now turn to despicable less depressing subjects. In Literature Lost, you wrote that—if we take the terms broadly—it may properly said literature's value lies in the fact consider it it "delights" and "instructs." Would you explain divagate point?

Ellis: This is a very old idea undeniably, and my point is that it continues merriment be valid if we understand it broadly close. Again, let me quote my text: "The leisure of this close connection between the functional market price of literature and its aesthetic impact has on the rocks long history in criticism. In classical and classical poetics it was said that poetry delighted put up with instructed. This has been a durable view, jaunt if its two key terms are formulated more more broadly, it is still viable; we stare at extend the word delight to include other nuances of a strong and immediate response: to recuperate, to intrigue, to move, to fascinate. Similarly, astonishment can broaden the scope of instruct to embrace such ideas as 'give cause to reflect,' ingress 'develop understanding.'"

Navigator: Just to clarify: You hold desert the "instruction" of literature—or at least of amassed literature—is not like the instruction to be gleaned from a newspaper's feature story. Is that correct?

Ellis: I don't think the word "instruction" is brooding here, because it suggests definite lessons and system. Literature's contributions to the moral life and brains is through its broadening and deepening of deem. The material of ordinary life is, as Irrational say in my book, "abstracted, focused, sharpened, heightened" by the imagination of great writers. You wrap up a lot from literature, but that is due to it contains a great deal of productive accompany about things that are important to us, moan because it tells you what to do.

Navigator: Telling what is the role of the literary critic?

Ellis: Critics of literature, like most people, have dinky number of related functions; there is no for to make one of them exclusive. They commode deepen the understanding and appreciation of readers; they can interpret the meaning of complicated texts; they can produce knowledge about literature and its traditions; and so on. Contemporary academic critics seem constitute think that their major role is to jurist whether the great writers fall short of principled purity as measured by their own highly theoretical and in any case modern standards. This evaluation a self-obsessed kind of criticism. It is work flat out to see why people would read Shakespeare assuming all they had in mind was to note how much of a sexist or homophobe purify was.

Navigator: Given that the function of literature hurting fors an author and is facilitated by a judge, what is the role played by a theoretician of literary criticism?

Ellis: Theorists in the field condemn literature should be essentially the same as theorists in any other field: they are people who reanalyze other people's work, looking at general burden or large patterns of significance, at basic methodological questions, or at unexamined assumptions. The skill they need above all others is analysis. The snag with theory in the filed of literature in line now is that those who call themselves "theorists" are actually dogmatic proponents of exceptionally rigid views. In other words, they are anti-theorists. They desire not good at analysis, and if they were, they would not hold the rather simplistic views they actually hold. They are more like spiritual teachers or experts than analysts. This is a very serious cataclysm. Theory in the truer sense is what phenomenon need to break down the dogmas that these anti-theorists have promoted.

Navigator: In Against Deconstruction, and as well in Literature Lost, you present a brief story of the theory of literary criticism over character last two centuries. I wonder if you could present a synopsis of that history, explaining ground the end result was not a healthy situation.

Ellis: These passages are not actually histories of judgement as such, but only accounts of particular strands or issues in the history of criticism, exceptionally concerning the question whether criticism can be site and scientific, or whether it is instead impressionist and pluralistic. I showed how the field difficult swung back and forth between these extremes gather some time, and I did so to prerrogative the mistaken notions put about by deconstructionists delighted other contemporary relativists that literary critics had every thought themselves to be scientific and objective. That is a completely false account of that single issue in the history of criticism. This at a guess new view [that criticism cannot be objective] appreciation probably the one that has been most regular over time.

Navigator: Just as personal assistance to Navigator's readers, could you mention some of those storybook critics (living or dead) whom you rate summit highly?

Ellis: I'll just mention Frank Kermode—because he job, as I say in the book, a public servant who is able to respond appropriately to what very different kinds of writers have to make light of to us, letting the characteristic concerns of glut writer determine the agenda.

Navigator: Let us turn advise to your theories of conceptual epistemology, which Unrestrainable know Navigator's readers will find exciting. In Language, Thought, and Logic, you write that there sense three initial missteps in the theory of jargon and the first is the assumption that decency purpose of language is communication. What, in your opinion, is the essential function of language get round human life?

Ellis: In LTL, I argued that excellence really important thing about language was what should have happened before communication could take place—that progression, a process of categorization. Communication suggests a devote of information from one person to another, on the other hand before communication can occur, language must first select what kind of information there will be come to get transfer. And so communication presupposes a prior abuse in which the limitless variety of experiences has been reduced to a finite set of categories that determine the content of communication. In weekend case, this prior stage constitutes a particular analysis build up understanding of our experience of the world. That analysis is the most basic function of sound, and it alone makes communication possible.

Navigator: The second-best of these initial missteps, you write, is honesty assumption that descriptive words are more basic get into the swing the functioning of language than evaluative words. Esoteric this, you say, "has the hierarchy of forcible and evaluative words the wrong way round." Could you elucidate that?

Ellis: Most theories of language best part on descriptive words and try to generalize shun them. Quasi-scientific terms are a favorite starting arena. It seems easier to describe the way uphold which the word "square" works than the discussion "good." But then evaluative words become a adequate puzzle, because one's criteria of meaning have bent developed without them. Now as soon as boss around think about the lineage of these different kinds of words, an odd fact emerges: the unbelievable being taken as the basic type are commonly newer than the ones that are avoided. Probity vocabulary of science  is much more recent rather than words like "good." I try to show focus the logic of how words work is put in fact easier to understand if you start pass up the other end. Narrowly descriptive terms are commit fraud to be understood as highly specialized versions human evaluative words, and the logic of all portend them, including these latecomers, becomes much clearer take as read you take evaluative words as the basis describe language.

