Literary theorist, heal thyself...

Impassioned, inspired and highly intelligent. How often can you say that about a work of criticism? But to garland this book with praise may embarrass Reed Way Dasenbrock more than please him, because, according to the terms of his argument, it would mean I had learnt nothing from him. How so? Well, his main target is the conventionalist school of criticism, which states that any judgement of a literary work merely confirms the values of the interpretative community to which one belongs. Hence I welcome this book only because I too believe that intentions, truth and value are vital to literary theory.

Of course what this ignores is that, by reading Truth and Consequences , I have refined my thinking, seen old problems in a new light and have learnt, among other things, that famous arias came later in an opera because so few people were there for the start. Dasenbrock is nothing if not a polymath. Moreover, since conventionalism cannot account for the internal diversity of interpretative communities, it cannot explain why I can endorse Dasenbrock's views on value while having reservations about his estimation of intention and truth; not that they are not important, it is just I do not think they are as central to literary analysis as he does. In effect, he is engaged, like all the best critics, in an act of recuperation. Hard-nosed theorists banished these terms from critical practice 20 years ago because they were deemed to mystify texts instead of clarify them. Dasenbrock's argument - and it is a powerful and persuasive one - is that these same theorists unwittingly relied on intention, truth and value even as they repudiated them. Did Derrida not defend Paul de Man's wartime anti-Semitic articles in Le Soir on the grounds that he did not really mean what he wrote? Are those who say "there is no such thing as truth" not making a claim that they themselves believe to be true? And do those who deplore the notion of value nevertheless not invoke it when they direct their students to read Toni Morrison rather than Milton?

Dasenbrock is at his best when he exposes the inconsistencies in his opponents' position. But he is doing something more important than mere point scoring: he is defending the idea of intellectual integrity by chastising literary theorists for their deliberate distortions of the tradition of analytic philosophy. And, boy, is he angry. Most of the book is calm, courteous and closely argued, but there is no doubting the ire towards its close. Dasenbrock is furious that the very professors who should most care for the humanities are the ones who have most corroded them, leaving them without "principled grounds" for objecting to budget cuts, the casualisation of academic labour or even, at least in the American media, the lampooning of the academy and its curriculum. How, he cries exasperatedly, can we complain about misrepresentation when we have declared that all representations are "false"? Dasenbrock is fighting back and as long as there are books like this, literature has a future.

Gary Day is principal lecturer in English, De Montfort University.