A Modern Quest

AT FIRST GLANCE, ARIZONA State University hardly seems like fertile ground for a religious awakening.

A combination of 362 days of sunshine and an influx of wealthy California transplants, results in a campus flush with perfectly tanned, waxed, and (occasionally) plastic body parts displayed in all manner of highly fashionable undress. Not for nothing was my alma mater voted Playboy's number-one party school in 2002. And a couple of years ago, Maxim, that bible of upwardly mobile miscreants--or at least those miscreants who would like to deceive single women into believing they are upwardly mobile--voted Phoenix "Best City on Earth" based almost solely on the merits of the aforementioned body parts.

But for all its party-school reputation, Arizona State is still a university. And so, as much as the inhabitants of Tom Wolfe's fictitious Dupont, the majority of professors and students embrace a strange mix of liberal ethos and licentious abandon. That is, embrace the kind of environment that, at once, requires passing a feminist theory course to graduate, yet welcomes Baywatch to the campus mall to select, by measure of male applause, a coed for a bit part in an upcoming episode.

My degree program, English literature, was perhaps more exposed to this paradox than any other on campus. After all, engineering and physics students don't have to deconstruct the racist, misogynistic, homophobic subtext supposedly present in the work of their masters. A mathematical formula either works or it doesn't, and the prevailing beliefs held by its author at the time it was created hold no bearing over its worthiness. Not so with literature studies, in which appreciation for John Donne's subtle, metaphysical metaphors has been replaced by appreciation for Adrienne Rich's obvious, sexual ones.