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I begin with a true story. In 1974 I was having coffee in the English department lounge at Northwestern University when two of my colleagues--a younger, untenured man and an [...]

Today, college students often describe their English courses in jargon that barely sounds like English at all. Hearing the word deconstruction, puzzled parents may suppose that their children are talking about urban renewal, not literary criticism. Yet deconstruction is the reigning school of literary theory. It is also the most difficult to comprehend, and the most controversial. Deconstructionist theory, Frank McConnell shows, not only challenges the way we think about "text," authors, and readers: It attacks the ideal of tradition, even as it raises doubts about the notion of meaning itself. No wonder it has sparked debate in and around the academy. But, as McConnell reminds us, literary criticism since the time of Mathhew Arnold has rarely been an innocent, ivory-tower pursuit. At stake in the "lit-crit" kwars are our most cherished cultural values.

In his celebrated essay, 'Defining Deviancy Down' (American Scholar, Winter, 1993), Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the alarm against passivity in the face of barbarization. He particularly deplored the nonchalance of [...]

Easily the most pleasurable and interesting book I have read this year has been Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Vintage, $13, 391 pp.), an extraordinarily beautiful, sexy, [...]

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I recently found myself subscribed--for the first time since 1964, my first year as a graduate student at Yale--to PMLA. That's Publications […]

The Enemy Within. By Michael Shelden. Random House. 442 pp. $25 It seems certain by now that the work of Graham Greene (1904-91) is, after that of Joseph Conrad and [...]

Volume II: 1939-1955. By Norman Sherry. Viking. 672 pp. $34.95 It seems certain by now that the work of Graham Greene (1904-91) is, after that of Joseph Conrad and D. [...]