Terence Hawkes

John Sturrock (LRB, 16 July) is quite right and his account of the delusions of poor Sokal and poor Bricmont gets to the heart of the matter. Their confident belief in a readily-graspable distinction between ‘discourse and language’ on the one hand and the ‘facts’ to which these refer on the other, indicates simple-mindedness of a rare perfection. No doubt Sokal finds it acceptable that his...

According to James Wood, Iris Murdoch just ‘knows’ that Shakespeare and Tolstoy are great artists (LRB, 1 January). The ‘strange, quasi-philosophical circularity’ of this view quite dazzles him. In my experience, it’s the sort of judgment undergraduates come up with all the time. One’s own marginal comments tend to be shorter, and ‘quasi-philosophical’ is not usually among them. What’s...

Frank Kermode’s defence of Harold Bloom’s ‘Western canon’ against those who regard it merely as ‘an instrument of cultural, hence political, hegemony’ is characteristically winsome (LRB, 22 December 1994). I’m less sure about his recommendation of Coriolanus as a transparently appropriate text for 15-year-olds. Over the years, this play has persistently attracted the peddlers of a variety...

Loved Stanley Fish’s notion that the work of academics can’t be transformed into the currency of politics (LRB, 10 June). I promise not to mention the likes of Norman Holmes Pearson, professor of English at Yale and one-time head of X-2, the counter-intelligence branch of the American OSS (later the CIA). Or Sir John Masterman, eminent Oxford historian and developer of the ‘double cross system’...

SIR: You might suggest to Graham Hough (LRB, 17 October) that his monumental world-weariness prevents him from recognising one of the major reasons for the broad appeal of critical theory in some institutions of higher education: underfunded library facilities and the absence of other features which no doubt he would consider essential to the life of the civilised mind. Posh institutions, such as the...