Volume 43, Number 10 · June 6, 1996

How to Read a Book

By Robert Darnton
Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer
by Roger Chartier

University of Pennsylvania Press, 128 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Shakespeare, the King's Playwright: Theater and the Stuart Court, 1603-1613
by Alvin Kernan

Yale University Press, 230 pp., $27.50

This hymn to the dead, white, male poet was written by the former minister of culture in Romania. It tells us something about postcommunism in Eastern Europe—and, by implication, about ourselves in the West. Such a poem could never be written in the United States today. Here we have postmodernism. And in its wake, like so many secondary storms stirred up by the general change in climate, we have jeremiads raining down on the humanities.



Review, 6325 words

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