Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism

This essay argues that no literary work exists in itself. Rather, the work is constituted in and through practices of reading and criticism, where "constituted" means determined as an object of knowledge. I treat criticism as a practice of knowledge production, and I distinguish this account from the overly empiricist bent I identify in otherwise divergent contemporary critical approaches. My goal is to demonstrate how a view of criticism as productive can support a shared project of knowledge, one that serves as the necessary condition of critical agreement or disagreement

Art · Criticism · Empiricism · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar) · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History