BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

By Richard Lacayo

If visitors still pause at People's Park, straining for a whiff of the tear gas that drifted off long ago, they will be disappointed. Berkeley, Calif., is in no danger of becoming the colonial Williamsburg of the student revolution. Grass-roots activism doesn't leave much behind in the way of bricks and mortar. What has survived is the politics that once tied the place in knots. So Professor Robert Alter, one of the nation's best-known literary scholars, finds himself an officer in the culture war over the Western canon.

Alter is president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC), a band of resistance fighters against prevailing academic trends, mainly the ones--deconstruction, cultural studies, gender studies--that examine literature for its complicity in racism, colonialism, sexism and homophobia. Alter's group believes that lit-crit obsessions with race, gender and sexuality reduce imaginative writing to the sum of its crimes against humanity, losing sight of the ambiguous and magical ways in which novels, poems and plays really operate. (To make matters worse, a lot of that criticism is written in indigestible nuggets like "reification" and "de-contextualizing.") Says Alter: "The bulk of academics cut their eyeteeth in the student revolution. They keep pushing the impulse to transform the country by transforming their students."

All the main lines of politicized inquiry converge in the Modern Language Association, the 30,000-member group of scholars, many of them devoted to grievance politics as a critical method. For a while in the early '90s, reporters would cover its annual conference as a kind of fascinating academic comedy club, where nutty professors delivered papers on "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl." Three years ago, when Alter's group came together, some of the biggest names in American letters signed on, including scholars Alfred Kazin and Roger Shattuck, novelist Cynthia Ozick, poet Donald Hall and the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky. "I don't think the MLA is the evil empire," says Alter, who maintains membership in both groups. "It's an umbrella organization. But academic people are conformist. With 30,000 people under one big top, you have a lot of conformism."

The ALSC has held two conferences of its own, where some of its 2,000 members heard papers on Dante and Dickens and reassured one another that it was still possible to discuss Auden's poetry without listening everywhere for the thump of his libido. They also try to offer an alternative job network for like-minded young Ph.D.s frustrated by the MLA job mart. "If young people didn't speak the language of race, gender and class studies, they couldn't get jobs," insists Professor Emeritus John Ellis of the University of California at Santa Cruz, an ALSC founder.

"Depoliticizing" literature is not that simple. A fourth of the ALSC budget comes from the very conservative Bradley Foundation, which has subsidized the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute as well as the authors of The Real Anita Hill and The Bell Curve. Alter insists that the foundation never interferes in his group's operations. A bigger problem for him is that ideological lit-crit is so popular within the profession. Can a small band of traditionalists hold it off? They look for signs of hope. In an issue last year of Lingua Franca, Duke professor Frank Lentricchia, a major figure in the politicization of literary studies, poured out his misgivings about "the pounding chatter about sexism and so on." Even if the profession succumbs for good and Othello is taught forever as just one more wrongful instance of white male shenanigans, Alter and his friends will still have the last consolation of literary critics. In a lot of wars, the best writing comes from the losing side.