The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth,  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994,  702 ps.

In survey courses on modern currents of thought in psychoanalysis and philosophy, two of the most commonly used books involving continental thinking are by

Kerney (1986) and by Adams and Searle (1986). Both of these books offer short surveys of major thinkers of interest to both psychoanalysts and philosophers. These include Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Derrida, Lukacs, Benjamin, Gramsci, Marcuse, de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Chomsky, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein. It goes without saying that anyone who wishes to have knowledge in depth of the psychoanalytic process will have to familiarize themselves with the thought of these seminal pioneers in the study of human communication and subjectivity.

A fine new book has just been published that also covers many of these thinkers. In addition, it contains sections on hermeneutics, phenomenology, postmodernism, historical theory, and matters of great importance to analysts that have been raised by authors Bakhtin, as well as by Marxist and Freudian thinkers. The new book has the advantage of offering short and relatively clear sections on each of these topics or pioneer authors. In contrast to this new book, Kerney offers more extensive chapters on each of the authors, chapters that are also more difficult to read and understand: Adams and Searle's book contains very little in the way of summaries of the authors' positions but offers instead selections from their actual writings.

The capsule summaries in the new Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism are usually clear and give a basic picture of the topic or author discussed with references at the end of the discussion. Although the book purports to be a guide to literary theory and criticism, authors are actually covered in terms of their general thought, and the reader should not be put off from studying this book by the esoterica of literary criticism. In fact, the capsules are at times overly simple and tend to