Sentence: Gloominess

A certain gloominess -- that is to say, a general pessimism regarding literary distinction -- could be called an occupational disease of literary scholars if it were not their primary occupation. With literary form always in flux, and literary publics always on the move, the scholar's sacred duty is to identify the crises of the literary, and to extrapolate from these certain explanations and elaborations of the cultural crises to which we all, as a human race, face in unending sequence. Little wonder, then, that gloom accompanies the analysis of the literary, and even less wonder that in attending to the literary in Chinese, and so faced with the ravaging cultural crises that have wrenched Chinese reading publics in their experience of the twentieth century, the scholar of Chinese literature is occupied with gloom as a matter of course.