单选题 The two articles arouse suspicion. The theory? The novel? Since there is no such thing as the novel, how can there be a single theory? Or is the editor some soil of monist? Blinkered hedgehog in wild fox country? The jacket identifies in wild fox country? The jacket identifies Mr. Halperin as "Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Southern California. " This is true academic weight. "He is also the author of The Language of Meditation. Four Studies in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Egoism and Self-Discovery in the Victorian Novel. " Well, meditation if not language is big in Southern California, where many an avocado tree shades its smogbound Zen master, while the Victorian novel continues to be a growth industry in Academe. Eagerly, one turns to Professor Halperin's "A Critical Introduction" to nineteen essays by as many professors of English Professor Halperin has not an easy way with our rich language. Nevertheless, one opens his book in the hope that the prose of "some of the most distinguished critics of our time" will be better than his own.
American professors of English have never had an easy time with French theoreticians of the novel (close scrutiny of the quotation from Barthes reveals that it was taken from an English not an American translation) . Nevertheless, despite various hedges like "may inevitably," Professor Halperin has recklessly enrolled himself in the school of Paris (class of 56) . As a result, he believes that the autonomous novel "is not created as a conscious representation of anything outside itself. " Aside from the presumption of pretending to know what any writer has in mind (is he inevitably but not consciously describing or mimicking the real world?), it is native to assume that a man-made novel can ever resemble a meteor fallen from outer space, a perfectly autonomous artifact whose raison detre is "with the relationships among the various structural elements within the work of fiction itself" rather than "between reader and text. " Apparently the novel is no longer what James conceived it, a story told, in Professor Halperin's happy phrase, from "the limited perspective of a single sentient consciousness. " And so, in dubious battle, unconscious sentiencies clash in the English departments of the West with insentient consciousnesses.
In general, Professor Halperin's novel-theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about. The result of all this bookchat cannot interest anyone who knows literature while those who would like to learn something about books can only be mystified and discouraged by these commentaries. Certainly it is no accident that the number of students taking English courses has been in decline for some years. But that is beside the point. What matters is that the efforts of the teachers now under review add up to at least a half millennium of academic tenure.
Rebirth of the novel? That seems unlikely. The University-novel tends to be stillborn, suitable only for classroom biopsy. The Public-novel continues to be written but the audience for it is reading anything at all difficult and unrewarding. Ambitious novelists are poignantly aware of the general decline in what Professor Halperin would call "reading skills" . Much of Mr. Donald Barthelme's means to be ironic. Of course he knows his book is not very interesting to read, but then life is not very interesting to live either. Hopefully, as Professor Halperin would say, the book will self-destruct once it has been ritually praised wherever English is taught but not learned.
Comprehension Questions.

单选题 The author's attitude towards John Halperin's credentials and past publications is best described as ______.
A. collegial B. condescending C. compassionate D. cynical

单选题 The author argues that contemporary literary criticism produced by the academy ______.
A. is strongly influenced by critical works written by French philosophers
B. is useful only insofar as is secures its author's academic career
C. reflects an unhealthy sense of nihilism
D. serves as an example of the interface "between reader and text/

单选题 The author differentiates between two types of novels: ______.
A. one artfully created for people who love to read, the other slopped together for scholastic analysis
B. one well-written and intended for scholars, the other poorly-written and intended for the public
C. those that are worthwhile and those that are produced for the mass-market
D. one that is lifeless and meant for analysis by the public, the other poorly-written and meant for the reading enjoyment of the public

单选题 The author is critical of the idea that the novel ______.
A. means many different things to many different people
B. is the result of authorial intent and interaction with the outside world
C. is a collaborative work
D. is created and be understood entirely of and within itself

单选题 The author of this essay believes that Halperin ______.
A. has created a useful and well-written anthology
B. ultimately makes valuable, if controversial, claims about modern literature
C. is a better analyst than writer
D. assumes too much about fiction writers' intentions and mindsets