So the four most common searches this site gets correspond to the four "all time" most popular posts to the left.

Just within the last 48 hours, for instance, people have reached here by searching:
Silas Lapham,
mimetic desire
McTeague, and
Walter Benn Michaels new historicism (though I get a lot of WBMs without the "new historicism").

Now, I'm especially unhappy with what people find when they search for Silas Lapham, so forthcoming will be my paper from ALA on that novel.

But also, I suspect that people searching for Michaels often are looking for information about his newest book. Since I've reviewed it for Rhetoric Society Quarterly (Spring 2007), here's a preview and a link to the review:

The trouble with diversity, according to Walter Benn Michaels, is that we believe there's trouble - that is, we believe the lack of it is a problem. Michaels offers a particularly apt example of this troubled belief by showing that domestic violence, often described as a problem among all income brackets, is in fact seven times more common among women from the poorest households than among women from the wealthiest. When Michaels suggests that the "message of the campaign against domestic violence" is precisely a "way of convincing ourselves that the fundamental problems of American society have nothing to do with the injustices of capitalism and everything to do with the injustices (in this case) of sexism" (119), he demonstrates how we have accepted the terminology and conceptual apparatus of identity and thus lost our ability to fight structural injustice. Just as solving domestic violence has meant respecting gender difference, our solutions for problems like racism, heterosexism, and classism have involved respecting identities. Yet as long as the left advocates appreciating identities rather than eliminating inequalities, Michaels suggests, arguments by the left and the right will amount to two sides of the same coin - and it's a coin both left and right would rather pocket than share. The Trouble with Diversity is an argument meant to shift the left's attention away from its love for diversity and "to help put equality back on the national agenda" (16).

...and the conclusion:

I will end this review by considering two objections we can expect to hear to this book. First, some people will read Michaels's argument against diversity as indifference to racism, especially when he claims that "racism has been pushed to the fringes of public life" (82-83). Multiculturalists will no doubt argue that racism continues to be a problem, but this argument will center around whether or not the effects of various discourses and policies are racist whereas Michaels's point is that no one (except a few on the extremely marginal right) advocates racism. Consider two recent examples: Virginia's former Senator George Allen and Orlando Magic fan Hooman Hamzehloui uttered racial slurs ("macaca" and "monkey"); both claimed ignorance; both claimed that they would never have intentionally said something racist; and both apologized. So the argument that we should continue fighting racism amounts to the argument that we should remain vigilant for unintended racist effects (and certainly we should), but this is a somewhat different project from the multiculturalist effort to affirm identity as a way of encouraging agency, illustrated earlier by Omi and Winant's fear that an absence of "racial identity" will lead to some people "having no identity." For reasons we have seen, this is either an incoherent fear (because it assumes the possibility of a racial identity without race) or a reactionary fear (because it accepts the mistake of race). In either case, this position avoids the important questions Michaels raises - and hence prefers diversity to equality. A second objection will be that Michaels's description of class as almost exclusively economic amounts to what some Marxists dismiss as "economism." Insofar as Michaels's solutions seem only to involve "redistributing wealth," working class identification (what Marx called class-for-itself) plays little role in political change - which is to say, it's true that class is under-theorized in Michaels's account. However, as a means of exposing the ostensible left's limited vision for change, Michaels has chosen an effective approach: pointing out how solutions for diversity preclude the opportunity for equality. When we imagine diversity to be our solution, "what we're imagining is that the political commitment to equality involves not creating it (by, say, redistributing wealth) but just insisting that it's already there" (83). We know it's not, but to create it, we must stop ignoring inequality.

So maybe that's more helpful than the search results you've been getting.

And as for McTeague and Girard, I have nothing more to say at this moment.