Rescuing Literature: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers at Sixteen

Sweet Sixteen?

The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) held its sixteenth annual conference in Princeton in early November 2010 (program available at http://www.bu.edu/literary/). Many who attended may not have known that this organization was founded in 1993 (as the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, or ALSC; “Writers” were added in 2009) by a number of people associated with the National Association of Scholars, notably Steve Balch and several literary scholars, critics, and public intellectuals: John Ellis, Roger Shattuck, Norman Fruman, Ricardo Quinones, Paul Cantor, and others. As Fruman wrote in the first issue of the ALSC Newsletterin 1995, they all felt deep frustration about the direction of literary study: “The astonishingly rapid rise of the New Historicism, Cultural Studies and extreme forms of Feminist criticism all contributed to an acutely painful sense that the