Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman, eds. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (second edition). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. $80.00 hardcover. In addition to mine, other scholarly reviews of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory will no doubt appear in other academic venues, but neither mine nor these others will loom as large as the review this book received by Christopher Hitchens in the 22 May Zoos Sunday "Book Review" published by Vie New York Times. For this reason I will begin my review with a brief summary of Hitchens's evaluation. He concludes that this guide "is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities," It is, he says, a "shabby volume," filled with "leaden pages," recording in representative fashion a collective "wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and dishonest can be offered." Finally, he ends (unsurprisingly at this point) on a Jeremiah-like note--warning American professors of English that he is among the growing numbers who find the "prospect of ... an abolition" of English departments "at least in the United States" to be "more appetizing by the minute."
