These are called ‘textural’, ‘ideational’ and ‘interpersonal’ respectively.

A semiotic analysis of texts looks at how words and images combine to create meaning together.

three ‘branches’ of semiotics: Saussurian, developed in Europe, Piercian, developed in North America, and social semiotics, which was developed partly in Australia.

To achieve this objectivity and distance, semioticians have developed methods to help them study contemporary cultural artifacts such as products and media.

symbolism is hard for consumers to talk about

women are still under enormous pressure to deliver the perfect Christmas.

21st Century women about making the Christmas meal

There is nothing quite like it for combining family dynamics, nostalgia and financial stress, to name just three of the potential tensions involved here.

In the internal part, evolutionary linguistics has been neglected in favour of synchronic linguistics and I have dealt only with a few general principles of linguistics.

It is not possible even to determine what the value of the word sun is in itself without considering all the neighbouring words which will restrict its sense. There are languages in which I can say: Sit in the sun. In others, not the same meaning for the word sun (= star). The sense of a term depends on presence or absence of a neighbouring term.

The paradox - in Baconian terms the trap in the 'cave' - is this: the meaning, which appears to us to be the counterpart of the auditory image, is just as much the counterpart of terms coexisting in the language. We have just seen that the language represents a system in which all the terms appear as linked by relations.

to see how sense depends on but nevertheless remains distinct from value

sometimes in one order of relations, sometimes in another.

agn-animus: the relation involving animus is syntagmatic. Idea expressed by juxtaposition of the two parts in sequence.

meant in a work on natural history by contrasting 'the plant' with 'plants' (c.f. also .'insects, versus 'the insect').

emiological facts in societies. Let us go back to the language considered as a product of society at work: it is a set of signs fixed by agreement between the members of that society; these signs evoke ideas, but in that respect it's rather like rituals, for instance.

eat class of social institutions.

Sound production - that is what falls within the domain of the faculty of the individual and is the individual's responsibility.

he latter can be defined at the level of the individual. It is an abstract thing and requires the human being for its realisation.

acility - w

that there is no homogeneous entity which is the language, but only a conglomerate of composite items

Similarly, for any given period, it will refrain from selecting the most educated language, but will concern itself at the same time with popular forms more or less in contrast with the so-called educated or literary language,

'the scientific study of languages', which is satisfactory, but it is this word scientific that distinguishes it from all earlier studies.

or at least none which is correct, acceptable and reasonable

philology

The task of feminist critics is to find a new language, a new way of reading that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism and our vision. This enterprise should not be confined to women. I invite Criticus, Poeticus, and Plutarchus to share it with us. One thing is certain: feminist criticism is not visiting. It is here to stay, and we must make it a permanent home.

the dismal sexist symbology surrounding the humanities which he meets everywhere, even in the university itself, from freshman’ classes to the president’ s office. This symbology, or whatever one should call it, says that the sciences, especially the physical sciences, are rugged, aggressive, out in the world doing things, and so symbolically male, whereas the literatures are narcissistic, intuitive, fanciful, staying at home and making the home more beautiful but riot doing anything serious and are therefore symbolically female

Feminist criticism cannot go around forever in men’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs, the Annie Hall of English studies

It is because we have studied women writers in isolation that we have never grasped the connections between them.

terra incognita

matrophobia

that a woman creates her identity by choosing her clothes, that she creates her history by choosing her man.

the fulfillment of the plot is a visit to the heroine’s grave by a male mourner.

it is necessary to leave oneself room to deal with other things besides their work, so much has that work been influenced by conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art.

The critique also has a tendency to naturalize women’s victimization by making it the inevitable and obsessive topic of discussion

As we see in this analysis, one of the problems of the feminist critique is that it is male-oriented.

Having severed his bonds with this female community of love and loyalty,

their daughters are all for sale sooner or later

gynocnt- ics”

From this perspective, the academic demand for theory can only be heard as a threat to the feminist need for authenticity, and the visitor looking for a formula he or she can take away without personal encounter is not welcome.

