SOURCE: A review of After Bakhtin, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 4, Autumn, 1991, p. 780.

In the following review, Quinlan offers a favorable assessment of After Bakhtin.

A remark in the introduction to David Lodge’s quite excellent new book—or rather collection of occasional essays, all of which have been influenced in some way or other by Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the novel—appears to deconstruct immediately the pieces that follow: “Though I intend to go on writing literary criticism [after his recent retirement from the University of Birmingham], I doubt whether it will be ‘academic’ in the way most of the essays included in this book are academic.” Why not? Because, without the “institutional stimuli, satisfactions and incentives” of university life, “a lot of academic literary criticism and theory—the kind published in learned journals and by American university presses—frankly no longer seems worth the...