"The focus of any genuinely new piece of criticism or interpretation must be on the creative act of finding the new, but deconstruction puts the matter the other way around: its emphasis is on debunking the old. But aside from the fact that this program is inherently uninteresting, it is, in fact, not at all clear that it is possible. . . . [T]he naïvetê of the crowd is deconstruction's very starting point, and its subsequent move is as much an emotional as an intellectual leap to a position that feels different as much in the one way as the other. . . ." --From the book
"Ellis's elegant and absolutely unsentimental book can serve as a sort of solvent in today's critical debates. Not much remains intact: binary oppositions, 'alternative logic, ' texts as 'play, ' and 'performance, ' are all subject to rigorous examination. In the process, Ellis lucidly restores Saussurean categories (so battered and reduced in contemporary criticism) to their original complexity. Appalled by the growth of a class of critics who appear to risk nothing when they take on a literary text, Ellis challenges every reader under the spell of new vocabularies to stop and think. Rarely has scholarly exasperation been put to better or more timely use."--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
