Modern Cultural Theorists

ELT 37:3 1994 tion professionals, including academics from the working class." Indeed. Few from any background would be excluded from such a statement, I suspect, even in succeeding generations. Guillory has the sort of forceful note so many of the essays like this one lack: "Within the discourse of liberal pluralism, with its voluntarist politics of self-affirmation, the category of class in the invocation of race/class/gender is likely to remain merely empty." I see no exception to this discourse in the Tokarczyk and Fay volume, try as everybody does to make the invocation of class do some real conceptual work. Or at least work of some sort. Cheryl Fish mentions that one of her brightest students once came into her office and confessed she worked as a prostitute. Fish allowed the student to make prostitution the subject of her research paper. Alas, the student stopped coming to class before the semester ended. But if prostitutes can now be invited to discover themselves in college, and the daughters of girls who once dreamt only of business school while they read John Greeleaf Whittier now teach there, what can we say about the game of commensuration? School is very good at playing it, perhaps better than either of these books allows. The only real difference might be that today's version of Smith's mother's date would be from the professional-managerial class. He might laugh at any volume of poetry in our picnic basket. We would certainly want to call him something more than a bad sport. But I don't think we'd be very certain of the precise grounds for our exclusion, even if we happened to have read the poetry apart from any syllabus. Terry Caesar _______________ Clarion University Modern Cultural Theorists Anne Samson. F. R. Leavis. University of Toronto Press, 1992. χ + 196 pp. Madan Sarup. Jacques Lacan. University of Toronto Press, 1992. xx + 204 pp. Verena Andermatt Conley. Hélène CixoilS. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. xix+ 153 pp. All Books Cloth $45.00 Paper $16.95 IT MIGHT have been predicted. At almost the same time that post-structuralist theory established itself within the academy, backlash struck from a variety of sectors. But the heat of recent argument over the legitimacy of theoretical discourse has generated at least one positive development; for all the occasionally irresponsible plays to the popular press, the recent controversy over the teaching of literary theory 408 BOOK REVIEWS has helped foster within the discipline of literary study a new self-consciousness . In particular, arguments about the legitimacy of post-structuralist theory have instigated new attention to the history and structure of the discipline. Gerald Graffs Professing Literature (1987), Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn's Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (1992), and Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz's English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism (1993) offer one kind of example. This new series from the University of Toronto Press, Modern Cultural Theorists, offers another. In their several reassessments, these books offer themselves not as final pronouncements, but as places to begin or renew discussion: means, as Richard Rorty might say, of intelligently entering the conversation. The inauguration of this series testifies to the existence of a new and presumably large constituency of readers to support it, since Toronto already publishes Linda Hutcheon's Theory/Culture series. It is not, however, clear what shared interests have created this constituency. None of these books offers a statement of purpose for the whole series. Nor is it clear what a "cultural theory" should do—does it theorize the integrity of a culture, or does it, assuming that integrity, thereupon theorize and relate constituent elements like literary production, economic exchange, or identity formation. Beyond initial chronologies and concluding bibliographies, these three books share little in the way of organizing and presenting their subject. To a certain extent, each study unfolds in a manner that alludes to the orientation of its subject. Anne Samson provides a historical and often critical view of Leavis. Each of her chapters focuses on F. R Leavis's relation to the growth of English studies, and...