David Lodge’s sprightly novels about academics entertain not least by dramatizing how “the very difficulty and esotericism of theory make it all the more effective for purposes of professional identification, apprenticeship and assessment.” But it is only in the last chapter (just cited) of After Bakhtin, his new collection of essays on fiction and fiction theory, that Professor Lodge’s comic voice can be heard as he there offers a droll tour d'horizon of the fissiparous and internecine ways of American academe. The rest of the book is largely devoted to applying the literary theories of the Russian Formalist Mikhail Bakhtin to English novels. But just as the final chapter satirizes career theorists, so the introduction informs us elegiacally that he plans to give up the very sort of academic criticism we are about to read. Thus the book is sandwiched, like a medieval romance written by a repentant monk,...

 

A Message from the Editors

Your donation sustains our efforts to inspire joyous rediscoveries.

Popular Right Now