"This is an impressive and important book. It gives an absorbing and impressively well-informed account of what is arguably the major intellectual and cultural event of this half-century, the coming of the text'; and it develops a very stimulating argument concerning the institutional conditions of that emergence and the challenge it poses to disciplinarity. Few of us who work in theory' will be able to afford to ignore it."--Ross Chambers University of Michigan
"This book analyzes and provides a history of the theory of the text, ' which has been a central doctrine in literary and cultural criticism over the past twenty-five or so years. This is a project which to my knowledge has not been systematically attempted by any other scholar, and Mowitt's discussion is subtle, deft, and provocative."--Richard Terdiman, University of California, Santa Cruz
