Reviews for Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities

The average rating for Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-10 00:00:00 Paul Sidebottom This is an interesting collection of essays written in response to media criticism of liberal education in America in the 1990s. It's a mixed bag - I found Frank Letricchia's essay to be self-indulgent and a bit dull, while Harold Bloom's interview was a slightly infuriating mix of concise erudition and willed obtuseness (it's hilarious though, and has some interesting biographical details about Bloom's early life). Enjoyed Judith Frank's essay 'In the Waiting Room' very much. Also Michael Berube's 'Discipline and Theory' - these two both offered very reasoned and intelligent and likeable defences of deconstruction and feminist theory and of 'ideological' approaches to criticism more generally. Found Richard Rorty's essay 'Trotsky and the Wild Orchids' quite liberating - Rorty argues that you can get your aesthetic jollies any old how, and don't need to worry about any 'alignment' between taste and politics (music to the ears of anyone on the left who's an aesthete and can't seem to help it). Rorty's interest in Pragmatism is borne out later in the book in Richard Poirier's essay 'Pragmatism and the Sentence of Death', which I thought was great (Poirier understands how writers *work*), and which brought me to a new way of thinking about certain Modernists and their relationship to the nineteenth century (also confirms my growing suspicion that William James is quite amazing and that I need to read him properly soon). Good to read these essays after the fact when the hysteria about 'political correctness' has died down a bit, and to realise how much of my own education was marked by the intellectual revolts of the late sixties on, in ways I'm grateful for. So much of what was contentious is now so much part of the scene it's hard to imagine the furore. But this book gives a good picture.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-08 00:00:00 John Smith Loved it! I'll try and concoct an appropriate review.