Garber & Academic Instincts

ELT 45 : 2 2002 play," with "Napoleon performing a role similar to that of raisonneur." You Never Can Tell parodies the harlequinade, complete with harlequin, columbine, pantaloon, and young lovers. The Devil's Disciple contains not one, but two plays-within-a-play. In Major Barbara, "characters perform roles they want other characters to accept as real," Shaw using acting "to dramatize Barbara's blindness, then awakening to reality." The "subject of The Inauguration Speech is the theater itself: actors, script, offstage associates, and even the audience." In Fanny's First Play (at over eight pages by far the longest analysis), the play-within-a-play "is permeated by intertextuality and self-referentiality that spoof the London theater scene and Shaw himself." In Pygmalion, Liza is "auditioning " for speech lessons to Higgins, who directs her to act a role that she successfully performs. In Part III, Dukore performs a valuable service in laying the grounds for fuller treatments of Shaw and metatheater. With Shaw's Theater, Bernard F. Dukore adds to his distinguished body of Shaw scholarship a work that Florida Shaw Series editor R. F. Dietrich, in his foreword, rightly calls "as complete and expert an account of Shaw's directorial, interpretative, and creative uses of the theater as we are likely to get for some time." Part I of Shaw's Theater not only brings back into print Bernard Shaw: Director, but the drawings in this volume are larger and in sharper focus than those of the 1971 work. In addition, all of Shaw's captions, some barely legible in his small hand, are transcribed here for the first time in Shaw's French. Updated source notes allow the reader to contextualize quotations quickly, and crossreferences provide continuity and organic unity among the book's three complementary parts. Shaw's Theater is essential reading for Shavians, directors, theater historians, and anyone wishing a glimpse of Bernard Shaw's behind-the-scenes struggle to make the audience believe that real things are happening to real people on stage. Michel W. Pharand ------------------------ University of Ottawa Garber & Academic Instincts Marjorie Garber. Academic Instincts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xi + 179 pp. Paper $19.95 THIS SHORT BOOK of three essays—on professionalization, interdisciplinarity , and jargon—is enormously enjoyable. One would expect no less from the inimitable Garber, who has authored volumes on dog love and cross-dressing as well as Shakespeare and cultural studies. 240 BOOK REVIEWS When a "Wild Card Committee" was drawn up in her department and charged with the duty of coming up with "exciting scholars who didn't fit into any traditional search category," no wonder Garber chaired it. The William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at Harvard herself fits, as she might say, by not fitting—and no need to split the difference, which is really what each essay is all about. Would that all issues concerning the "disciplinary libido" (her term) were this simple. Take professionalization. How different is the professional from the amateur? Ultimately not at all, Garber demonstrates, through a lively array of citations drawn from sources ranging from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the New England Quarterly. (As usual, nobody commands a bigger database than Garber.) The two identities are falsely opposed, as we see by the way they are always collapsing into the other, each either the other's adjective or noun. The argument is deft. But its life is in the examples, including Jesse Ventura, Lord Peter Wimsey, Charles Eliot Norton, Florida Atlantic University's new "Public Intellectuals" doctorate , Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, deconstruction, and footnotes. So it goes with interdisciplinarity, the book's best, most interesting chapter, entitled "Discipline Envy." As telling quotations from Lewis Carroll, Jacques Derrida, an astronomer in an on-line humor magazine, and a columnnist in the New York Times grease the wheels, Garber churns along with a multifaceted concept of envy, a clear notion of intellectual inquiry itself "structured as a desire," and a searching demonstration of the following "paradox": "the disciplines themselves are constituted, precisely, on the site of their own lack." Of course if there were too many sentences such as this in Academic Instincts, Garber would only be accused...