Once every two or three years, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the sidewalks of New York are filled with bearded men in corduroy jackets and crewcutted women in polyester pantsuits loudly pronouncing the words metataxis, logocentric, paralogic, non-referential, and hermeneutics at one another. There can be no surer sign that the holiday is over and the MLA has descended.

Any organization capable of publishing an almost completely unreadable journal can be relied upon to mount an intolerably dreary annual conclave. The MLA did not disappoint. For dullness with a difference, or (as Derrida would put it) difference, few of the six hundred ninety-three sessions listed in this year’s convention program could have topped number 47, “Representation and its Discontents: Philosophers, Poets, and the Stories They Tell,” on Tuesday evening, December 27. At this gathering—which might better have been titled “Masters of the Obvious: Or, It Seems to Me I’ve Heard that Song Before”—three of the top-seeded players on the contemporary critical circuit served up everybody’s favorite paraquestion, namely, whether words correspond in some way to reality. The fun twist this time around was that, although everybody was, in his own little way, a Derrida disciple, the correspondence view won two sets out of three. David L. Bromwich of Princeton began the proceedings with a talk entitled “Why Authors Don’t Give Us Their Own World,” in which he announced his discovery that many novels, stories, and poems describe something which bears an uncanny