Abstract

that literary texts are products of human imagination, that they are in some sense exogenous to other forms of human activity (politics, for example, or ideology), and that the special significance of literature (or indeed any work of art) is its unified, harmonious, totalizable discursive practice, in which the parts and the whole reflect each other without contradiction. The latter, as the designation anti denotes, more or less systematically negates each of these claims, conceiving of literary texts as manifestations of the collective beliefs and practices of social groups, as therefore implicated necessarily in the social conditions of their production and reception, and as consequently ex hypothesi incapable of mastering the conflicting and contradictory materials from which they have been constructed.