Vetted by an authority (or not)  

Mel over at In Favor of Thinking (kind of a hard name to argue with) suggests what only seems natural to a former lit student: that the Oprah-Frey fiasco can be so instructive on "the basic questions of our discipline."

My thought is that it seems likely a student entering "our discipline" today is much much better equipped to deal with these kinds of quetsions, thanks not so much to high-profile pretenders like Frey, but rather to the internet, which demands a more critical stance on fact, fiction, narrator, author. The stakes today are so much higher, because the reader is so much more responsible for editing, filtering, deciding whether or not to believe. This should make us all better readers, but especially the young. I wonder if teachers are seeing this.

In the above context it seems telling that we've had such talked about cases of literary or journalistic deception in recent years. It's almost as though a cult of the factual has arisen to defend what little surety there is left in what we read. If you'd asked me ten years ago I would have envisioned instead a kind of knowing cult of the text. But I suppose those were different times.