Our colleague, Ernest Old, expounds
  To first year ‘kids’ upon
Metadiegetic discourse
  In Dickens and in Donne.

He thinks he’ll make a Chair before
  He’s thirty-eight or so;
His latest work is due out soon
  On Methuen Video.

Archaic bourgeois structures must
  Dictate a bourgeois text:
That methodology once grasped,
  It’s hermeneutics next.

He’s a brand-new desk-computer
  For poems he takes to bits.
‘The author’s dead,’ you understand;
  In his place our Ernest sits.

Send Letters To:

The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN

letters@lrb.co.uk

Please include name, address, and a telephone number.

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences