Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Bloom argues that because the modern student is only interested in things being relative to his or her life that he or she is missing the true meaning of some of the great works of literature.

Hirsch, E. Donald, Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Hirsch charges that all Americans are becoming culturally illiterate because they are not reading the best kinds of writing.

Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Literature as we know it is dead; criticism now is considered a genre of literature; therefore, we find writers such as Homer and Shakespeare void of meaning. Deconstructionist critics have emptied literature into "the service of social and political causes that are considered more important than the texts themselves to...