Metacriticism by Suresh Raval (review)

282ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW another, one becomes aware that the genre to this date has not evolved much past 1840. Such was the sophistication of these authors in the practiceofastonishing their readers and leaving them to wonder . . . was it Spook or Spoof! Phillips has done a fine job in this study. There are previously untreated works brought to our attention. There are new insights on more-studied works given to us in abundance. There is a valid synthesis of diverse aspects of structural similarity in the stories treated which goes a long way toward an ultimate definition of the genre itself. And we are even entertained. I would quibble only over the transliteration convention used, preferring the international scholarly over the popular system no doubt enforced on Phillips by the word-processor font, and with thefact that several Russian titles are not accessible from the notes given for translated versions in the text. These quibbles, however, should not detract from a fresh and valuable work. LEE B. CROFT Arizona State University Suresh Raval. Metacriticism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. 289p. Anglo-American literary criticism has always been notably resistant to literary theory, in contrast to the long dialectical relationship between the two on the Continent. Even when Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature (1949) became accepted as a persuasive program fora theoretically-based criticism, scholars tended to see in this or that theoretical doctrine — predominantly New Criticism, of course — the logicallyconclusive underpinningfor the practical andeveryday commentary on texts. When critical controversies arose, as say between the New Critics and the Marxists, or between the New Criticsand the Structuralists, it was basically a matter of winning the debate on points, with the goal being one of the better theory being declared the winner. Raval's monograph is a "deconstruction" of such debates. Although he is unfortunately not very interested in analyzing the vigorous newer trends like Structuralism, Semiotics, and Ideological Criticism — rather he implicitly accepts the assertion (which is probably true) that New Criticism remains the privileged mode of Anglo-American literary scholarship — Raval begins with the linked hypotheses that theoretical truth depends on what your (often unannounced) assumptions are and what you want criticism to do with a text. Such an analysis of underlying assumptions insists that the coherence oftheory is relative to its premises rather than the consequence of its correspondence to the "real" nature of literature. Raval's discussion of major topics in modern literary theory like the Affective and Intentional Fallacies and Poetic Autonomy is metacritical because it assumes that particular theories of criticism are as much problematical discourses as theliterary texts they propose to provide the intellectual models to analyze. Significantly, the one contemporary theory Raval discusses at length is Decontructionism, both because his own essay is essentially deconstructionist — first axiom: no discourse text is internally coherent because of the radical inadequacy of sign systems — and because this skeptical movement has so far constitued the one truly successful challenge to the waning hegemony of New Criticism. Ofcourse, Raval deconstructs the pretensions ofDeconstructionism in the interests of confirming his assertions on relative postulates. Book Reviews283 Metacriticism is a valuable addition to the growing bibliography of essays on critical systems: the proponents ofthesesystems often engagein acrimonious debate rather than the balanced assessment of premises that Raval so nicely exemplifies. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University Michael Sexson. The Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981. 208p. Am I not, Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone? Even though the formalist tradition has long been supplanted by other critical techniques, interpretations of Stevens have continued to focus primarily on the texts he produced. Stevens himself has remained an elusive figure, an "apparition" known only as the man who lived in the world as an insurance executive while writing some of the most important poems of the modern age. A reader of Stevens's poems finds many of the ideas and...