interposition

it's a weird thing with literary theory...it's ostensibly about understanding literature - that's the whole point of it....or is it? my feeling is that literary theory is, in many ways, a genre itself. Harold Bloom, who was probably a school of one, aimed at a practical criticism - a criticism that provided a kind of apparatus for analysing literature, but can I as a reader or student, use his criticism in that way? I'm doubtful of it, because I have enough on my plate trying to understand his theory. 

In their 1982 essay, 'Against Theory', Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels argue that the meaning of the text is basically just what the author intends, so using literary theory to analyse text is a futile endeavour because most of what we call critical theory is premised on problematising the concept of meaning - saying that there's a difference between what the author intended and what the text can mean. That's true, I think - the part about how theory is premised on problematising the question of meaning, I mean. Because I'm so indoctrinated by theory myself, I find it hard...this might sound ridiculous...I find it hard to accept the idea that the meaning of the text is limited to authorial intention. 

But there is a distinction to be made. Knapp and Michaels are specifically addressing theory as a means of interpretting literature and they specifically exclude 'literary subjects with no direct bearing on the interpretation of individual works, such as narratology, stylistics and prosody'. So, their argument is not with theory as a genre in itself as I called it above, but rather with theory as a way of analysing and engaging with literature. Still, they do write that, 'The whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and should be abandoned.' 

but I don't think abandoning critical theory is actually a conclusion supported by Knapp and Michaels's argument that meaning coincides with authorial intention. I don't think it makes that much difference because, whether you're talking about meaning as constructed by the reader or meaning as conveyed by the writer, meaning is still a complex and interesting thing. 

That's why Harold Bloom, who regarded the ultimate test of literary quality as being aesthetic power engendered in the text by the writer, and Roland Barthes, who talked about the death of the author, with the associated idea that authorial intention is irrelevant, can both talk about texts in the same way - can (and do) both say that, ultimately, there are no texts, as such///only relationships between texts.