Against Deconstruction

"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