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DECONSTRUCTION FOR THE MASSES

Romance.'', David Lodge, David Lodge, who teaches English literature at the University of Birmingham, England, is the author of the recent novel ''Small World: An Academic

1985

Overview

The pieces are, however, by no means uniformly, or even mostly, easy. The nonspecialist reader of ''Reflections on French Romanticism,'' for instance, a densely packed and allusive survey, is likely to feel a pang of sympathetic identification with the ''hero of consciousness'' defined there as ''a solitary haunted by vast conceptions in which he cannot participate''; and the film buff who doesn't know the work of the 20th-century Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and in particular his view of carnival, may be more baffled than enlightened by the observation that, ''Though [Alfred Hitchcock] . . . leads us back to a transcended or obsolete form, in particular the silent movie and its rural vestiges, what he wishes to carry over is their economy of means, which is the opposite of a carnivalistic catharsis.'' There is an element of competitive self-display, endemic to the Yale style of criticism, that Mr. [Geoffrey H. Hartman] either cannot or will not forgo.

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