The critics bear it away

Frederick Crews has been a force in American literary culture ever since his hilarious spoof of criticism, The Pooh Perplex, made its way onto the bestseller lists in 1963. Now, in The Critics Bear It Away, he turns his attention to the way key American novelists - from Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Twain to Hemingway, Faulkner, O'Connor, and Updike - are being apprehended, and misapprehended, by the academic avant-garde. As Crews shows, recent theoretical discourse takes a justifiably hard line toward the liberal humanism and formalism that dominated the discussion of American classics for many years following World War II. As academics have become more distrustful of the social attitudes that produced a largely white-male, New England-based canon, they have developed a dramatically altered account of standard authors - sometimes indicting them for ideological deficiencies, sometimes attempting to render their texts more congenial through "decentered" techniques of analysis.^ With relentless logic and a keen eye for the telling detail, Crews shows what is gained and, more often, what is sacrificed by such well-intentioned maneuvers. Are we really better off, he asks, with a Mark