Seconded. Aside from some nicely crafted sentences I found this review only offered a surface-level critique of a book on literary theory, snide summations of s

Seconded. Aside from some nicely crafted sentences I found this review only offered a surface-level critique of a book on literary theory, snide summations of said book, and a forced element of personal reflection on reading in the context of our current zeitgeist. Excellent writing. Poor criticism. The author's critical position is also very transparent and does not seem very nuanced (reader-centric, drawing on and abiding by much of the wealth of work in reader-response criticism without qualifying any of their major tenets). I tend to formalism myself, so I am always harder to sway toward these arguments that desire to transform literature into a privileged instrument of self-definition and morality--you cannot deny that literature has roots in those realms, but those dynamics have shifted, which judging by the cursory glance we're given at the work in this review, was precisely Marx's point.