Conversation Manqué: On Judging Someone Else’s Book

In this response to his critics, the author values the areas of missed opportunity observed by Braziel, Buscaglia-Salgado, and Bogues, while also endeavoring to “defend” his book from those objections that he ascribes more to the exigencies of the critic’s particular reading practice than to the text’s demonstrable failings. He uses the occasion to meditate on the psychopathology that informs the writing of a scholarly critique of a peer’s work and the tension that such a task may entail.