GENERAL STUDIES AND COLLECTIONS

At the very moment of finishing this review the British Prime Minister, John Major, has denounced ‘airy-fairy theory’ as part of a more general demonizing of the inheritance of the sixties which has marked the last year or so of political discourse in Britain. It is tempting to see Brian Vickers’s counterblast to current literary theory, Appropriating Shakespeare (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993) as animated by very much the same hostility. It has been greeted already with considerable enthusiasm by those who feel alienated from, threatened by or contemptuous of the directions in which critical practices have been moving for the last thirty years or so. Like John Major, Vickers sees the sixties as the cause of our going astray. Unlike the politician, however, Vickers mounts his attack not out of a vague nostalgia and determined anti-intellectualism, but through a detailed and systematic scholarly critique of the appropriation (or misappropriation) of the work of Saussure which he argues underlies French literary theory. In subsequent chapters Vickers attacks each modern ‘heresy’ in turn. Deconstructionists don’t understand how language works; psychoanalysts are doomed to failure because their founding father is a fraud; new historicists just don’t do their history well enough; feminists (like everyone else) misread the texts because of their determination to find their own political/ideological theories represented therein; Christians and (some) Marxists – oddly bracketed together – are guilty of treating texts as allegories. There are many shrewd hits in the course of the book and some occasional touches of pure vituperatio that enliven what is sometimes a rather stodgy (and very long) text.