ABSTRACT
Polemic has a bad name in the humanities academy. Reasons for avoiding or seeking to discredit polemic aren't always articulated, yet they surely include these: polemic disrupts the shared endeavors of the academy and preempts the civil or technical discourses of professionalism; polemic is a short cut to professional recognition typically chosen by those whose ambition outruns their achievement; conversely, polemic is the last resort of major figures in decline, seeking to maintain their professional dominance; polemic is a cheap, often trivial, substitute for real intellectual production; polemic belongs to the sphere of public journalism, where careers can be made on the basis of verbal aggression alone; polemic caters to the unseemly pleasures of cruelty and malice; polemic tends to become compulsive and consuming. Such reasons, or perhaps only intuitions, suffice to create an aversion to polemic, at least in the U. S. academy; they also tend to render polemic ethically suspect, with whatever intellectual justifications it is pursued. Yet it is not clear that academic disapproval of polemic remains at a steady level. During the past three decades or more—say the post-1960s decades—a trend to devalue, disavow, or, on occasion, disingenuously deny polemic has intensified in the academy.
