SOURCE: A review of Content's Dream, in Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1, Winter, 1989, p. 96.

In the following review, Wellman offers a positive assessment of Content's Dream.

It is one of the scandals of our literary culture that the so-called “language” writers have been so scrupulously ignored by virtually all establishment editors, pundits, critics, and upholders of public taste. Charles Bernstein must be accounted a major literary theorist of his generation, but don’t expect to find his articles in The New York Times or his poetry in The New Yorker.

These essays [in Content's Dream] range over a wide number of topics: the idea of representation, the fallacy of value-free, “objective” prose, canons of good taste, and such contemporary artists and writers as Arakawa, Louis Zukofsky, and Clark Coolidge. Throughout the collection, Bernstein offers a multivalent analysis of the various kinds of political discourse of our time.

Bernstein...