Just how radical are all those English professors whose seminar rooms ring with talk of différance, discourse formations, institutional critique, Eurocentrism, textual interrogations, marginalization, empowerment, the political unconscious, etc., etc., etc.? What sort of threat does the academic literary gauchiste pose to the established order? In Academic Capitalism and Literary Value, a collection of essays first published in such journals as Critical Inquiry, The Georgia Review, and The Hudson Review, Harold Fromm portrays the purported revolution in literary study as hardly “revolutionary at all [but] an exemplary specimen of capitalism in action.”

Fromm does more than accuse professional radicals of careerism, hypocrisy, clubbish exclusivity, and other bourgeois failings. He examines at close range a broad sample of influential texts produced by feminists, deconstructionists, New Historicists, Marxists, reader-response critics, and African-American literary theorists. To the writings of professors Houston A. Baker, Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert, Frank Lentricchia, Jerome McGann, and Elaine Showalter, among many others, he brings what he calls an “informal sociology of criticism.”

A better term would be rhetorical analysis. Although Fromm rarely uses the vocabulary of the rhetorician, he offers a shrewd assessment of “the relation between what the critic-theorist says and what his or her texts actually seem to be doing.” What they do, he argues in example after example, is contrary to the revolutionary and egalitarian stances usually struck. All too often the texts produced by academic radicals are exercises in self-aggrandizement and obfuscation, upon which spurious legitimacy