What better word than 'high' to connote...the elitism and snobbery that so many people at large have felt in the culture of literary studies. From on high, we can look down. Yet again I turn. I can't throw away 'high.' I want to value it and keep it--yet peel away what's noxious. Is there not something valuable that follows from revering and even trying to live with things one experiences as 'above' one--Milton? Woolf? Morrison?--from trying to get our minds around things that are miraculously good?

--from Peter Elbow's, "The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?"