Well now, Jim, you may call it literary theory if you like. But count me out. I wasn't making any sort of critical point. I was simply saying I liked Salinger's stuff when he was telling me engaging stories about memorable characters. And found him unpersuasive when he waxed windily with drugstore versions of Eastern philosophy. I haven't the smallest inclination to defer to anyone else for advice on how I should read or understand a piece of fiction. And I've an even smaller inclination to put some academic or critic's view before whatever the writer himself may have chosen to tell me. (Such English literary friends as I have tell me, incidentally, that this strange arrogation of the critic to a place of equal authority to that of the writer is one of those weird French conceits which have been enthusiastically embraced by the American academic establishment - I hope not for their own self-serving reasons. I can well believe it, though, having been told on at least two other mailing lists by contributors with American .edu addresses that the critical function in literature is more or less indistinguishable from the creative. What a cheek.) By the way, I don't accept your analogy between first-aid & literary appreciation. Professional criticism is really much closer to pathology than medicine. If I had to chose between having my wounds bandaged by Sister in Casualty & some formalin-smelling lecturer in morbid histology fresh from the morgue, I know which one I'd chose. The one feature medicine *does* have in common with academic criticism is an enslavement to fashion. Remember Proust's description of the discipline as `a compendium of successive & contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners..' Scottie B.