Abstract

ACCORDING TO RECENT REPORTS, the literary text is dead. A thing of the past. When I was a student in the 1940s and 1950s the text seemed a hale and hearty ruler of the literary critical world. Supported by chamberlains like I. A. Richards, who asserted its plain sense meaning, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Rene Wellek, who defined its structures, the text was there to be understood, approached, admired in all its glory with definitive editions, reader's guides, explications, and annotations. A few minor revolutionaries or dissidents were tolerated; Louise Rosenblatt was the herald of the regicides, but she was dismissed as an educationist and relegated to methods courses. Northrop Frye anatomized criticism and said that texts were mute, but many of his adherents paid no attention to his introduction and simply showed how his anatomy supported the old ruler. While the text ruled, literature was almost as easy to teach as it had been in the earlier regime when history was queen and biography her consort. Facts were then to be regurgitated: dates, trends, and influences, all assembled in a kind of manifest destiny for literature. Under the new monarchy, these were replaced by speakers, metaphors, ambiguities, images, and structures, which if not to be memorized could be learned for subsequent use in cracking the text. Criticism became an enterprise of elegance and logic, rather than of enthusiasm and emotionality; the critic became faceless rather than a personality. One may speculate as to why the reader has come to replace the text as the central figure in the literary enterprise. Perhaps the reason lies in the growth of psychological criticism which found itself confronted by the Heisenberg principle and could do little else than to observe the reader. Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that criticteachers were losing their students, those who did not want to deny their own personality. Perhaps the reason lies in the growth of interest in communication theory, perhaps in resurgent romanticism, perhaps in the distrust of the dogmatism of the critics. Other causes might occur to others, but the fact is true: The reader reigns. But who is the reader? When a critic like Stanley E. Fish writes, It is the structure of