Abstract

Derek Longhurst’s rhetorical strategies don’t leave me much room to maneuver. By constructing my essay in such a way that we are opponents, he offers only two choices: I can recant or enter into battle. Actually, I would rather do neither; I agree with most of what he says and would like a chance to explore those points where we differ. But in order to do that, it is first necessary to see where our differences really lie; and Longhurst’s response does not make it easy.Granted, some of his criticisms are sound. He is right that I use the word “we” too loosely and that I sketched out my argument on an extremely abstract level, which resulted in, among other things, a blurring of the differences between American and British literature. But more often than not, Longhurst attacks me for taking positions that I do not in fact hold. For instance, he suggests that I believe the categories “popular” and “serious” to be fixed, and that my scheme would therefore shatter when confronted with a text like The Citadel, which was regarded as “both ‘serious’ and ‘popular.’ ” Yet my essay was intended precisely to offer a way to talk about such cases—of which The Glass Key is one—and while my solution may have its flaws, the rigidity of categories that Longhurst attacks it for is surely not one of them. Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Before Reading , a book about the conventions of reading, and is also active as a music critic for such publications as Fanfare and Ovation. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences” , “Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method” , and “The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy”