One of the most interesting pieces to appear recently in PMLA was Joel Conarroe's editorial column from January of 1980. In his brief remarks Conarroe gave the results of an internal survey or "popularity poll" which he had conducted on the basis of footnotes to 35 papers discussed by the editorial board of the journal in June of 1979. The results are hardly surprising to anyone even vaguely familiar with the vogues in contemporary criticism. Derrida and Barthes led the continental contingent in the ratings; the so-called "Yale School" received most numerous mention from the domestic field. Journals frequently cited included Georgia Review, Glyph, and Critical Inquiry; and among the books repeatedly footnoted were such contemporary standards as Said's Beginnings, Culler's Structuralist Poetics, the essay collection The Structuralist Controversy, and Lacan's Ecrits-to mention only those works whose authors have not already been cited.' Now although one should not be astonished by these names and titles, their prominence on the American critical scene is not without significance. What is most noticeable is the strong structuralist and post-structuralist profile; many, if not most, of the European and American critics referred to most often fall somewhere in this vaguely defined category. But another, undoubtedly related, slant is also apparent-one which is slightly more disturbing to someone who has been occupied more intensively with German literature and criticism for the past few years. The continent, it seems, stretches from the channel to the Western Alps, but not beyond the Rhine; for all practical purposes it could be said to extend to Paris or to the French border, since the Swiss writers who appear are all from the French-speaking regions of that nation. Neither Benjamin, Adorno, Lukics, nor Marcuse; not even the Romance-language scholars Auerbach, Spitzer, or Curtius-to name only those members of the last generation of German critics readily available to American readers-were referred to in more than one essay, Conarroe's criterion for inclusion in the column. For a student of recent German criticism and scholarship, however, there is an even greater lacuna in this list. No two authors, it seems, submitted an essay in which reception theory played a role. A corresponding situation in Germany for any time during the last decade is almost unthinkable. For between the Rhine and the Elbe the hegemony of recep-