“... the present deconstructors. What he resists is the desire – recently and forcefully expressed by Jonathan Culler – to have done with the endless old business of ‘interpreting’ texts. As one whose main professional pleasures have come from ‘finding out what texts seemed to be saying as it were voluntarily’, Kermode declares himself unwilling to ...”

“... the modernist and postmodernist masters, these writers – among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in ...”

“... and political programmes now being quite stridently proposed by some – for instance, Jonathan Culler in his recent book Framing the Sign.4 Norris, no less committed but rather more critical, is less confident of the imperialist possibilities of theory, though he would like some sort of concordat with Marxism. De Man himself, with his ...”