Volume 37, Number 3 · March 1, 1990
Lucy and Lucifer
By Robert M. Adams
Doing Things with Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory
by M.H. Abrams, edited and with a foreword by Michael Fischer
Norton, 429 pp., $27.50
An Appetite for Poetry
by Frank Kermode
Harvard University Press, 242 pp., $22.50
Protocols of Reading
by Robert Scholes
Yale University Press, 164 pp., $18.95
Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions
by Jonathan Culler
University of Oklahoma Press, 237 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Critical Writings, 1953–1978
by Paul de Man, edited and with an introduction by Lindsay Waters
University of Minnesota Press, 246 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The situation of universities in societies where they're allowed to have a situation at all (where, in other words, they're not just part of the bureaucratic apparatus) has always had a monastic coloring. In the castle and on the plain, lord and peasant go about their accustomed pleasures and assigned chores; shopkeepers along the lanes of little towns quietly pursue their little advantages—while within the cloistered halls, doctors and saints carry on their internecine feuds on topics too remote and abstract for the society outside to know or care about. Every now and then a thump, a squeak, and a wail of suppressed agony comes out of the academy; but mostly the odium theologicum expresses itself in the classroom, at the department meeting, and by pointedly ignoring in public the rogues of the opposite party. Occasionally it overflows in print, as reviews, articles, and contributions to little magazines—as well as in books assembled out of these fragments, like those currently under review.
Review, 4649 words
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