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While some of the contributors bracingly point out the strengths as well
as the problem areas within their subjects, too many function merely as
cheerleaders Uean-Michcl Rabate on Derrida and Barthes) or as nags
(Walter Kalaidjian's grousing about Susan Sontag's insufficient attention
to
"the representation of gender, race, and class").
Furthermore, a work created by committee is almost guaranteed to
be subjected to the by-now all too familiar compromises of contempo–
rary academic consensus-building: the token affirmative action gestures to
include as many representatives of sexual, social, and cultural fringe
groups and minorities as possible; the obligatory coverage of certain
"name" academics (in this case, Canadian and American ones) who
themselves serve as advisors and consultants and whose good will needs to
be secured for the project to go forward; and the general overemphasis
on trendy movements, issues, and figures at the expense of those not cur–
rently hot.
The Johlls Hopkins Guide
tells a reader as much about who's
in and who's out on North American college campuses (and who's on
the A-list and who's not at editorial board meetings) as it does about
what will still matter in fifty or a hundred years. That explains some of
the more eccentric editorial choices: the fact that space is devoted to ex–
tended, individual articles on Australian Theory and Criticism, M. H.
Abrams, W. H. Auden, Canadian Theory and Criticism, Film Theory,
Margaret Fuller, Rene Girard, Thomas Kuhn, Lesbian Theory and
Criticism,
J.
Hillis Miller, Charles Sanders Peirce, Adrienne Rich, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Madame de Stael, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf
and Mary Wo ll stonecraft, but that there are no entries on Louis
Althusser, Leo Bersani, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas De Quincy, Denis
Donoghue, Terry Eagleton, Max Horkheimer, William james, Randall
jarrell, Frank Kermode, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Richard Poirier,
Pragmatism, A. W. Schlegel, F.
C.
S. Schiller, john Searle, George
Bernard Shaw, or Constantin Stanislavski. Who says academics aren't
fashion conscious?
But these are quibbles. One more or less tendentious, rebarbative, or
slipshod entry, or advisory board vote-buying inclusion or exclusion
doesn't ultimately matter. What is most disturbing about
The Johns
Hopkins Guide
is not its superficial eccentricity or its unevenness, but, at a
deeper level, its frightening uniformity. Approximately half of the vol–
ume is devoted to twentieth-century critics and critical theories, and in
entry after entry (with only the fewest of exceptions) there is a near
unanimity of critical values, assumptions, and methods. Notwithstanding
the lip- service paid to "diversity," "otherness," and "heterogeneity," and
the unending genuflections in the direction of resisting "hegemonic" and
"dominant" forms of discourse, it is clear that almost everyone (both
