Abstract

The book of Mackey is actually a collection of analytical articles framed by a couple of explanatory theoretical essays. He writes with varying degrees of judiciousness about critics like Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and writers like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, about science fiction and courtly love. Unfortunately, the foundation of these explorations is less than clear and firm. Mackey is convinced that philosophy at some point supplanted literature by positing a “naturalistic and conceptual” language to the vatic, dissembling, and mythical utterances of traditional narration and subsequently of poetry. He is careful to repeat that he does not aim to “prove” anything but just “converge upon a proof”. Curiously, he emphasizes with equal energy that literature is falsehood, in a kind of vulgarization of Platonic arguments.