Literary Culture Is Purity Culture

I recently read J. Arthur Boyle’s takedown of the contemporary alt-lit space in New York, and friends—I confess to having enjoyed it—quite a bit, actually. Partly this is because I love to read this type of hit piece, there’s a certain aggressive energy to it, a secularized Deus Vult invigorating the memetic commons with the thrill of a holy war. Any artifact of the culture war is charged with the sublimated impulse to conquer and destroy: it is memetic competition at its most savage, something like a turn-based strategy game conducted with words.