Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. - Review - book review

David H. Richter, ed. Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. xviii + 414 pp. $16.50 paper.

The second edition of David Richter's Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views of Teaching Literature responds to the disciplinary, institutional, and cultural issues under debate in the humanities since the publication of the first edition in 1994. These lively conflicts over the theory and practice of reading in departments of English, American, and cultural studies have proved enormously influential in expanding the borders and subject matters of these disciplines. Falling into Theory organizes these conflicts over reading around three general questions: Why do we read? What do we read? How do we read? These questions are designed to invite students to shape an understanding of their own reading experiences within the broader theoretical contexts in which such questions are posed.

Falling into Theory offers readers thirty-eight selections--twenty-two new essays in addition to sixteen from the first edition. Each of the three parts of the book provides a representative set of essays on the most formative and controversial issues debated by literary critics and theorists during the period from 1970 to 1998. There are five early selections (Freire, 1970; Deluze and Guattari 1975; Achebe, Barthes, [both 1977]; and Gilbert and Gubar, 1979), fifteen selections from influential theorists writing in the 1980s, and eighteen in the 1990s. Twenty-one of the selections are complete essays or book chapters, and the remainder are self-contained excerpts from longer works. Each selection has a concise and informative introduction to the author, with annotations and helpful notes suggesting opportunities for further reading. The second edition also includes an appendix, "Falling into Theory Online," that will prove useful for students interested in the ongoing conversation about literature and readin g on the Web.

Rather than provide a chronological sequence of texts, Richter clusters selections by topic to underscore the heuristic value of studying the conflicting views on reading literature. Part One, "Why Do We Read?: The University, the Humanities, and the Province of Literature," introduces students to the vibrant conversation about the nature and value of the humanities, and in particular the problem of disciplinarity: it opens with Helen Vendler's 1980 inaugural address to the members of the Modern Language Association, "What We Have Loved, Others Will Love," and concludes with an excerpt from Robert Scholes's 1998 book The Rise and Fall of English, entitled "A Fortunate Fall?" Part One raises central questions for humanities students, most importantly by drawing connections between the experience of reading and the study of reading protocols in the classroom. Why we read, and why we study literature, are questions that should inform every decision we make as teachers and every task we set for our students. Suc h reflections on the personal and social motivations for reading will ideally lead students to difficult questions about the contemporary value of the humanities and literature.

Part Two, "What We Read: The Literary Canon and the Curriculum after the Culture Wars," moves away from the political and aesthetic debates of the culture wars featured in the first edition toward the intellectual battles fought in their wake--over the syllabus, the curriculum, and the canon. In Part Two there are new essays by Janice Radway, Alan Purves, John Guillory, and Harold Bloom. However the second edition quietly displaces the generative provocations of Charles Altieri and Denis Donoghue to brief mention in the introduction. One wonders, too, why this section does not include other influential voices from this period on the politics of the curriculum, such as Frank Lentricchia and Walter Benn Michaels. And Part Three, "How We Read: Interpretive Communities and Literary Meaning" is substantially expanded in the second edition to account for the current debates over authorial intent, identity politics, and the ethics and politics of reading as well.

Part Three begins with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" and includes formative exchanges such as Stanley Fish and Reed Way Dasenbrock's debate over the concepts of interpretive assumptions and communities. There is a notable absence of the critical perspective of Richard Poirier in this section; however, Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, George Levine, and Michael Berube call students to consider the lingering and unresolved questions about the qualities of the aesthetic and the status of the literary that have re-emerged in the second half of the 1990s.

The second edition of Falling into Theory is an important sourcebook for readers seeking a general introduction to the conflicting views on reading literature. The anthology is designed as a primary text for students in an introductory course; nevertheless, the broadly representative essays in the anthology offer instructors a well-organized supplementary text for any course in which students might benefit from a first-hand acquaintance with contemporary theoretical discourse. The fifty-five pages of introductory materials, however, reveal the shortcomings of this book. In these pages the differences and texture of a complicated interdisciplinary tradition is presented to readers in exasperatingly parochial terms. Richter's narrative outlines a progressive historical sequence from the moral and social agenda of English studies under the regime of formalist criticism, through the crucible of the culture wars, to the period in which conflict breaks out. As Richter triumphantly claims, today "we prefer our trut hs complicated rather than simple." (8)