For some radical feminists, methodology itself is an intellectual instrument of patriarchy, a tyrannical methodolatry which sets implicit limits to what can be’ questioned and discussed. “The God Method,” writes Mary Daly,   is in fact a subordinate deity, serving higher powers. These are social and cultural institutions whose survival depends upon the classification of disruptive and disturbing information as nondata. Under patriarchy, Method has wiped out women’s questions so totally that even women have not I been able to hear and formulate our own questions, to meet our own experiences.

Too many literary abstractions which claim to be universal have in fact described only male perceptions, experiences; and options, and have falsified the social and personal contexts in which literature is produced and consumed.

The absence of a clearly articulated theory makes feminist criticism perpetually vulnerable to such attacks, and not even feminist critics seem to agree what it is that they mean to profess and defend.

his terminology is best understood as a form of intimidation, intended to force

they are against feminist. criticism and consequently have never read any.

clinamen

while the men stand gossiping in the sun, she is inside hard at work

wondering why femininity requires brainwork

The pedagogical theory, which we will examine in detail next, requires that teacher and studentwork together to solve problems on an equal footing, or at least without the teacher claimingabsolute knowledge and an authority superior to that of the peasant.

According to some viewpoints the signal disease of late industrial capitalism is schizophrenia.

The oppressed are 'submerged', seeing themselves as things as the oppressor seesthem; they lack a critical take on their situation of oppression.

He notes that the possessive view of the world to be found in 'the oppressors' is necrophilic. Forexample he writes: "And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they changethem into apparently inanimate 'things'".

his distinctionbetween 'being' and 'having' as two contrasting approaches to the problem of living.

Any further philosophising is vaporising. But for Heidegger andothers this is a foreclosure of the argument. So - we, too, maintain, that philosophical thinkingwithout political action is valid (if of course the philosophy is authentic). We would allow thatthinking about existence can be authentic even when it is not political thinking. Freire seems toallow this but only marginally.

This theory links the work of critical reflectionon the situation of oppression with action which changes that situation in a concrete, objectivelyverifiable way. Freire writes "A mere perception of reality not followed by this critical interventionwill not lead to a transformation of objective reality - precisely because it is not a true perception".

n Search of Authority: An Introductory Guide to Lit­erary Theory or Lois Tyson’s Critical Theory Today: AUser­ Friendly Guide.

Teaching literary theory lays the groundwork for many of the new ways of thinking we’re expected to address, from media literacy to social critique. To teach literary theory is to teach critical thinking about texts of all kinds

The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.

there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects

deas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.

rom him as a subject with a consciousness which contains the ideas of his belief. In this way, i.e. by means of the absolutely ideological ‘conceptual’ device (dispositif) thus set up (a subject endowed with a consciousness in which he freely forms or freely recognizes ideas in which he believes), the (material) attitude of the subject concerned naturally follows.

I now return to this thesis: an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material.

existence of a small number of cynical men who base their domination and exploitation of the ‘people’ on a falsified representation of the world which they have imagined in order to enslave other minds by dominating their imaginations.

men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imaginary form’.

Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

history is outside it,

Ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it. Ideology is thus thought as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the theoretical status of the dream among writers before Freud.

ask the pardon of those teachers who, in dreadful conditions, attempt to turn the few weapons they can find in the history and learning they ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero. But they are rare and how many (the majority) do not even begin to suspect the ‘work’ the system (which is bigger than they are and crushes them) forces them to do, or worse, put all their heart and ingenuity into performing it with the most advanced awareness (the famous new methods!). So little do they suspect it that their own devotion contributes to the maintenance and nourishment of this ideological representation of the School, which makes the School today as ‘natural’, indispensable-useful and even beneficial for our contemporaries as the Church was ‘natural’, indispensable and generous for our ancestors a few centuries ago.

But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced.

Each mass ejected en route is practically provided with the ideology which suits the role it has to fulfil in class society: the role of the exploited (with a ‘highly-developed’ ‘professional’, ‘ethical’, ‘civic’, ‘national’ and a-political consciousness); the role of the agent of exploitation (ability to give the workers orders and speak to them: ‘human relations’), of the agent of repression (ability to give orders and enforce obedience ‘without discussion’, or ability to manipulate the demagogy of a political leader’s rhetoric), or of the professional ideologist (ability to treat consciousnesses with the respect, i.e. with the contempt, blackmail, and demagogy they deserve, adapted to the accents of Morality, of Virtue, of ‘Transcendence’, of the Nation, of France’s World Role, etc.).

