...do not read Ibsen, and in United States universities, "one or two" of Ibsen's plays are taught in courses in modern drama, but mostly as "hurdles to be got over as soon as possible" (1). But if Moi's acquaintances read Flaubert instead of Ibsen, this hardly establishes a norm. Nor is it generally true that American professors of drama regard Ibsen as a boring old realist to be swiftly endured before they treat their students to the "really exciting stuff" (1). Ibsen is the subject of many regularly scheduled courses, both graduate and undergraduate, throughout the country, in institutions of which I have room to cite only a few: Yale University, New York University, the City University of New York, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Washington, and various branches of the University of California, including Berkeley and UCLA, and the California State University. As for Moi's claim that "academic critics" do not show much interest in Ibsen, the plethora of articles in the International Ibsen Bibliography and the annual survey in Ibsen News and Comment demonstrate otherwise. In her zeal to make Ibsen an author in disfavor since World War II, Moi quotes from a 1947 theater review by Brooks Atkinson, who declared that the ending of John Gabriel Borkman smacked of "sophomoric melodrama" and from a 1950 essay by Eric Bentley, who noted that "the Norwegian's name elicits, in many quarters, a certain feeling of tedium" (18). But Atkinson's remark was a parting comment in an otherwise favorable review, and Bentley's famous "Ibsen, Pro and Con" systematically demolished middlebrow critics who saw Ibsen as passe Mary McCarthy's failure to appreciate Ibsen is more than cancelled out by the great critic Kenneth Tynan's admiration. It is unfair to Raymond Williams to claim that his nuanced assessments condemn Ibsen's plays as "dead historical monuments" (18). There is a long-running joke in England that Ibsen is so enshrined in the theatrical repertory that audiences assume that he is British....

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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