M.H. Abrams on Literary Theory

Replaced Age of Criticism; focuses on the reader rather than the work itself.

Traditional view: literature is a transaction between a human author and a human reader.

Post-structuralist concept. Author's intentions are irrelevant; meaning comes from intertextual relationships.

The text replaces the work, and what writing-as-such effects and reading-as-such engages is not a work of literature but a text, writing, ecriture.

Relations between authors depersonalized into a reverberation between ownerless sequences of signs.

Radical new ways of reading texts that undermine not only the grounds of structuralism itself, but the possibility of understanding language.

Signifies not only difference, but also deferment, indicating that meaning is never fully present but is always deferred.

Derrida describes his general strategy as a mode of double writing, where it inverts the hierarchy and displaces what was once lower outside the oppositions

There is no outside-the-text in Derrida's theory; we can't escape our interpretations.

Stanley Fish theory represents his theory of reading as a ringing defense against the dehumanization of meaning.

Instead of asking 'what does this mean?', ask 'what does it do?' to transform minds.

Pater posits the perception of all external objects is an experience so the meaning is all of it.

The reader makes sense of the word or words has read so far, and surmises what will come next.

Harold Bloom restores the human writer as well as reader to an effective role in the literary transaction.

Bloom posits that the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us.

Bloom describes how a modern, belated poet awakens when seized by the poems of a precursor poet

Bloom's reading is about the relation of the poet with his parent-precursor

Bloom talks about his revisionary ratios with aggressive acts designed to malform the precursor.

Knowing a language is not a science but a practice; we know how because we learn how by what we have gone wrong and what we have refined.

Meanings we find depend on interpretive strategy and membership in a community that shares and agrees about meanings/strategies.