SOURCE: “Miss Marple at the MLA,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4,863, June 14, 1996, p. 9.

In the following review, Showalter praises the satire of Masterpiece Theatre, but finds much of it already dated.

I was in the audience in 1989 when Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gave a dramatic reading of Act One of their literary satire, Masterpiece Theatre, at the Modern Language Association's annual conference. Their spirited performance was rapturously received by a ball-room full of professors and graduate students, battered by attacks from the Right and grateful for a few minutes of laughter in the gruelling four-day professional marathon. The rumour in the corridors was that Gilbert and Gubar were getting phone calls from literary theorists insulted because they had not been parodied. That frail commodity, academic reputation, depends on publicity, on being what literary critics as well as Hollywood moguls call “a player.”

But ah, the vanity of...