Gallop's work is precisely what's wrong with modern literary criticism. Rather than explicating Lacan, providing an interpretation of Lacan useful to those not willing to sift through the myriad volumes of Lacan's writings, Gallop instead focuses on proving how clever she is, how she can excise a text with the best of them. However, all her semantic exercises lead the reader nowhere. She clearly knows her subject matter, for which i assign two stars to the work, but the work itself is useless fluff. I can only assume Gallop wrote this to further her career at some univeristy. I wonder, however, when she was writing this, if a moment passed where she doubted if she even cared. I know i didn't. All those years of study, all that time disecting Lacan in French, and Gallop can do no better than this? Perhaps, though, that's Gallop's point. Since, according to Lacan, the unconscious is constructed by the Other as language, Gallop merely wishes to prove that the Other was ultimately responsible for this work.

Potential buyer beware. You'd be better served to read any Slavoj Zizek work or Fink's The Lacanian Subject, both of whom provide incredibly insightful commentary on Lacan without trying to prove their own cleverness. Ok, maybe Zizek attempts to be a bit too clever, but he's fun to read. And you get something out of his work when you're finished.

Phallus, Oedipus, and everything else you need to know to understanding Lacan. Gallop offers a very detailed examination of Lacan's works, giving the reader ideas on how to approach Lacan. The book can either be read before reading Lacan or after reading Lacan, either way it is a very helpful book.

I could not agree more that this is "shrill, unconvincing screed." I might also add that for a Professor who teaches psychoanalytic theory, Ms. Gallop doesn't seem to have a clue about the mechanisms of DENIAL, RATIONALIZATION and NEGATION. The unconscious is speaking very clearly through all this nonsense, if anyone cares to find it where it is, all on the surface. My condolences go out to her poor students, past and present, who have to put up with this psychotic pretentiousness.

Jane Gallop's 1997 tract, "Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment," is not meant to be an apology for her run in with academic and legal bureaucracies. The tract is not criticism nor critical theory as such. Instead, Gallop gives us an intensely personal overview and examination of her involvement in feminism, culturally and scholastically, since her exposure to the movement in the early 1970s. Gallop's writing is casual, even colloquial, and addresses the various socio-sexual facets of the student-professor relationship, and how they have changed between the early 70s and to-day.

In 1992, Gallop was served notice that she had been accused by two former students of hers of sexually harrassing them. As a feminist, Gallop discusses the initial strangeness in perception that this may generally cause: the fact that most harrassment cases are normally male to female, not female to male, or female to female. She looks at the history of the feminist movement and sexual harrassment as its legacy from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Gallop talks about her explicitly sexual relationships with her own professors as a student, and with students as a professor herself. Making clear that since she began dating her eventual husband, she has completely stopped having these explicit relationships with students, Gallop details the important ways that relationships between students and professors can yet be erotically-charged.

Gallop's defiance of the academic and professional establishment may come off looking like willing ignorance or wistful naivete, but an undercurrent of anger and disappointment runs throughout the tract. Gallop laments the apparent cold distance and rigid formality being fostered in the current environment of academia. She asks if it should be the province of decor and propriety to decide how professors influence students and how students (especially graduate students) select and respond to the professors who guide their development.

While there is in the tract some longing for the days of yore and this is, above all, the personal and intimate reflections of one person, it is important to remember that Gallop does not ask every reader to agree with her assessments or abide by her conclusions. Gallop makes quite clear at the outset that her goal in placing this work before the public is simply to encourage its readers to reexamine the erotics of education - for feminists to reconsider the initial projects of feminism - and for each reader to decide if and how they will allow their every move to be overdetermined by needlessly oversensitive bureaucratic and legal manipulations. "Feminist Accused of Sexual Harrassment" is meant to provoke thought and discussion - those who would levy judgments against Gallop without pondering her arguments or talking about them in some kind of community risk missing the point entirely.

This is a fascinating, jolting, unsettling book. Gallop makes a disturbingly persuasive (and entertaining) case for the essential harmlessness of sexual relationships between professors and students. Ultimately, I disagree with her thesis for reasons similar to those cited by the other reviewers -- despite her feminist credentials (which are first-rate), Gallop fails to see how the erotic nature of the power differential is a destructive one. It's not that she doesn't acknowledge the power imbalance between teachers and students -- she does -- but she suggests that the imbalance can be easily overcome by entering into consensual amorous relations. (As if once a student and a professor sleep together, all the elements of power are suddenly, uh, "stripped" away!) I am a young male college professor, and I see all too well the temptations in such relationships. But I believe sexual relationships with my students to be fundamentally unethical because if I do sleep with my students (as Gallop slept with hers), I am "trading on" my power, and viscerally reinforcing the notion that for young women sexuality is an appropriate means of getting what you want.

I am glad that most professors are not like Jane Gallop. I am grateful, however, that we HAVE Jane Gallop -- and I sense, whatever her ethics, that she truly must be a marvelous teacher. I reject her thesis, but I applaud her daring and recommend this book enthusiastically, especially to graduate students and younger faculty!