John Fekete's Moral Panic incorporates three distinct literary genres: it is at once a jeremiad, a martyrology, and (somewhat less obviously) the testament of a strong cultural theorist fallen among neoconservatives. My own reactions to the book are no less multiple: they include respect, exasperation, and (since I remain an admirer of Fekete's previous work) a certain sadness.
Read MoreIs something seriously wrong with the humanities departments of our universities? In 1987 Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind set out to tell us, in the lurid wording of its subtitle, “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.” Similar messages have been repeated with increasing vehemence in books like Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education [...].
Read MoreIn his poem “La Torre,” Charles Olson remarked that “The end of something has a satisfaction, / When the structures go, light / comes through....” This collection of essays, which arose out of a symposium held in 1982 at the University of Toronto, is presented by its editors as offering (along with other pleasures) a measure of this kind of satisfaction.
Read MoreIt might seem paradoxical to propose that a book which tells us nothing about the specific meanings of Shakespeare's plays or poems and quotes not so much as a line from any of them is nonetheless one of the most important studies of Shakespeare to appear within the past decade.
Read MoreThe notion of postmodernity, though current in literary discourse since the 1960's, has during the past decade become the subject of vigorous theoretical debates involving Jean-François Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty and Terry Eagleton, among others. Any attempt to define postmodernism is thus likely to seem contentious [...].
Read More[I]f the study of Shakespeare and his contemporaries remains to any faint degree an Arcadian realm, it is no longer one characterized by a Theocritan nostalgia for past delights, or a Tillyardian nostalgia for departed orthodoxies, but rather such an Arcadia as Sir Philip Sidney imagined—delightful still, yet traversed by violent oppositions, and open to subversion from within and invasion from without.
Read MoreDr. Tolomeo's remark [that Professor Frye's approach to the Bible as myth "will undoubtedly be offensive to some"] belongs, I suspect, to that interesting category of self-evident truths which it is the duty of every responsible academic either to ignore, or to attempt to change.
Read MoreOne of the oddest pieces of Shakespearean commentary written during the past century is an extended dialogue by one William Bliss, published in 1947, which contains on its first page an urbane denunciation of Shakespearean commentators as “the ultimate nadir of human foolishness." If in this regard the book invites description as a self-subverting artifact, in other respects as well it is a thoroughly paradoxical performance.
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