SOURCE: “Words Heard,” in New Statesman & Society, June 5, 1992, pp. 39–40.

In the following review, Davey outlines Josipovici's developing views on literary theory in Text and Voice.

During the 1980s, beacons were lit in universities across the land to warn the studious that a fleet of hostile French deconstructive thinkers was under sail. Numerous Channel ports of the intellect were sealed and appeasers were duly pilloried. But the bulk of this fearful armada arrived anyway, having taken the transatlantic route. A landing was easily effected, and Derida was received into Cambridge. Every discipline has had to define its response.

As a result of his deeply sympathetic engagement with European literary modernism in The World and the Book and The Lessons of Modernism (both published in the 1970s), Gabriel Josipovici was particularly attuned to the source and the strength of the challenge. But over the next decade, in the essays now...