John M. Ellis – författare

In the span of less than a generation, university humanities departments have experienced an almost unbelievable reversal of attitudes, now attacking and undermining what had previously been considered best and most worthy in the Western tradition. John M. Ellis here scrutinizes the new regime in humanistic studies. He offers a careful, intelligent analysis that exposes the weaknesses of notions that are fashionable in humanities today. In a clear voice, with forceful logic, he speaks out against the orthodoxy that has installed race, gender, and class perspectives at the center of college humanities curricula. Ellis begins by showing that political correctness is a recurring impulse of Western society and one that has a discouraging history. He reveals the contradictions and misconceptions that surround the new orthodoxy and demonstrates how it is most deficient just where it imagines itself to be superior. Ellis contends that humanistic education today, far from being historically aware, relies on anachronistic thinking; far from being skeptical of Western values, represents a ruthless and unskeptical Western extremism; far from being valuable in bringing political perspectives to bear, presents politics that are crude and unreal; far from being sophisticated in matters of "theory," is largely ignorant of the range and history of critical theory; far from valuing diversity, is unable to respond to the great sweep of literature. In a concluding chapter, Ellis surveys the damage that has been done to higher education and examines the prospects for change.

The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis by John M. Ellis argues that modern debates about “what criticism should do” have stagnated since the mid-century syntheses, breeding a climate of “wise eclecticism” that shrinks theory’s scope to ad-hoc judgment. Ellis contends this posture is a practical stopgap, not a theory: if critics switch methods “case by case,” theory must still explain which distinctions justify those switches. He traces the impasse to two habits: (1) reform-driven polemics that keep questions at slogan level (“study the text itself” vs. “study its context”) and (2) an unexamined **reference theory of meaning** (language = names for things), which either declares non-referential critical claims meaningless (à la logical positivism) or mystifies them as beyond analysis. Both routes, he argues, block principled criteria for interpretation and evaluation.Ellis proposes recentering literary theory on logical and conceptual analysis, drawing on Wittgenstein rather than importing ready-made dogma. The practical method: begin with What distinction is this claim trying to make?”; surface the implied contrasts and purposes; then test whether the opposed positions genuinely conflict (often they don’t). Examples—“read literature as literature,” “a text is a social document”—only become meaningful once their operative contrasts (e.g., which contextual uses, which exclusions) are specified. The payoff is a theory that (a) analyzes kinds of critical statements without reducing them to reference, (b) provides rules of use rather than rigid verifications, and (c) rebuilds shared criteria where current eclecticism offers only “sound judgment.”This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis by John M. Ellis argues that modern debates about “what criticism should do” have stagnated since the mid-century syntheses, breeding a climate of “wise eclecticism” that shrinks theory’s scope to ad-hoc judgment. Ellis contends this posture is a practical stopgap, not a theory: if critics switch methods “case by case,” theory must still explain which distinctions justify those switches. He traces the impasse to two habits: (1) reform-driven polemics that keep questions at slogan level (“study the text itself” vs. “study its context”) and (2) an unexamined **reference theory of meaning** (language = names for things), which either declares non-referential critical claims meaningless (à la logical positivism) or mystifies them as beyond analysis. Both routes, he argues, block principled criteria for interpretation and evaluation.Ellis proposes recentering literary theory on logical and conceptual analysis, drawing on Wittgenstein rather than importing ready-made dogma. The practical method: begin with What distinction is this claim trying to make?”; surface the implied contrasts and purposes; then test whether the opposed positions genuinely conflict (often they don’t). Examples—“read literature as literature,” “a text is a social document”—only become meaningful once their operative contrasts (e.g., which contextual uses, which exclusions) are specified. The payoff is a theory that (a) analyzes kinds of critical statements without reducing them to reference, (b) provides rules of use rather than rigid verifications, and (c) rebuilds shared criteria where current eclecticism offers only “sound judgment.”This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

The Novelle is a characteristic German literary form, easier to recognize than to define, except as a brief novel or a long short story. The main body of this book is devoted to interpretative essays on individual Novellen. In a sense they all illustrate one central problem: the relationship of the narrator to his story, and the importance of this relationship for its interpretation. Professor Ellis begins with an analytical chapter which faces the problem of defining the genre, using an approach derived from conceptual analysis. The individual studies are of works by Kleist, Tieck, Hoffmann, Grillparzwe, Keller, Storm, Hauptmann and Kafka. This is a book which will help students and scholars to categorize and criticize an important genre, and it may well serve as an introduction to the whole study for the English-speaking reader.

Ellis's book confronts directly the most central issue of Kleist criticism: the essential nature and meaning of his work. Rather than provide a general survey of Kleist's writings, Ellis performs an analysis of six of his most mature works: Der Findling, Die Marquise von O. . ., Das Erdbeben in Chili, Der Zweitkampf, Michael Kohlhaas, and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg. Ellis draws some general conclusions about the uniquely Kleistian character of these six works which are at sharp variance with previous Kleist criticism.

A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient.Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation.Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don’t touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.