Richard Ohmann is, by his own accounting, one of the celebrity Marxists who are being paid rather handsomely these days to subvert the university from within. Although he admits that he waited to become a radical until after securing tenure at Wesleyan University, Ohmann has atoned for his early timidity. In the past two decades he has been a leading figure in the campaign to radicalize literary studies in America. In 1968 he joined in the Putsch on the Modern Language Association. At the MLA convention that year, anti-war radicals were arrested in a scuffle in the lobby of a New York hotel, one of those arrested was subsequently elected second vice-president, and the national guild of literary scholars adopted resolutions pledging to resist the government’s efforts to conscript students and demanding an immediate end to the war in Vietnam. It was Ohmann who nominated Marxist scholar Louis Kampf for the vice-presidency and Ohmann in his capacity as editor of College English who served as chief apologist for the events at the MLA. Others as well as he have dated the escalating politicization of English studies from this first radical coup.

Since that time Ohmann has published English in America (1976), an examination of the various ways in which English departments contribute to the military-industrial complex; and now he has come forth with Politics of Letters, a miscellany of essays, lectures, scholarly papers, and talks to teachers. The present volume is the fruit of more than