Reader-Friendly Critics

Sometime in the early 1980s, I drove to Buffalo with a CBC producer to interview the literary critic and novelist Leslie Fiedler, who had achieved more than academic celebrity in the 1960s when he published Love and Death in the American Novel. Although literary and cultural criticism had undergone a sea change during the 1970s with the arrival of French critical theory (Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Lacan), Fiedler was still a star, his stature attested by the fact that his books were published by trade publishers and not university presses. He knew that his audience extended far beyond the professional intelligentsia of the academy, and that his books attracted attention in media—including CBC’s Sunday Morning and The Globe and Mail—normally not interested in English professors. We spoke for nearly an hour, but I remember only a couple of details, one of which would not have surprised either Christopher Knight or the three remarkable literary critics he...