Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Friday, January 14, 2022 at 5:00:24 AM UTC-5, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:
>> Not as far off-topic as some of the junk that gets posted, as it does
>> concern teaching of English, but not fully on-topic either, as it's not
>> about usage.
>>
>> I'm interested in finding an authoritative source of information about
>> a controversy at the beginning of the 1970s. As it's been a long time
>> since I read about it, my memory is doubtless inaccurate in some
>> respects, but it was something like this.
>>
>> Atkinson was a junior lecturer (still on probation, I think) in the
>> English Department at Cambridge. His contract was not renewed because
>> his colleagues didn't like the way he was using his position to
>> inculcate structuralism in his students rather than teaching them about
>> English literature. His supporters claimed that this was a disgraceful
>> scandal; others thought it was common sense.
>>
>> Years afterwards, around 1980, I think, David Lodge (a colleague of
>> mine at the time, though we didn't know each other) wrote about it in a
>> journal of literary criticism. He described structuralism as the most
>> important intellectual movement of the post-war period, and lamented
>> that apart from the Atkinson affair it had passed completely unnoticed
>> by the British press.
>>
>> It seemed to me that to call a passing fashion in literary criticism
>> the most important intellectual movement of its time, a time that had
>> seen huge advances in physics, medicine, biochemistry, genetics,
>> evolutionary theory, etc., indicated such a blinkered view of
>> intellectual life that it could not be taken seriously. Before that I
>> had already found that although I had enjoyed some of David Lodge's
>> novels I had found his "serious" writing to be so boring as to be
>> unreadable. This episode just confirmed that.
>>
>> Anyway, does anyone remember this episode and, in particular, David
>> Lodge's assessment of it?

___________________________(then, PTD comments: )

> I have never heard of it, but your ignorant assessment of the importance
> of structuralism in the intellectual world of the 20th century is appalling..
> IIRC C. P. Snow was concerned that the intellectual world knew too little
> of the hard sciences, but this shows that his coin had two sides.

> Check out your own countryman Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roman Jakobson.

note to self. ACB knows little about structuralism , Saussure, and such matters.
(is lit crit his weak point?)