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which might be considered to be the most doctrinaire form of social
criticism, and structuralism. And I propose to focus on these ap–
proaches as carriers of the continuities, the discontinuities, and the
main problems of contemporary criticism. The history of contempo–
rary theoretical criticism might be summed up as a series of inflations
and deflations: the inflation and then the deflation of the text, the
deflation of the author and the inflation of the interpreter. The New
Critics resurrected the text; the structuralists lessened its meaning
while enlarging its importance; and both (as well as the Marxists), in
different ways, expanded the role of the reader. Finally the text and
the process of interpretation came to be seen as open ended.
In
recent
French criticism, a cardinal principle is that there are no privileged or
transcendent positions, neither about a text nor about literature in
general. The reader continually reconstructs the text. Umberto Eco,
for example, a neo-structuralist, spoke of "producing texts by reading
them." The process is somewhat parricidal, for the rebirth of the text
requires the death of the author. As for judgment, it disappears in
theory, but is assumed in practice.
Now this development is not without its share of paradox and
irony. For the modern movement in criticism was launched mainly to
insure the autonomy and sanctity of the text, and to assure its proper
interpretation. This led to a variety of related theories about the
structure and meanings of the text, and to a close textual reading. The
New Criticism was, of course, largely a reaction against earlier
impressionist and biographical approaches, and one-dimensional
social and historical interpretations of literature, particularly of the
Marxist variety.
It
was an attempt to free literature from being a
branch of civics or morality or politics. The New Critics did not insist
that a poem-and most of their criticism was centered on poetry-had
only one fixed meaning. But, like most contemporary critics who
have not been seduced by structuralism, they did maintain that not all
interpretations were equally valid or useful. They certainly did not
believe that texts were to be deconstructed and reconstructed. Nor did
they think that the reader coauthored the text.
However, the break was not a total one. One element in the
continuity in modern critical theory, from the New Critics to the
structuralists, is the emphasis on text, almost to the total exclusion of
history, the reservoir of human experience, from the writing, reading
and judging of literature. True, the New Critics, in response to the
charge that they slighted the social and human elements that were
transformed into poems and made up the context in which they must
