The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism Matthew Biberman Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism( second edition). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. $80.00 hardcover. In addition to mine, other scholarly reviews of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theorywill no doubt appear in other academic venues, but neither mine nor these others will loom as large as the review this book received by Christopher Hitchens in the 22 May 2005 Sunday "Book Review" published by The New York Times.For this reason I will begin my review with a brief summary of Hitchens's evaluation. He concludes that this guide "is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities." It is, he says, a "shabby volume," filled with "leaden pages," recording in representative fashion a collective "wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and dishonest can be offered." Finally, he ends (unsurprisingly at this point) on a Jeremiah-like note—warning American professors of English that he is among the growing numbers who find the "prospect of … an abolition" of English departments "at least in the United States" to be "more appetizing by the minute." At this apparently late stage in the story so often called "the culture wars," Hitchens's comments are probably best read as a refrain of one wellaired position on the turn toward theory that occurred within humanities departments in the latter half of the last century. In his brief review, Hitchens [End Page 215]doesn't labour to prove his point; rather, he offers up in postmodern fashion a pastiche of worn tropes. We begin with the uncredited citation of Sedgwick's paper on "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," proceed to a lamentation on the absence of George Orwell (valid point, that), before he turns to a neoconian vivisection of Louis Althusser and thence to the concluding jeremiad by way of potshots (at Barbara Johnson, Judith Butler, and, perhaps oddly, Raymond Williams). Such a reception in the mainstream media reminds us that the publication of The Johns Hopkins Guidewas not an occasion to evaluate how well that volume's editors and contributors parsed literary theory; instead it prompted another round of debate about the value of theory itself. In short, is theory worth pursuing, preserving, and serving up in guides? For Hitchens the answer is clearly no; theory is simply obfuscation that purports to further a radical agenda without delivering on that promise. Though unstated, but surely implied throughout, Hitchens wants to see the academy steer a course toward accessibility and relevance. Given his singling out of the United States for opprobrium, I was surprised that Hitchens didn't make an effort to locate a positive counter-example. Of course that may be asking too much from any reviewer of this volume, a heavy, handsome affair that spans 958 double-column pages, but if Hitchens had pursued the quest, I think he would have found something to applaud in the entry for "Australian Theory and Criticism" where we are told that "Australia has produced no single critic or theorist of international stature, nor has it developed a distinct school of criticism or theory" (84). Ah, Australia, that bastion of common sense! What a pity Hitchens missed the chance to exhort literary critics to hearken less to the French and more to those who hail from down under. Indeed, the entry for "Australian Theory and Criticism" offers us even greater insight into the ideological charged reception of the Hopkins Guide, because its author, Robert L. Ross, takes the time to explain why he sees the current state of Australian criticism as he does; according to Ross, this state of affairs is the logical (if attenuated) outcome of what remains a well-known literary scandal, the "Ern Malley Affair." As Ross details, the Australian poets James McCauley and Harold Stewart perpetrated the hoax in order to undermine modernist and internationalist aesthetics; they did this through getting the Ern Malley poems published in 1944 in the then...

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