ABSTRACT
The state of contemporary literary study is neither one of intellectual sin, as Lynne V. Cheney would have it, nor one of political grace. In 1991, debating Dinesh D'Souza on the issues of multiculturalism and affirmative action, the author traced the connections between the media assault on academic multiculturalism and "political correctness" and the deep pockets and larger ideological agendas of some of the most reactionary organizations, institutions, and politicians in America. The author argues that, in the faculty office, the relations of power that govern the pedagogical situation hold sway over other, doubtless quite different, relations of power in the general society and culture. In combination with the inherent inequality of the student-teacher relationship and with the circuit of desire that necessarily informs it, the display of the poster, manipulated and threatened to disable the pedagogical enterprise in ways that the author felt a commitment to principled contextualism and pedagogical conscience disallowed.
