Art and Its Effect
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It is wrong for Chuck Lane to suggest that Aliza Schvarts's provocation reflects "standard fare in the humanities" at universities today ["The Art of Folly at Yale," op-ed, May 3].
Most courses offered at any institution remain oriented toward "canonical" texts with emphases on traditional interpretive methodologies. Of the more than 50 classes this year in Yale's literature department -- long a seat of radical approaches to the field -- titles such as "Dante in Translation" and "Faust and the German Tradition" surface much more frequently than courses espousing the "unrelenting critique not just of contemporary society but of meaning itself" that Mr. Lane decries.
Ms. Schvarts's piece is lamentable, and her description of it challenges the boundaries of intelligibility, but the real impact of "subversive" thinking in the academy has been an expansion of our tools for understanding the common inheritance of humanity, not its destruction. My experiences in Yale's directed studies program and in my subsequent academic life (Oxford, Frankfurt, Chicago) have borne this out repeatedly.
LOREN GOLDMAN
Chicago
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Regarding Jacob M. Appel's May 8 letter to the editor, "The Value of Controversial Art":
Comparing the works of Édouard Manet and Marcel Duchamp to a grisly display of self-mutilation involving induced miscarriages not only is intellectual fraud but also betrays the same sick mind-set of the "artist" involved. Just because such a sociopathic display elicits an inevitable reaction does not make it art.
BRAD MORRIS
Astoria, N.Y.
