Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Destruction (From Phenomenology to Deconstruction) - Softcover

Ray, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0631134581 ISBN 13: 9780631134589

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 1984

Synopsis

This book is both a guide to, and interpretation of, the course of modern literary theory. Exploring the various theories of reading which have informed post--war literary criticism, it shows that for all the fervour of current debate about new movements in criticism, all these different approaches share at root a common notion of literary meaning.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

This book is both a guide to, and interpretation of, the course of modern literary theory. Exploring the various theories of reading which have informed post-war literary criticism, it shows that for all the fervour of current debate about new movements in criticism, all these different approaches share at root a common notion of literary meaning.

Through a successive examination of the most influential theoretical works, William Ray provides the reader with a clear view of how literary critics have conceived their object of study and of how they have sought to grasp the nature of fictional meaning. Starting with the French and German critics who brought the notion of consciousness to the fore in the fifties and sixties, he proceeds lucidly through expositions of Reader Response Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Semiotics and finally Deconstruction.

These different schools, Ray argues, all implicitly acknowledge that one cannot account for literary meaning purely in terms of 'structures' or 'events', yet they have persisted in trying to do just that. Some writers, such as the psychoanalytic and reader response critics, see meaning as deriving from the author's intention or the individual act of reading. Others, notably the structuralists and semioticians, hold that meaning has its source in the shared conventions of an author's and reader's culture. The repeated failure of either position to provide a critical practice consistent with its theory has driven literary criticism towards post-structuralism. The paradoxical formulations of deconstruction are best understood, Ray suggests, as an extreme, but historically predictable, attempt to bring the 'structural' and the 'eventual' definitions of meaning together within a peculiarly elusive, perhaps inconceivable, notion.

About the Author:

William Ray is Associate Professor of French at Reed College, Oregon.

About this edition

• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0631134581
• ISBN 13: 9780631134589
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240