. Nevertheless, in this concert, one Ideological State Apparatus certainly has the dominant role, although hardly anyone lends an ear to its music: it is so silent! This is the School. It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’, squeezed between the Family State Apparatus and the Educational State Apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology (French, arithmetic, natural history, the sciences, literature) or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state (ethics, civic instruction, philosophy).

plebiscitary

educational ideological apparatus.

ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production.

But in the social formations of that mode of production characterized by ‘serfdom’ (usually called the feudal mode of production), we observe that although there is a single repressive State apparatus which, since the earliest known Ancient States, let alone the Absolute Monarchies, has been formally very similar to the one we know today,

but also and above all, the State apparatus secures by repression (from the most brutal physical force, via mere administrative commands and interdictions, to open and tacit censorship) the political conditions for the action of the Ideological State Apparatuses.

But I add that the State Apparatus contains two bodies: the body of institutions which represent the Repressive State Apparatus on the one hand, and the body of institutions which represent the body of Ideological State Apparatuses on the other.

which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class’

In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the Family.... The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.

Repressive State Apparatus functions ‘by violence’, whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses function ‘by ideology’.

It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well ‘function’ as Ideological State Apparatuses.

private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc., are private.

tested, corrected and re-organized. With all the reservations implied by this requirement, we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular significance): the religious ISA (the system of the different churches), the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private ‘schools’), the family ISA,[8] the legal ISA,[9] the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties), the trade-union ISA, the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.), the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.).

In order to advance the theory of the State it is indispensable to take into account not only the distinction between state power and state apparatus, but also another reality which is clearly on the side of the (repressive) state apparatus, but must not be confused with it. I shall call this reality by its concept: the Ideological State Apparatuses.

the objective of the political class struggle on the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other.

heir experiences and procedures were indeed restricted in the main to the terrain of political practice.

he difference between science and art is not that they deal with different objects, but that they deal with the same objects in different ways. Science gives us conceptual knowledge of a situation; art gives us the experience of that situation, which is equivalent to ideology. But by doing this, it allows us to 'see' the nature of that ideology, and thus begins to move us towards that full understanding of ideology which is scientific knowledge.

so much literature challenges the ideology it confronts, and makes this part of the definition of literary art itself. Authentic art, as Ernst Fischer argues in his significantly entitled Art Against Ideology (1969), always transcends the ideological limits of its time, yielding us insight into the realities which ideology hides from view.

'vulgar Marxist' criticism, which tends to see literary works merely as reflections of dominant ideologies.

In this sense The Waste Land is ideological: it shows a man making sense of his experience in ways that prohibit a true understanding of his society, ways that are consequently false.

Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.

No one of these elements can be conflated with another: each has its own relative independence. The Waste Land can indeed be explained as a poem which springs from a crisis of bourgeois ideology,

Nature which capitalist society necessarily destroys, and which socialist society can reproduce at an incomparably higher level.

the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. — forms of law — and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.

in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.

The pessimism of Conrad's world view is rather a unique transformation into art of an ideological pessimism rife in his period — a sense of history as futile and cyclical, of individuals as impenetrable and solitary, of human values as relativistic and irrational, which marks a drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class to which Conrad allied himself.

To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society; and to do that means grasping where those classes stand in relation to the mode of production.

authors' psychology.

the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.

legitimate

But the superstructure contains more than this: it also consists of certain 'definite forms of social consciousness' (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology.

capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit.

their social being that determines their consciousness.

production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.

Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.

Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. [4] But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history.

Marxist criticism is part of a larger body of theoretical analysis which aims to understand ideologies — the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times. And certain of those ideas, values and feelings are available to us only in literature. To understand ideologies is to understand both the past and the present more deeply; and such understanding contributes to our liberation.

Marxism is a scientific theory of human societies and of the practice of transforming them; and what that means, rather more concretely, is that the narrative Marxism has to deliver is the story of the struggles of men and women to free themselves from certain forms of exploitation and oppression.

