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ELT: VOLUME35:1 1992 generally be regarded as ephemeral journalistic pieces written primarily for money or as diversions from more arduous scholarly fare. But he is grateful for writing within an Anglo-American tradition less insistent on enforcing a distinction between Tageskritik and Literaturwissenschaft , reviewing and literary study, that German nomenclature imposes . Most of the reviews would bear him out, primarily because Kermode the interpreter always contributes to the work of Kermode the "reviewer" and commentator on the timely issues of the day. Thus Phillipe Aries's book on death provokes an impromptu reconsideration of the thanatological drama of Hamlet. The graveyard scene no longer appears an inspired instance of "the literary macabre," for burial grounds of the day would have been littered with bones and gravediggers would have been familiar with whose body was laid where. And the melancholy Dane who addresses the jester's skull as both a memento mori, a general reminder of death, and a memento illius, the reminder of a particular person, is showing the stress of transition from medieval attitudes toward more "modern" feelings toward death. All of Kermode's sympathies and skills as reviewer and literary critic are in evidence in what I feel to be the review in which Tagescritic effortlessly wanders—and remains—within the precincts of Literaturwissenschaft : his review of Forster's Maurice. He values Maurice, rightly, for recalling us to the distance between the charming, but dated early novels, whose amatory customs appear too much like tribal quirks, to the astonishing imaginative reach and sexual daring of A Passage to Indm. One can only read admiringly as Kermode strolls, in deliberate error, into literary criticism that aspires to a serious and considered assessment of what, in a work of art, makes sustained claims on our imagination. Maria DiBattista _________________________ Princeton University Post Modernism Christopher Norris. What's Wrong with Post Modernism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991. via + 287 pp. Cloth $42.50 Paper $13.95 IN HIS INTRODUCTION, Christopher Norris argues that "theory has served as an escape-route from pressing political questions and a pretext for avoiding any serious engagement with real world historical events." His interest in "emancipatory discourse" leads him to challenge the widespread assumption linking the left and its emancipatory discourses with epistemological relativism and ontological skepticism. He argues 132 BOOK REVIEWS on the one hand that anti-realism is contradictory, self-refuting and dogmatic and on the other that human emancipation needs to be connected to a realist epistemology. He proceeds by way of an immanent critique of false dichotomies endemic to postmodern discourse—the separation of freedom from knowledge, history from truth, fact from value. In chapter two, the central chapter of the book, Norris discusses Stanley Fish's claim that theory has no consequences. It is well-known that Fish's insistence on defining the object of interpretation as the product of the dominant interpretive community has sanctioned a glorification of professionalism. For Fish, all criticisms of the profession, all meta-level inquiries, are misguided and doomed to failure—that is to say, they can make no difference. Cheerfully, he even admits this applies to his own discourse—it makes no difference whether we give up doing theory or not since "we believe what we believe (or reject what we do not believe) on the basis of convictions that are always already in place." Behind Fish's no consequence argument is an argument against realism. Realism becomes equated with the possibility of some ultimate standpoint outside of theory from which theories could be judged. For pragmatists like Rorty and Fish, "there is no question of scientists—or anyone else—coming up against evidence that their theories are basically unsound, or that their findings necessitate some large-scale revision of the paradigm currently in place." Change means just a change in our "final vocabulary." That theory change might entail a deeper understanding of reality is rejected as assuming "a standpoint of ultimate truth outside and above the various discourses." With the help of the Marxist philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar, Norris argues that Fish's arguments depend on dubious assumptions about truth: "Where the pragmatists go wrong is in equating all talk...

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