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“... In the noisy polemical atmosphere of contemporary literary criticism, Geoffrey Strickland’s quiet ‘thoughts on how we read’ may not have got a fair hearing. His book is an answer to the philosophical critics who have lately been questioning the assumption that literary and other texts have determinate meanings, meanings more or less under the control of their authors ...”

“... If you teach or study literature in a university, the chances are you’ve spent at least some of your time recently arguing with colleagues about the uses and abuses of literary theory. Not only do structuralism, deconstruction and their offshoots draw the biggest audiences at professional conferences, but the quarrel over them has aroused the curiosity of mass journals like Newsweek ...”

“... would be left with the Oxford Book of English Verse, gentleman scholars and no students. Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature is another Condition of English book, but one which comes out of a different system and reaches more pugnacious conclusions. How, Graff asks, did American literary studies get into ...”

“... professors have risen to dizzying new heights. Enter Professor Bromwich stage right and Professor Graff stage left. Confronted with the political morality play of John and Carol, Bromwich would hardly be surprised: he abhors everything that has to do with the ‘group thinking’ of his subtitle. He and Mamet seem to be on the same wavelength, except that ...”

“... The state of chronic hypochondria in which literary education subsists shows no sign of abating. Indeed, in some quarters it is entering an acute phase. Regular and formerly healthful activities lose their zest, attacked by morbid depression of spirits. The milder forms of therapy effect little improvement, and a battery of fantastic remedies is brought to bear, which in spite of energetic promotion do not seem able to establish themselves ...”

“... and the failure of art, and is deeply and characteristically Conradian. Following to some extent Gerald Graff and the other modern critics, Dr Erdinast-Vulcan sees things rather differently: but her clear and thorough analysis of Conrad in relation to contemporary critical thought makes her study the most stimulating yet on this subject, particularly as ...”

“... similar quasi-evenhandedness when Hartman, who is happy to name opponents like Frederick Crews and Gerald Graff, comes to speak of those on his own side from whom he would slightly wish to dissociate himself. Yet those who have turned to Continental thought or the sciences humaines have also fallen into reductive habits. A new species of coterie writing ...”

“... about the personal self, and truth and reality, and the nature of the objective world. As Gerald Graff told us in his essays on ‘The Politics of Realism’ and ‘Textual Leftism’, bourgeois society controls its rank and file and its intellectuals alike, not by censorship or repression, but by the use of language, truth and logic. By this ...”

“... severe judgment of one page earlier: ‘at the theoretical level the Moderns are simply wrong.’ Gerald Graff complains that ‘recent literary theory has become a private enclave’ on one page, then laments the assimilation of theory as a ‘“traditional” practice’ in the literary curriculum two pages later. When an academic critic is ...”

“... are inseparable from any serious thinking about literature. The fact may have a bearing on Gerald Graff’s claim in Professing Literature that the present warfare over theory is a replay of all previous academic disputes about the teaching of literature since English studies were first introduced as a university subject. His book makes some ...”

“... to them. This is why deconstruction is also open to the sort of objections recently levelled by Gerald Graff, in his vigorous polemical book. Literature Against ltself, against the whole post-Kantian separation of art, reality, and moral reason, which infected the old New Criticism in America and which the deconstructionists are only taking a stage ...”

“... scholars of American education and society such as Laurence Veysey, David Hollinger and Gerald Graff. Guillory opens with a respectful nod to Graff’s Professing Literature, published in 1987, which gave a more internal and chronological narrative of the developments that Guillory subjects to estranging ...”

“... American magazine Commentary, Michael Vannoy Adams, gives this account of some of the arguments in Gerald Graff’s anti-deconstructionist philippic, Literature Against Itself: The deconstructionists render literature invalid or ineffectual by default; they deprive literature of the relevance it ought, by all rights, to have, and they reduce criticism ...”

“... uncosmopolitan month for the Stravinskys): 11. Isherwood and Don come for dinner. 15. Dinner with Gerald [Heard]. 16. Lunch with Christopher Isherwood and Don at MGM Studios. 17. Bob [Craft] records Gesualdo 2 to 5. 19. Aaron Copland for dinner. 22. Bob records. 24. For dinner here: Isherwood and Don. 29. Lunch at Bel Air. The whole day with Robert ...”