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Academic Instincts by Marjorie Garber, $19.95, ISBN 069104970X

AMATEUR can be a term of abuse, and so can professional—as, indeed, can
journalistic and academic. So whose writing gets taken seriously? It all
depends, says Marjorie Garber, on a bunch of status codes and badges of
authority that readers glimpse through the language they use.

Garber, a professor of English at Harvard, takes an expansive view of these
quarrels in the trio of essays entitled Academic Instincts. The
disputes—between literary theorists and critics who just tell you what
they liked, for example—are never settled, she argues. But their shifting…