As we all know, criticism has undergone a crucial transformation since the advent of structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism. Oddly, although these methodologies might have been expected to reduce criticism to a purely impersonal, even scientific, exercise, they have had the opposite effect of turning a generation of critics into cult figures. The reason is not hard to find. If, as Harold Bloom proudly claims, literary criticism today “has the same status as lyric poetry or narrative writing,” then the critic has the same status as the poet or novelist—at least in the eyes of other critics. For the generation that has followed Bloom’s, such thinking has given rise to a new creature: the critic as hero.

The extent to which this view has taken hold is illustrated by Criticism in Society, a book of interviews with literary critics conducted by Imre Salusinszky, a tutor in English at the University of Melbourne. His subjects include many of the stars of the literary-critical firmament: Jacques Derrida, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller. Although there is much that is interesting—and horrifying—in the comments of the nine critics interviewed, the true cautionary tale of Criticism in Societyis to be found in the questions posed, and not posed, by Salusinszky. For it is the outlook of Salusinszky and his peers, now making their way out of graduate school and onto university faculties, that will set the tone for