A little more than a decade ago Bob Dylan was being hailed as the nation's pre-eminent poet; Charles Reich, a professor of law at Yale University, wrote a book, The Greening of America, suggesting that all our problems could be solved if we ate organic peanut butter and learned to play basketball in
jearns; literary criticism, which had given us the historical incisiveness of Edmund Wilson and the elegant textual analyses of the New Critics, was taken over by academic drones who called themselves Structuralists and then called themselves Deconstructionists and whose chief claim to fame was that they could make literature as dull as single-wing football.