Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who’scredited with the first use of the term marginalia, in 1819, coined the term as literarycriticism and to spark public dialogue.6

AuthorW.H. Auden demystified both literature and criticismwhen he said, “Here is a verbal contraption. How doesit work?”

Every work of art can be read, according to Eco, in three distinct ways: the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

Writing onstructuralism, Barthes (1972b) states that ‘the goal of all structuralistactivity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an “object” insuch a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the“functions”) of this object’

Genetic criti-cism seeks to reconstruct the creative process of great authors by examining thesuccession of working papers from reading notes to drafts and editorial changes.

The study of personal papers was pioneered by a school of literary criticism (“ge-netic criticism”) that focused on famous authors of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies who often deposited their papers in national libraries.

The hermeneutic circle (German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

Reading should never be merely passive and consist in the mere absorption or copying of information. It should be critical and engage the material reflectively, being guided by questions such as "Why is this important?" "How does this fit in?" "Is it true?" "Why is the author saying what she is saying?" etc.

the multilayered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting, not only at the social level, but also at the physical and symbolic level

No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission

But perhaps the greatest change is the one that renders the key opposition of the essay-between the timeless realm of literature and the pressures and exigencies of politics-inaccurate as a description of the assumptions prevailing in the profession. There are of course those who still believe that literature is defined by its independence of social and political contexts (a "concrete universal" in Wimsatt's terms), but today the most influential and up-to-date voices are those that proclaim exactly the reverse and ar- gue that the thesis of literary autonomy is itself a political one, part and parcel of an effort by the con- servative forces in society to protect traditional values from oppositional discourse. Rather than reflecting, as Ransom would have it, an "order of existence" purer than that which one finds in "actual life," lit- erature in this new (historicist) vision directly and vigorously "participates in historical processes and in the political management of reality" (Howard 25). Moreover, as Louis Montrose observes, if litera- ture is reconceived as a social rather than a merely aesthetic practice, literary criticism, in order to be true to its object, must be rearticulated as a social practice too and no longer be regarded as a merely academic or professional exercise (11-12

Everyone is aware of that risk, although it is usually not acknowledged with the explicitness that one finds in the opening sentence of Raymond Waddington's essay on books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. "Few of us today," Waddington writes, "could risk echoing C. S. Lewis's condemnation of the concluding books of Paradise Lost as an 'untransmuted lump of futurity"' (9). The nature of the risk that Wad- dington is about not to take is made clear in the very next sentence, where we learn that a generation of critics has been busily demonstrating the subtlety and complexity of these books and establishing the fact that they are the product of a controlled poetic design. What this means is that the kind of thing that one can now say about them is constrained in advance, for, given the present state of the art, the critic who is concerned with maintaining his or her professional credentials is obliged to say something that makes them better. Indeed, the safest thing the critic can say (and Waddington proceeds in this es- say to say it) is that, while there is now a general recognition of the excellence of these books, it is still the case that they are faulted for some deficiency that is in fact, if properly understood, a virtue. Of course, this rule (actually a rule of thumb) does not hold across the board. When Waddington observes that "few of us today could risk," he is acknowledging, ever so obliquely, that there are some of us who could. Who are they, and how did they achieve their special status? Well, obviously C. S. Lewis was once one (although it may not have been a risk for him, and if it wasn't why wasn't it?), and if he had not already died in 1972, when Waddington was writing, presumably he could have been one again. That is, Lewis's status as an authority on Renaissance literature was such that he could offer readings with- out courting the risk facing others who might go against the professional grain, the risk of not being listened to, of remaining unpublished, of being unattended to, the risk of producing something that was by definition-a definition derived from prevailing institutional conditions-without me

verningthis function is the belief that there must be - at a particular levelof an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire — apoint where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatibleelements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere arounda fundamental and originating contradiction. Fin

In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods fordefining an author - or, rather, for determining the configurationof the author from existing texts - derive in large part from thoseused in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) theparticular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desireto 'recover' the author from a work, employs devices stronglyreminiscent of Christian exegesis w

Meanwhile, in almost exactly the same decades that the Internet arose and eventually evolved social computing, literary scholarship followed similar principles of decentralization to evolve cultural criticism.7

No joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.