Andrew Cockburn · Big Six v Little Boy: The Unnecessary Bomb lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Reading for the Plot, because he describes how the plot in which literature and the MLA revolved was ready to explode the way the stories in Lodge’s and Eco’s novels do. The plot had tightened up and was ready to spring boy-yoy-yoing! The professors were building a movement right there on Sixth Avenue at the Hilton hotel, a new Tower of Babel, out of the plethora of interesting books, ideas, events they were churning out. And these novels convey how tightly wound up this moment felt. The MLA stood at its beating heart and provided the arena in which the contest to define what the humanities were would be fought. Or so we believed. “The whole academic world seemed on the move,” wrote Lodge. It was on the move and also in the process of being monetized: “The American Express card has come to replace the library pass.”