Adams worked as an insider at the highest levels of academic administration for much longer than anyone should ever have to. This book clearly takes up much of the hatred of the culture wars. You can see this topic played out in The Education of Max Bickford, or in novels like Straight Man, but the topic is so much more painfully dissected in this novel, as the people involved in the internecine war are much more human than they are ideological machines, and it's the humanity that suffers in the present conversation between traditional academic scholars and cultural studies mavens.

It's hard to put your finger on why this book is great. I've always been interested in anarchist communes of the Pacific Northwest. There's research and a resurrection of one of these. Another strong interest is how sexual harassment is being used as a weapon to gain academic power by a very small minority, and how this weapon is destroying any sense of collegiality in humanities departments. what Adams reaches for is the humanity behind people in those humanities departments. It is this that nobody really dares to show, but which is nevertheless always there.

This novel won't be for everyone. Anyone, however, who has suffered through the culture wars while attending graduate school in English at the University of Washington, however, will find this book right on the money. I'm not sure if other graduate programs are as terribly afflicted as that one, but that school was a disaster in which all sense of conversation had broken down, and only single-issue name-calling, and lies, and the bearing of false witness remained, except for a few small circles when they were in very protected environments.

This novel astutely and rather wisely recounts that one battleground in the cultural wars. I feel almost grateful to have gone through that war just in order to have this book's psychogeography down pat. Novels like this take something horrible and make it comprehensible, and manage to create a sense of community out of the incommunicable.

I'm grateful. I suspect that those who aren't very in on the lingo and debates of the last few years in literary studies will have a tough go with this one and be unable to quite get their bearings. For me, I couldn't put it down. It was a powerful and tremendous book that moved me as deeply as literature ever has, and is likely to remain one of my favorite books. there were some characters I couldn't get a feel for, and some of the plot concerning the fin de siecle anarchists seemed slow, as I couldn't wait to get back to the sexual harassment case in present time, but finally the author managed to pull it all together into a very impressive ending. This book is a song of experience: a lifetime spent in academia distilled, and one feels the author's simultaneous gratitude, amusement, and sorrow all mixed together and in no particular order.

It is not a coincidence that Adams chose 1965 as the date from which to begin a new edition of his Critical Theory series. The works of Derrida and others in his School of Deconstructionism first began to make headlines (in philosophical circles at least)during the mid to late 1960s.

Adams, as always, provides a generous helping of various schools dealing with Modern Critical theory. Some background with Saussure would help, I think, as would some background with Derrida himself.

I would just like to point out that seminal essays from both Saussere and Derrida ARE included in this survey of critical theory. Background information and suggested further readings are provided for both theorists as well.

In Critical Theory Since Plato, Hazard Adams surveys the history of criticsm from Plato through the post-structuralists. Considering the exhaustive nature of his topic, Adams does a good job of presenting a balanced view of the subject. The essays are arranged chronologically, allowing the reader to survey not only a particular author, but the development of critical theory as well. Each essay is prefaced by an introduction by Adams. These introductions are helpful to a newcomer to the subject. A student with no experience working with critical theory, though, may also find it helpful to purchase a critical theory handbook, such as those available by Eagleton. Still, there is no substitute for the original sources, and Adams has compiled a useful, lively textbook. See also Critical Theory Since 1965 by the same author.

The title says it all. Hazard Adams has compiled a collection of essays, dialogs, excerpts, etc. from Plato to Postmodernism. The selections made could be called the critical pieces of Critical Theory.

I purchased this book to accompany a college level course on Literary Theory, and it served excellently in that capacity. This book is not, however, self-explanatory. You should have some kind of background in theory before diving into this book. The introductions to the book, and to the beginning of each selection are generally enlightening, but still require some basic knowledge of the field. If you haven't had a formal introduction to theory, you may want to purchase a guide, or take a course on it before beginning this book.

However, if you have a good grasp of basic theory, this is an excellent book to help guide you deeper into the field.

I used this book for research on Yeats' Byzantium poems, & I must admit that Adams presents many wonderful ideas about WBY, but he does so in a way that is so difficult to decipher, it hardly seems worth the effort. I am by no means a literary mastermind, but neither am I a terribly "slow" individual, & I found this book to be fairly difficult reading. I had to read several passages over, & very slowly, to decipher Adams' "academese." He could very easily have expressed the same ideas without such pretentious jargon and structure. All in all-- it is filled good ideas which are rendered virtually incomprehensible by their presentation. I suspect that most people who make an attempt at it won't last very long (I dredged through it solely out of neccessity). What a waste :o(