Now, scholars who wouldn't have allied themselves with the old guard are also seeking to make room for beauty. In 1994, Rutgers University Press published Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by Rutgers English professor George Levine. Scholars like Mr. Elliott do not wish to turn back the clock, but to nudge the pendulum just a little. They want attention to aesthetic criteria, but not just a new New Criticism, which held that literary texts should be read for formal properties, divorced from the social and cultural forces that affected their creation. In the canon wars, cultural conservatives have been the only ones arguing for aesthetic criticism, he notes.
Professors also say that graduate students are restless for change.
And the faculty are struggling to keep up with them. And in an era of Oprah's Book Club and the Modern Library's Top 100 novels, the general reader wants help from experts in making judgments. But John Carlos Rowe, a professor of English at the Irvine campus, detects a generational split around the matter of cultural studies. Older scholars trained in high theory broke down the idea of universally shared literary standards, allowing younger scholars to import popular culture into the classroom. Now overwhelmed by art forms they just don't get, senior professors take refuge in aesthetics, says Mr. Rowe.