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the role of subversives or at least revolutionaries without, however,
ever defining clearly what the present system would be replaced with.
It
must be obvious that all this talk about liberation and destroying
hegemony is totally theoretical. There is no basis in society for this
assumed revolution, and in practice it all favors only Marxism and
the Soviet Union, as no other alternative is offered.
Stanley Corngold's
The Fate of the Self
(Columbia University
Press, 1986) is a most ambitious, sophisticated and learned attempt
to defend the concept of the self against the arguments for the loss of
the self of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. Stanley Corngold argues
that these writers did not encourage the sort of divestiture of the self,
but actually uses them for evidence of the self which is not, he empha–
sizes, a mere metaphor or fiction. Literature, and particularly German
literature, becomes for him the main source for evidence of the self.
He argues at length that it is not from the conflict between self and
society, but rather from a sense of "an original estrangement that the
German soul draws its sense of life." The book has chapters on Hol–
derlin, Dilthey's poetics of force, the self and subject in Nietzsche,
Thomas Mann as a reader of Nietzsche, Kafka's narrative perspective,
Freud as literature, and Heidegger's
Being and Time
and its implica–
tions for poetics.
In
this context it is impossible to give an adequate
idea of this learned and subtle book which, rather oddly, has the sub–
title "German Writers and French Theory," though French theory
comes in only via references to Lacan and Derrida and strangely def–
erential discussions of some French articles on Holderlin .
Geoffrey H. Hartman's
Easy
Pieces
(Columbia University Press,
1985) is a collection of miscellaneous essays, many of which have
nothing to do with criticism, but concern film and psychoanalysis.
The two pieces on contemporary criticism, "Wild, Fierce Yale" and
"Reconnoitering Chaos: A Statement on Contemporary Criticism,"
are defenses of deconstructionism as a "movement necessary for the
survival of literary studies" as it has a "recuperative and truly con–
servative strength." Mr. Hartman has good things to say for de–
construction as a rhetorical technique which finds everywhere un–
decidables and embraces the argument that there is no distinction
between an artistic text and any other, in order to plead for an
equality of criticism and literary creation. While one may grant him
these virtues of deconstructionism, he does not at all counter the
main objections, not against the creative element in criticism, but
against the destructive theories about the death of the author, the
complete denial of any correctness of interpretation, and the ex-
