Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction, and: Surface Tension (review)

reviews 129 lit into and alter our picture of de Man. The strength of the collection. I think, is that it offers no easy solutions. Although a hopeless task dealing with a collection of this size. I would note a number of theses that recur through it. First, everyone, without exception, finds the wartime writings to be bad, condemnable, evidence of a degree of collaboration. Second, while granting the problems with the early writings, many of the essays question the connection to de Man's later writings and find them to have a limited bearing at best (for instance, see the essays by Allan Stoekl and Sandor Goodheart). Third, implicitly, the collection calls to read de Man all the more, rather than to put him aside. In this sense, it decidedly recoups de Man. While the tone of veneration evident in Reading de Man Reading is no longer possible, it lays the groundwork for the future horizon of de Man criticism. Fourth, the wartime writings have no bearing on the enterprise of deconstruction. As Catherine Gallagher argues, part of the message here is that it is illegitimate to condemn deconstruction on the grounds of these writings. Fifth, many of the media attacks are uninformed and unjust and reveal an anti -professional bias. In this vein, Miller's essay takes Jon Wiener to task. Michael Sprinker's essay shifts the coordinates of the debate to underscore the disparity between journalism and professional academic discourse, in part implying that the real cause of the controversy is an attack on the academy. In this last point. Responses tells a distinctly disciplinary story. In effect, its very speed of response and thoroughness demonstrate a disciplinary self-policing, a way of keeping the scandal within disciplinary confines. Part of the message of the collection, I think, is to say that this is an academic affair; those outside academic boundaries should (mind their own business and) leave it to those who are licensed to investigate and talk about such things. The overall effect of Responses is to reconfirm the integrity—not just in the sense of honesty, but in a disciplinary sense—of professional literary studies. Responses marks a different moment, a different scene of theory than the one it had entered, the one represented by Reading de Man Reading. The wartime writings cast a pall over de Man and over deconstruction in general, over the prospects for its further elaboration and the probability of its governing "the task of literary criticism in the coming years," as de Man had once forecast. De Man's prediction, which seemed remarkably prescient through the early '80's, later came to seem more an indication of de Man's tragic hubris, his pride before his fall. The game seemed to have left town, leaving deconstruction behind, moving on to the verdant fields of history, of cultural studies, of gay and lesbian studies, and so on. In fact, Reading de Man Reading and Responses not only fix the date of the fall of deconstruction but, by extension, signal the end of the epoch of Grand Theory that held sway in literary studies for some fifteen years, roughly from the early '70s to the mid to late '80s. This is not to say that deconstruction has disappeared; certainly, its terms and protocols of reading have indelibly alterred critical discourse. But the scene now holds different interests, different foci or concerns, and, more significantly, a different horizon for theory. The late '80s witnessed a loss of faith in Theory or, as Richard Rorty might put it, the end of the dream of theory. The king is dead, and there are no pretenders to the throne. JEFFREY WILLIAMS Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction by Martin Espada. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1987. pp. 93. $7.00 (paper). Surface Tension by Elaine Equi. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1989. pp. 69. $8.95 (paper). Steven Mailloux uses the phrase, "theoretical urge," to describe the teacherly desire for an explanatory schema that would "outlaw" textual misreadings.1 In the poems which comprise Martin Espada's Trumpets from the Islands of their Eviction, there seems to be another kind of urge Operating—a "mythic...