John M. Ellis

John M. Ellis is an emeritus professor of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His books include Against Deconstruction and The Breakdown of Higher Education.

Letter

Thinking Persons

14 May 1992

Three letters (Letters, 11 June, Letters, 25 June) reply to my review (LRB, 14 May) of five books on literary theory. Bernard Harrison complains that I quote him ‘out of context’. I said that Harrison showed ignorance of well-known New Critical dogmas (the heresy of paraphrase, the importance of ambiguity, the meaning of a poem is these words in this order) when he said that they dealt in interpretative...

Pieces about John M. Ellis in the LRB

Talk about doing

Frank Kermode, 26 October 1989

Anyone presuming to review works of modern literary theory must expect to be depressed by an encounter with large quantities of deformed prose. The great ones began it, and aspiring theorists...

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