Extract
Why Real the Classics?
WHY READ THE CLASSICS?
By Italo Calvino. Translated by Martin McLaughlin. Pantheon. $26. Although I heard a National Public Radio commentator this very morning respectfully note that it was Derrida's sixty-ninth birthday, the prestige of poststructuralism seems, in some quarters at least, to be waning. The ugly, opaque language; the labyrinthine indirection; the prevailing mood of glumness, smugness, or indignation in so much recent literary criticism--these are beginning to lose, if not their far-reaching influence, then at least their charm. The pendulum is swinging at least partway back toward pleasure; but given the protean nature of literature and those who st...See the full content of this document
