Literary Criticism

"It's later than you think! Literary critics, practicing and prospective, had better take a close look at Mark Bauerlein's mordant and humorous 'autopsy.'"—Frederick Crews, editor, Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend

"There isn't another book like this: a primer and a polemic on the jargon of literary study, impressive in its range of examples and uncompromising in its critique. Bauerlein describes the motives of several prospering forms of contemporary obscurantism, analyzes the conditions in which they arose, and maps the terrain in which they continue to flourish. His account is written with nerve, wit, and a tough-minded intelligence."—David Bromwich, Yale University

"A thesis I both understand and endorse. . . . I agree with him when he writes that the critical terms currently fashionable have very little to do with literature."—Philip Thody, Journal of European Studies

"This slim volume with its seemingly innocuous title takes the buzz words of contemporary critical theory to task for their pseudostatus as methodological tools…The items under the knife—cultural studies, discourse, gender theory, to pluck out a few—highlight how little real cutting edge there is in current literary criticism."—Forum for Modern Language Studies

"A shrewd demonstration, amusing and saddening at once, of what has gone wrong with so much academic writing in the field that used to be literature. It is in its way a pointed and revealing piece of cultural criticism, but of the sort which that fashionable pursuit cannot—and for reasons Bauerlein's excellent little book implies—perform."—John Hollander, Yale University