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With our strong historical roots and our field 's commitment to logic and clarity , high standards of argumentation , and textual evidence , we are in a position to take advantage of the contributions of the new critical methodologies without falling into some of their worst excesses : jargon , pretentious and inflated rhetoric , obscurantism , solipsism , and removal from the moral and social concerns that have been such an important part of literary study of the Classics , from Aristophanes ' Frogs through Plutarch and the Neoplatonists , and on to today . A numbness paralyzes the arts , high and low , pretentious and proletarian , from the work of the supplicating grantees of government largesse to that of the plutocrats of rock and rap .