But to New Americanists (and to many others) this [attention to canonical mastertexts] is all sheer ideology, false consciousness that calls for the exposure of its historical determinants.... This ques-tioning of absolutes is now being conducted in all branches of literary study; it reflects an irresistible trend in the academy toward the spurning of unified schemes and hierarchies of every kind. What gives the New Americanist critique a special emotional force, however, is its connection both to our historic national shames-slavery," Indian removal," aggressive expansion, imperialism, and so forth-and to current struggles for equal social opportunity. When a New Americanist shows, for example, that a canonical work such as Huckleberry Finn indulges in the stereotypical" objectifying" of blacks, Native Americans, women or others, a double effect results. First, the canon begins to look less sacrosanct and is thus readied for expansion to include works by long-dead representatives of those same groups. Second, their contemporary descendants are offered a reason for entering into an academic dialogue that had previously slighted them. In short the New Americanist program aims at altering the literary departments' social makeup as well as their dominant style of criticism. 2

The animus informing this lengthy quotation can be reduced to a single complaint: the New Americanists have returned ideology to a field previously organized by an end to ideology consensus. But this reduction does not begin to do justice to the density of register and tone in the pas-sage. Among the many remarkable features at work here and elsewhere in the article is the complex stance Crews adopts in relation to the New Americanists. He writes from the dual vantage point of a specialist in a field