Literary Theory and Its Discontents

Bibliographic Data

ID7932181
AuthorsJohn R Searle (corresponding author)
Year1994
Volume25
Issue3
Pages637
Publication date1994-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/469470
OpenAlexW2327179563
LanguageEN
Citations received19

and not criticism. I will discuss, not in great detail, three different approaches to questions concerning textual meaning-Stanley Fish's claim that the meaning of a text is entirely in the reader's response;' the claim made by Stephen Knapp and Walter Michaels that the meaning of a text is entirely a matter of the author's intention; and the view of Jacques Derrida that meaning is a matter of, well, what? Meanings are undecidable and have relative indeterminacy, according to Derrida. Instead of fully determinate meanings, there is rather the free play of signifiers and the grafting of texts onto texts within the textuality and the intertextuality of the text. It is an odd feature of the extensive discussions in contemporary literary theory that the authors sometimes make very general remarks about the nature of language, without making use of principles and distinctions that are commonly accepted in logic, linguistics, and the philosophy of language. I had long suspected that at least some of the confusion of literary theory derived from an ignorance of well-known results, but the problem was presented to me in an acute form by the following incident. In a review ofJonathan Culler's book On Deconstruction that I wrote for the New York Review of Books,' I pointed out that it is not necessarily an objection to a conceptual analysis, or to a distinction, that there are no rigorous or precise boundaries to the concept analyzed or the distinction being drawn. It is not necessarily an objection even to theoretical concepts that they admit of application more or less. This is something of a clich6 in analytic philosophy: most concepts and distinctions are rough at the edges and do not have sharp boundaries. The distinctions between fat and thin, rich and poor, democracy and authoritarianism, for example, do not have sharp boundaries. More

Art · Literary criticism · Literary theory · Literature · Philosophy · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

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