Garber (Sex and Real Estate), "a Shakespearean by training and a critic of contemporary culture by predilection," offers an eclectic collection of scholarly essays on the power and importance of language. She examines the moments when language breaks down, leading to dissension and conflict, and insists that "no matter how unexpected its authorities, how multiple and contradictory its associations, and how circuitous its path to meaning," language must be taken seriously. The 14 essays move freely between the most insipid aspects of modern culture (like the obsession with Monica Lewinsky's lip gloss) and the Big Questions of 'Who am I?' and 'What am I doing here?' In "Vegetable Love," for example, Garber looks at paintings of vegetables to show how they convey sexuality. The analysis is light-hearted and witty ("These peppers are having a good time"), but Garber ultimately treats the issue as profoundly political, because, she argues, how we read sex and gender is one of the key steps for changing social ideas. In "The Jane Austen Syndrome" she celebrates Austen's presence in modern culture but laments the increasingly minor place her novels have in the larger scheme of things. And, in the final essay, she urges humanists to write openly about "human nature" and defends the aesthetic, interpretive, philosophical and intellectual activities of the humanities. Garber's style is rather schizophrenic, at times hilariously funny and based in personal narrative, at other times profoundly serious and firmly entrenched in the thorny jargon of Derrida, Barthes and other theorists. The book does not always answer its most pressing questions, but it's a useful prod to other critics who just might take them up. 8 pages of color illus. (Oct.)
