What I'm noticing

 I've had to read a lot of things outside of my own subfield lately, for a top-secret project.  Here's what I'm noticing:

Not a lot of attention to poetry or poetics. With other genres (novel) the attention is usually on content, not on narrative technique or style. There's not a lot of attention to aesthetics. Where an aesthetic dimension enters, it enters under suspicion. 

Maybe a related factor: I'm not seeing much use of theory, either. 

I don't see much intellectual brilliance. This might be related to the lack of attention to aesthetic detail and to theory.  

I think I'm eccentric, off-center for my field. It could be a feature of when I entered the field: we were all defined as specialists in a genre (poetry, novel, drama) and wanted to be theoretical and brilliant. Many of us wrote dissertations on a single poet or novelist.