the wooden tongue

Christopher Hitchens turns in a caustic and clever review of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism:

The French, as it happens, once evolved an expression for this sort of prose: la langue de bois, the wooden tongue, in which nothing useful or enlightening can be said, but in which various excuses for the arbitrary and the dishonest can be offered. ''The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism'' is a pointer to the abysmal state of mind that prevails in so many of our universities. In another unconsciously funny entry, on the Kenyan Marxist Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Nicholas Brown appears to praise his subject for a postcolonial essay entitled ''On the Abolition of the English Department.'' Like the other contributors to this shabby volume, Brown ought to be more careful of what he endorses. The prospect of such an abolition, at least in the United States, becomes more appetizing by the minute.

Via Maud Newton