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Karl Eibl has written an energetic rejoinder to my critique of neo-naturalist approaches in contemporary literary studies. I am grateful for his willingness to discuss my paper at such great length. When I heard that the editors of JLT had asked him to reply to my piece, I was looking forward to an enlightening debate. Having learned so much from Eibl’s Animal Poeta, I was expecting a penetrating assessment of my major contentions – a chance to re-view entrenched ideas from unanticipated angles in a mutually enhancing dialogue. Well, enlightenment I received, but not of the kind I had hoped for. Eibl frames his critique of my article in a single image taken from old Western movies: he says that I treat neo-naturalist approaches as if they were Indians outside a corral. From inside the encampment, he explains, all Indians look alike and the settlers shoot at them indiscriminately, for only a dead Indian is a good Indian. As a description of my position, this would be damaging enough, but curiously, Eibl does not even object to what is being described here (two hostile groups, clashing like Huntingtonian cultures). Rather, he employs this metaphor as the organizing trope of his own argument. In his view, there really are self-fortifying palefaces in the humanities, afraid of contact with a variety of free-thinking tribes roaming the Great Plains outside. As a metaphor, then, the opposition of redskins and circled wagons, according to Eibl, conveys a relatively accurate image of what is going on. His real objection is not that I establish a false dualism, but that I am on the wrong side of some intellectual divide. I find it difficult to reply in a productive way to Eibl’s more detailed challenges to the content of my argument, when those chal-

The Polemic Animal (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Partisan Politics). A Reply to Karl Eibl