In recent years, Garber's appetite for the rigors of theory seems to have diminished. The books have kept coming, but the italics-heavy meditations and the recherche terminology have receded. One rather thought that with this relentlessly cute disquisition on the bond between humans and canines, Garber had descended as far into the realm of perky banality as she was going to descend. But she's been there, done that. Real estate is sexy, don't you know.
Open houses are like mixers.
Waiting for a prospective buyer to make an offer is like waiting for your date to call you. Even dim undergraduates who had not made it all the way through Of Grammatology could stump up some headline-writer jokes and hope to pass them off as polysemic jouissance . Now that subverting metaphysical hierarchies no longer yanks Garber's chain, the wretched propensity for wordplay is all that remains of her former method. And so it goes on. The lasting legacy of Barthes and Derrida and all those terrifically sensual French feminists is not, it turns out, the subversion of the humanities as we know them.