80 SOCIAL SCIENTIST peculiar to Harvard men about the latest edition of the Hauspostille as contrasted with the second edition.7 She rightly pleads for rewriting literary criticism as historical and cultural criticism and for a creation of intelligentsia a large part of which engages in active political work. But how many foundations are there in her country to finance this kind of subversive activity? Bruce Franklin and Richard Ohmann discuss the New Criticism against the background of the depoliticizing and anti-communist academic activities in the forties and fifties. Bruce Franklin's experiences in the educational and military establishments of the USA lead him to the conclusion that the orientation of all the academic literary activity is essentially anti-communist. He points out in his paper "The Teaching of Literature in the Highest Academies of the Empire'9 that the anti-communist offensive in the postwar period was aimed at smashing the radical wing of the labour movement, at expanding the American empire and at developing and consolidating reactionary ideology. In performing the last function the faculties of the American universities vied with each other in purging their ranks of 'subversive' 'un-American' elements. He cites a resolution passed by the Assembly of the Academic Senate of the University of California way back in 1950: "No person whose commitments or obligations to any organization, communist or otherwise, prejudice impartial scholarship and free pursuit of truth will be employed by the university. Proved members of the Communist Party, by reason of such commitments to that party, are not acceptable as members of the faculty.5'8 Bruce Franklin correlates the consolidation of the New Criticism with the emergence of this anti-communist ideological political crusade. But now the contradictions of the American political and social structure have assumed such proportions that the formalist critical trends have been pushed to the background. Pompous Mimics Richard Ohmann in his paper "Teaching and Studying Literature at the End of Ideology" generously recognizes the positive contribution of the New Criticism to literary studies. But he points out how inept were many of the sophisticated literary intellectuals in discussing society because of their flight from politics. This point links his essay with Katherine Ellis^s "Arnold's Other Axiom" in which she joins issue with the attempt of some modern critics to see the literatures of different ages as a simultaneous order existing beyond time. What she says about Ph D aspirants' efforts to imitate the professional style of the 'big people' is generally true about the pro-American depoliticized Indian scholars too: ^[It] reminds me of the Indian petty officials in one of Orwell's stories of Burma, imitating the officious manners, the locutions and gestures of their British superiors, striving even to outdo them in polished eloquence as they attempt to deny the humiliating reality of their own class position