Marxist criticism analyses literature in terms of the historical conditions which produce it; and it needs, similarly, to be aware of its own historical conditions.

none of the interpretive strategies at his disposal are uniquely his

re operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted grou

hat I have been arguing is that meanings come already ca culated, not because of norms em-bedded in the language but because language is always per-ceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent hut so

_communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possession of (or to be possessed by) a structure of assumptions, of practices under-stood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are already in place; and it is within the assumption of tl~se pur-poses and goals that any utterance is immediately hear

n literary criticism this means that no interpretation can he said to be better or worse than any other, and in the class-room this means that we have no answer to the student who says my interpretation is as valid as yours

ate the strategy by which

he did it because he could do it; h_e was able to get to this context because it was already part of his repertoire for organizing the world and its events

They hear it coming from me, in circumstances which have committed me to declaring myself on a range of issues that are sharply delimit

that to so hear it is al-ready to have assigned it a shape and given it a meanin

rather, it is ,.--.... because the words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then

no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enables will be normal for ever,

magine someone capable of h

An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentences existed in a state in which they were not already embedded, and had come into view as a function of, some situation or othe

hat there are readers and hearers for whom the intelligibility of the question would have neither of the shapes it had, in a temporal succession, for my colleague.

t is just that .these norms are not embedded in the language (where they may be read out by anyone with sufficiently clear, that is. unbiased, eyes) but in-here in an institutional structure within which one hears utter-ances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals.

Notice that we do not have here a case of indeterminacy or undecidability but of a determinacy and decidability that do not always have the same shape and that can, and in this instance do, chang

either there is a literal meaning of the utterance and we should be able to say what it is, or there are as many meanings as there are read

The charge is that literal or normative meanings are overriden by the actions of willful interpreters.

insta~ility of the text and\/ the unavailability of determinate meanings

"I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it just us?"

To speak of any reading event in isolation is, of course, to set up a useful fiction for analysis.

In reading, the message would be represented by the author's written or printed symbols, which constitute what I term "the text." The temptation is simply to adapt the formula and substitute "author" for "speaker," [20] "reader" for "listener." This masks the fact that in any actual reading act, the author has dropped out. Only the text and the reader remain.

"Something, not yet a stimulus, ... becomes a stimulus by virtue of the relations it sustains to what is going on in this continuing activity. ... It becomes the stimulus in virtue of what the organism is already preoccupied with."

but a valid interpretation, I believe, must be at the same time an [16] interpretation of my own feelings when I read it."6

Perhaps because of preoccupation with the tie between the author and his creation, or the fixation on the text itself, there has been resistance to, and suspicion of the idea of the reader's creativity.

This necessary co-operation between writer and reader, the one to suggest, the other to make concrete, is a privilege of verbal form.5

Does not the reader

This becomes part of the ongoing stream of his life experience, to be reflected on from any angle important to him as a human being.

compenetration

"Poem" stands here for the whole category, "literary work of art," and for terms such as "novel," "play," or "short story." This substitution is often justified by the assertion that poems are the most concentrated form of the category, the others being usually more extended in time, more loosely integrated.

irst, the text is a stimulus* activating elements of the reader's experience—his experience both with literature and with life. Second, the text serves as a blueprint, a guide for the selecting, rejecting, and ordering of what is being called forth; the text regulates* what shall be held in the forefront of the reader's attention.

the fact that the reader's creation of a poem out of a text must be an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process.

He may discover that he had projected on the text elements of his past experience not relevant to it, and which are not susceptible of coherent incorporation into it.

particular associations or feeling-tones created by his past experiences with them in actual life or in literature

Moreover, we see that the reader was not only paying attention to what the words pointed to in the external world, to their referents; he was also paying attention to the images, feelings, attitudes, associations, and ideas that the words and their referents evoked in him

hey do give us some clues as to what goes on during the active relationship between reader and text.

Some, in addition, felt it necessary to pack in as much symbolism as possible and tried to find another level of meaning for "the sun" as well.

the notion of inanity evidently had prepared them to think of the great drama being played out through the ages by mankind on this planet

having called up such a vivid notion of a director or producer talking about a play, immediately attempted to adapt this to a situation

it starts like the others, but quickly makes articulate the realization that this text is to be read as a poem

These notes reflect, one might say, a rudimentary literary response, yet they already represent a very high level of organization.

