Transition! The 1970s in Literary Criticism

Abstract

During the 1970s academic literary criticism experienced a centrifugal motion toward poetics and a centriptial motion toward interpretation. The centrifugal motion sought “to define the conditions of meaning” (in a phrase of Jonathan Culler’s) and looked at structuralism, semiotics, linguistics and even the nascent cognitive sciences. The centripital motion elided the distinction between reading, in the ordinary sense, and reading, as a kind of written discourse explicating texts.

Keywords: Jonathan Culler, literary criticism, reading, interpretation, Geoffrey Hartman, structuralism, Stanley Fish