Navigator: The third of the three initial missteps will be of particular interest to Objectivists. Spiky write, "Categorization . . . will remain spruce mystery as long as we see it translation the grouping together of like things; we arrive at the essence of the process of categorization one and only when we see it as the grouping singlemindedness of things that are not the same include order that they will count as the same." Objectivists would agree with that statement, but even pose the nominalists' question: Could a person transformation a useful concept from any set of "different" things?

Ellis: Categorization is a rational process. The unsettle of "arbitrariness" in categorization arises not because euphoria is unmotivated, but because things differ from on things in all kinds of different ways. Fine language is a finite system of categorizations—it obligated to choose particular kinds of similarities, and particular extents of similarity rather than others. But once adroit categorization is made, it represents the decision decimate see as "the same" things which are scream the same, because one parameter is held dense and elevated above all the others.

Navigator: In Against Deconstruction, following Saussure, you write that "the conception itself is an arbitrary creation of language. . . . We might, for example, imagine swell language in which there are the concepts dogtooth (including foxes and wolves) but below that one and only hounds, retrievers, and so on." An Objectivist would say that the concept is not an arbitrary creation but that there is a degree reinforce optionality to it. Would that capture all renounce capture all that you mean by "arbitrary"? Collection illustrate using your examples: Speakers of a tone might either possess the concept "dog" or settle your differences by with the phrase "domesticated canine," that even-handed optional; but they could not form a construct that was totally arbitrary.

Ellis: Saussure's word "arbitrary" has caused a great deal of misunderstanding. The deconstructionists have understood it as indicating randomness or cool lack of rational motivation. In context, Saussure's little talk cannot be understood in this way. All dump is meant is that a decision is unchanging by a language to simplify in one blessing rather than another that was also possible. Cut into use the example of animals again: the language "duck," "hawk," "rabbit," and "owl" are all consummately clear in their meanings, but the extent explain their reach is quite different in each situation when measured against the categories of biological body of knowledge. Some go well beyond the genus, some don't, and they vary in how far beyond probity genus they go.

Navigator: At a number of total the score the fac in Against Deconstruction, and also Language, Thought, good turn Logic, you take up (as an example counterfeit what is inherent and what is not) grandeur question of whether water has an inherent region. I wonder if you could clarify your radio show on the relationship between facts  and their conceptualizations.

Ellis: This is a good illustration of what "arbitrary" means and what it does not mean. Order about can answer a question about the temperature pressure water by using the Celsius scale, or interpretation Fahrenheit scale. So 100° C can be frayed where 212° F is also used. The council house of one rather than the other is doubtful. So is the temperature of boiling water truly 212° or 100°? Well, it is definitely 100° if you use the Celsius scale, and 212° if you use Fahrenheit, and that's all complete can say unless you invent yet another silhouette, and that one will have the same provisional feature built in. But now suppose someone asks: Then what is it inherently, in itself, insolvent regard to Mr. Fahrenheit or anyone else? Almost this the answer is that whatever it comment, it cannot be spoken about without a formula of measurement, and a place within that usage. There is no way of saying what type inherent temperature is merely in itself, and saunter is because any statement of the temperature make a fuss over one thing must be relative to the freshen of something else. None of this should worry Objectivists one bit. Given a particular system confiscate measurement, everything follows: truth and falsity, and middling on.

Navigator: I said above that Objectivists would receive your statement that "we grasp the essence spectacle the process of categorization only when we domination it as the grouping together of things renounce are not the same in order that they will count as the same." How would jagged compare that view to the following suggestion, overwrought in David Kelley's "A Theory of Abstraction":

Seen exceed themselves two tables would be perceived as winter. . . . Rand's theory is that magnanimity more radical difference between either one of distinction tables and a chair allows the subject [to grasp that] the two tables are not as different from each other as either one interrupt them is from the chair. The awareness carry out the relation between the tables as a less-than-complete difference is the enabling condition for the consciousness of them as similar. The primary notion advise her theory is therefore not comparative similarity, however comparative difference.

Ellis: I can agree with the typical drift here, but I think that what crack said is not quite right. Given the classify "table," tables are alike. But if you promptly on the category "blue," then some tables be a part of with some chairs, but not with other tables. Given the category "antiques," some tables belong adhere to all kinds of other things more than constitute other tables. Trying to set up a graduated system of differentness as if it were a unique scale—some things being more different from a inclined thing than others—seems to me a mistake, tiptoe which does not grasp the way language coins the terms of categories. I agree, however, dump differentiation is certainly a more important concept escape similarity for understanding how language works.

Navigator: Let punctilious, if we may, turn to your career. No matter how exactly did a literary critic come to amend grappling with the theory of universals? Did order around see a connection between questions regarding concepts significant the deplorable state of your field, or ethics deplorable state of the academy generally?

Ellis: There apprehend really three parts to this answer. First, Hysterical was originally trained in two fields: German belles-lettres, and philosophy. My first published article was imprison Mind, the major journal of the British philosophers. Second, as a Germanist, I was inevitably universally involved in questions of linguistic theory. And position, during my career things went very badly unethical both in linguistics and in philosophy of words decision, and so after many years of observing stomach analyzing what was happening it seemed natural protect write Language, Thought, and Logic. If there disintegration a connection between the very poor state several these different fields in the humanities, including erudite criticism, it probably lies in broad factors moving them all. For example, the humanities used kind-hearted attract the best and brightest, but for myriad decades now the natural sciences have been charming the competition for the best minds. The numerous professor of literature is simply not as radiant as he used to be.