Two examples of the opening remarks in the commentaries reject an initial confusion

My aim was rather to discoveries paths by which these students approached even a tentative fest interpretation.

Romance of the Rose could not, without loss," observes Mr. Lewis, "be rewritten as the Romance of the Onio

e total statement has a more complex and testable .structure

litative progress

the affective critic (avoiding both the physiological and the ab stractly psychological form of report) ventures to state with any precision what a line of poetry does?as "it fills us with a mix ture of melancholy and reverence for antiquity"?either the statement will be patently abnormal or false, or it will be a description of what the meaning of the line is: "the spectacle of massive antiquity in ruins." Tennyson's "Tears, idle tears," as it deals with an emotion which the speaker at first seems not to understand, might be thought to be a specially emotive poe

today actually able, if he wishes, to measure the "psycho-galvanic reflex" of persons subjected to a given moving picture.1

e is today found perhaps less often among the sophisticates at the theater than among the myriad audience of movie and radio. It is said, and no doubt reliably, that during the war Stefan Schnabel played Nazi roles in radio dramas so convincingly that he received numerous letters of

most concrete instances not a theory but a fiction or a fact?of no critical signific

nd so a poem," says Hans Zinsser, means nothing to me unless it can carry me away with the gentle or passionate pace of its emotion, over obstacles of reality into meadows and covers of illusion. . . . The sole criterion for me is whether it can sweep me with it into emotion or illusion of beauty, terror, tranquillity, or even dis

unconscious.3 They are the correla tives of very generalized objects,

s in different measures of knowledge, based on experience of the consequences of conduct, and in different be liefs." Th

ne of these examples (except the utterly anomalous "Sibboleth") offers any evidence, in short, that what a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything except

es." And secondly, by the fact that a great deal of emotive import which does not depend thus directly on de scriptive meaning does depend on descriptive sugges

ort" might have been a happy choice.

this is on the side of what may be called the descriptive (or cognitive) func tion of words

ne of the most emphatic points in Mr. Stevenson's system is the distinction between what a word means and what it sug gests. T

. Richards spoke of "aesthetic" or "projectile" words?adjectives by which we project feelings at objects themselves altogether innocent of these feelings or of any qualities corresponding to the

l causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepti cism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from t

Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle.

I don't pretend that I quite understand My own meaning when I would be very fine; But the fact is that I have nothing planned Unless it were to be a moment merry.

had to pay in order to avoid what he would have considered muffling the energy of his poem by extended connecting links in the text itself.

and it is a nice question whether the notes function more as guides to send us where we may be educated, or more as indications in themselves about the character of the allusions.

If the distinction between kinds of evidence has implications for the historical critic, it has them no less for the contemporary poet and his critic.

It is difficult to answer argument like this, and impossible to answer it with evidence of like nature.

For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context‑or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about.

There is a difference between internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial that what is (1) internal is also public: it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture; while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations (in journals, for example, or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem‑to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother. There is (3) an intermediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by a coterie of which he is a member. The meaning of words is the history of words, and the biography of an author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word had for him, are part of the words history and meaning.7 But the three types of evidence, especially (2) and (3), shade into one another so subtly that it is not always easy to draw a line between examples,

The evaluation of the work of art remains public; the work is measured against something outside the author.

judgment of poems is different from the art of producing them.

public art of evaluating poems

School are interesting evidence of what a child can do.

ruth! there can be no merit, no craft at all, without that.

Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration.

plausibility, produce an essay in sociology, biography, or other kinds of nonaesthetic history.

there is another way of deciding whether works of art are worth preserving and whether, in a sense, they "ought" to have been undertaken, and this is the way of objective criticism of works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish between a skillful murder and a skillful poem.

The beautiful is the successful intuition‑expression, and the ugly is the unsuccessful; the intuition or private part of art is the aesthetic fact, and the medium or public part is not the subject of aesthetic at all.

Homer enters into the sublime actions of his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the combat," we shall

and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it).

The poem is not the critic's own.

Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution

Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?

He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his former concrete intention was not his intention.

We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.

practical messages

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine.

If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.

design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's performance.

Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude

There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be qualified by his view of "intention."

THE CLAIM of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions,