Word: bogus
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With 90 pages for four extended pieces of criticism and two poems, Bogus can treat its material with a thoroughness unmatched by existing publications. Despite the small number of selections this issue presents a broad range of subjects and approaches...
...incisive and lively style, DeYoung's fast-moving argument is more speculative than conclusive, but convincing just the same. In contrast, Jacob Egan '68 does a longer, deeper, more confined analysis in a Dickens study, "Reification and the Rhetoric of Nature in Bleak House"--the longest piece in Bogus. The texture is as academic as the title, and requires thesis-grading frame of mind...
...poems, slipped in to compliment the critical articles, are partly responsible for Bogus' high quality. "California Plush" by graduate student Frank Bidart just misses being one of those six-page identity crisis -California -Cambridge poems; but Bidart's sincere, practically apologetic awkwardness saves it from banality. John L'Heureux seems a more accomplished poet. His "Three Awful Picnics" manipulates a playfully surreal death (of a man whose "head split open like a rotten cantaloupe and seven birds flew out") through three discordant, animated perspectives...
...Bogus obviously hasn't defined its future with first issue. A set of four different essays could, for instance, give the review an entirely different cast. Subsequent issues may stake out a particular part of the vaguely defined "literary criticism" terrain for Bogus' concentration. It could emphasize outstanding undergraduate essays in literary history (like Egan's and DeYoung's); print more prestigious "professional" work (like that of Gelpi and L'Heureux); or review contemporary literary concerns, as Lubin's parody does. Any of these categories could define a separate review. To expect one journal to handle all adequately is, perhaps...
With the exception of a few typographical and technical oversights--especially damaging to the effect of Bidart's poem and the Borges parody--Bogus' small-review format is clean and dignified, putting an attractive face on an impressive first effort that deserves to be continued and expanded...