On the Finn Syndrome And the Shakespeare Paradox.

The article focuses on two books "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," by E.D. Hirsch and "The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students," by Allan Bloom. Both of these books belong to the center-cannot-hold genre of American prose. The conventions of this form are as rigid as those of the western or soap opera and both authors adhere to them faithfully. The recipe demands a diagnosis that society is disintegrating, a finding that this disintegration results from some debilitating idea, an examination of one aspect of culture by way of isolating the destructive intellectual organism and a proposal for treatment to restore the ailing patient to health.