Welcome to the LRB podcast. If you subscribe to the LRB, you can get the first 12 issues for just £12. To find out more, go to lrb.m.me forward slash listen. That's LRB.m.m.m. Forward slash listen. Welcome to the LRB podcast. My name is Adam Schatz, and I'm here with Michael Wood. Hello, Michael.

Hi, Adam. How you doing? The occasion for this conversation is the publication of the eighth volume in the

LRB collection series of little books. The titles from a piece by Michael about Roland Bart, the

meaninglessness of Meaning.

It's a collection of writing from the London Review of Books about the Theory Wars.

This anthology features pieces by Michael and others including Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler,

Terry Eagleton, Richard Rorty, Lorna Sage, and John Sturrick. Michael, it's great to have

you here. Very good to be here or wherever we are, Adam. Yes. Michael is one of our great

literary critics and film critics. He's a professor at Princeton University. I think that Michael

has established almost a model for writing about theory.

So often, writing about theory is as abstruse and opaque as the theory itself. And Michael has

written about Ba'ath and others with fluency and elegance and a real sense of of playfulness.

And so it's a real pleasure and an honor to be here with you, Michael.

Thanks, Adam.

So, you know, Michael, you came up in a way in the age of theory or at a moment when new criticism was transitioning into the age of theory.

Am I right about that?

Absolutely, yeah.

Actually, I was interesting we should be talking about it now, because I'm just writing a piece

about Frank Komod's book, The Sense of an Ending, which appeared in 1967, and really, in its way, sort of jumped straight into the theory

war, or was a little ahead of the theory wars. Commode himself at university college,

afterwards invited Roland Balth and many others, and there was a center of theory at university

college in the 70s. So that was something happening.

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