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I have to say that there were very few points in Sosnoski's essay that I could find any reason to disagree with. What I was hung up most on was the vocabulary. He describes the "Magister Implicatus" as impeccably male but there are definitely women who work in a competitive manner that mirrors exactly what Sosnoski described. So I'm not sure why the "Magister Implicatus" must be male. I understand that it comes from a history of opression and only recently have women become more respected in the field of literary criticism, but it is more of a mindset issue than a gender issue. I don't believe it is accurate to use the word "male" in describing the "male machine. In a quote from Sosnoski's essay by Marc Feigen Fasteau, he states, " The male machine is a special kind of being, different from women, children, and men who don't measure up," which shows that even men do not fit into the prototype of the "male machine." Yet there are women who fit the description of a "male machine" perfectly. Realizing that Sosnoski's essay was written in the late 1980s, I'm hoping that current critics of literary criticism have found new un-gendered terms.

However, I love Sosnoski's argument that competition is not even close to the best method of achieving verification. For competition to work there needs to be a right and wrong and as Sosnoski points out, "texts do not provide a factual ground to interpretive claims, that writers and readers are discursive subjects who cannot be codified... In short, in post-modern theorizing, the very possibility of falsification is thoroughly undermined as a worthwhile intellectual endeavor," (69). There is a clear trend in essays written by professionals where the entire point of the essay is to falsify someone else's prior claim. Simply tearing down someone else's argument, more often than not, is a waste of time. However, if both essay-writers were to collaborate, both minds would reach a conclusion more worthy of scholarly work and intellectual capacity would increase rather than shift from one thought to the next.

Overall, Sosnoski's essay doesn't need to be at all about gender, but it is the past work of men that have created a trend and thus competition/falsification is labeled "male." It almost seems that the entire essay could have been written without any mention of gender with words that have the same meaning of insider vs. outsider. I hope his alternative methods to competition have been put into use in the field of literary criticism (or in all fields of study), because they are by far the best methods of aiding intellectuality.