ABSTRACT
The "comedia wars" to which the author's title refers are those battles on the Anglo-Hispanic front of the culture wars, where theoretical fire has been concentrated on the virtually perfect target provided by what has come to be called by its detractors "Parkerian neo-Thomist ethical thematic structuralism". To secure a place in the expanding world of academia in the 1960s, literary studies had to become "scientific," had to produce "research." A fundamental premise of the New Criticism was that the work was the center of our interest, the assumption being that its enduring appeal meant that it had something important to communicate. Parker's "method" provided a pseudo-scientific system that could be used to produce simulacra of research in the analysis of comedias. The New Critical presumption of unity in a classic that so exercises Malcolm Read is simply a provisional recognition of its authority relative to that of the critic; it expresses a kind of minimal critical humility.
