College English - Volume 60, Issue 1, 1998

Suggests that Jane Smiley’s “A Thousand Acres” is a faithful and a “profoundly subversive” revision of Shakespeare’s “King Lear.” Argues that the terms in which the novel have been most frequently praised, no less than the case made for banning it, raise important questions about the relationship between the novel’s secret and the source of Smiley’s Shakespearean “production.”

Describes the author’s experiences as a Fulbright scholar and English-as-a-Foreign-Language lecturer at the National University of Cote d’Ivoire in Abidjan before and during teacher and student strikes in May 1991. Notes that the author experienced what education is like for many people in the world--education in Abidjan was serious and deadly.

Discusses “Quixote’s visor,” a rhetorical turn that conceals a logical gap, an appeal to frustration or necessity. Suggests that the form of Quixote’s visor, the testing of a series of possibilities, is a way of deriving logical and rhetorical inferences in response to acts of questioning. Discusses two “cousins”--Sherlock’s visor and Darwin’s visor.