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"My Russian"
A serious novel that's almost a thriller tells of a woman who assumes a disguise and hunkers down 11 blocks from home.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[07/21/99]

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"The Dragon Hunt"
In his first collection in English, an expatriate Vietnamese author tells grueling (and highly original) stories of suffering.
By Judith Coburn
[07/20/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
case dismissed
women who write using only lower-case letters must be careful about love. they'll fall too easily for a cabbie, a pizza boy or a poet.
By Garrison Keillor
[07/20/99]

Book Bag
The wild side
The author of "The Hours" picks five books from the edge that belong in the center.
By Michael Cunningham
[07/19/99]

The never-ending war
Even in hindsight, no one -- soldier or journalist, politician or scholar -- can agree on what went wrong.
By Zachary Karabell
[07/19/99]

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Woodring, a professor emeritus in English at Columbia University, has spent some 50-plus years in the fray of the culture wars. And now, just a stone's throw from octogenarianhood, he reports back to tell us what he has learned along the way. The central lesson he wishes to impart is the value of literature -- its power to enrich lives and elevate the soul. Worried that this lesson is increasingly lost on a general public that by and large feels alienated from the ivory tower, he has written "Literature" as a plea to practitioners of literary criticism to lower the drawbridge for the intelligent layperson.

He mounts a two-pronged case, first against current literary critics and theorists and then against the institutions that house them. In well-wrought and engaging prose he sketches the last three centuries of American literary study -- from etymological studies firmly grounded in Greek and Latin to the New Critics of the early 20th century who opened the door to contextual interpretation. Finally, he arrives at the current moment, when Post-Structural criticism has, in his eyes, taken a wrong turn and abandoned the recreational reader's concerns. In short, he blames the ascent of theory for encouraging professional students of literature to look down on the ordinary readers' desires for plot and character, beauty and meaning.

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It is here that Woodring is at his best. Clear-eyed and witty, he articulates feelings that have been welling up in a literate public for years. He shows how jargon serves as a means for academics to sequester themselves from the general reading public, so that readers who had once "found the literary scholars unutterably dull now can protest additionally -- and they can quote -- comically unintelligible."

The book then assails the administrative wing of higher learning. Displaying exceptional polish as a researcher, Woodring demonstrates how universities have become grotesquely top-heavy with management. Citing one example of administrative excess after another, he paints a vivid picture of universities that hire more vice-presidents, who in turn need more deans, support staff, office space and equipment, all of which raise tuition, swallow grant money and squeeze academic departments. Woodring succinctly summarizes the bureaucratic logjam: "Employees numbering twenty thousand will consider themselves collectively vital to twenty-three hundred faculty and forty thousand students, but many of them are vital only to each other." Consequently, universities have created a glut of jobless Ph.D.s, and increasingly resorted to the cost-cutting practices of hiring student assistants and adjunct lecturers to replace professors.

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