Notes toward a new philology

The decline of academic literary study in the United States as it has moved in the direction of “multidisciplinarity” and “theory” is nowhere better illustrated than by “Sokal’s Hoax,” in which an American physicist, Alan Sokal, wrote a parody of “science studies” that was so effective that it fooled the editors of a “cultural studies” journal into publishing it as a straight article. The study of literature would be better served by open, explicit, arguable “real” theory such as cognitive metaphor, an analytical tool that is illustrated in a sample analysis of a famous passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.