Terrell,

I'm deeply hurt by the aspersions you cast on my humble profession.
The idea that academics would fight over trivia for low pay pains me
beyond belief.  We fight over VERY IMPORTANT things for little money.
And next week when everybody comes to accept MY view on everything that
matters, we'll be singing the music of the spheres when we harmoniously
announce how many angels dance on the head of the average pin.  Now,
there may still be disagreement over how many angels dance on the head
of a push pin, or on the head of a pin that holds broken bones together,
or on the summit of a pin-head, but those variants are truly trivial.

There.  I didn't use "paradigm" once.  I'd quote what Twain said about
not using the phrase "butchered to make a Roman holiday," but I'd be
violating my P.C. contract.

All jest aside, which seems a kind of blasphemy on a Twain list, I
agree that academics in the humanities and social sciences school like
fish, but their arguments tend to be over how to interpret facts less
than over the facts themselves.  To discourage any accusations of bias,
I turn to a field other than literary criticism for an example.
Consider the arguments of economic historians over those years that
Twain so appropriately named the gilded age.   Stuart Bruchey's
histories basically extol the virtues of the "American Economic System"
as it evolved then; Bruce Laurie shows the harm done to labor.  Clearly,
they are in different "camps," but they agree on the facts behind their
interpretations. And the intellectual pleasure that comes from comparing
their arguments is great. Given that our country is founded on the
belief that we have the right to pursue happiness, I'm glad somebody is
willing to pay a small number of us to engage in such pleasant argument.
 But pleasure aside, their modes of interpretation ARE important; the
debates they engage over our history are still pertinent.  If our
leaders had any historical savvy, they'd be able to see the analogies
between our own era and the period of 1865-1914.  God help us if we
don't take into account that reservoir of knowledge no matter how we
interpret it!

It may be a bit more difficult to find the value in those things
literary critics argue about, but that's only because our culture
denigrates the arts.  If we were to acknowledge that the symbolic
systems by which we organize and ascribe value to our world DO matter,
then we'd see that when literary critics disagree, they are engaging a
fundamental argument about what our culture is and should be.

But we still don't get paid much.

Gregg

p.s.  "I never had but two ambitions in life.  One was to be a circus
clown, and the other to be a preacher manque. I failed at the first
because I lack balance, but that trait made me succeed beyond my wildest
dreams at the second."  (I'm quoting from memory; you might want to
check that citation for accuracy.)