Excerpt from my paper on the death and resurrection of the Author

I should like to make a point that may rankle some people: I want to make a distinction between literary critics and literary theorists. Critics, in my understanding, is that group to which I myself and most or all of my teachers here at the university belong, the group that reads literary texts and tries to extract their meaning. Theorists, by contrast, is that group which has written at least a solid majority of the theoretical articles we read in the literature classes here at the university, and this group doesn’t actually seem interested in literature, or literary texts. This group, judging by their articles, is mostly interested in arguing with each other about ever-more abstract points of theoretical doctrine. A fairly small portion of the theoretical articles I’ve had to read in my years here have actually referred directly and substantively to specific literary texts: much more commonly, they aim at stepping away from the texts, or seeking to actively destroy the idea of literary texts in general. Stanley Fish and his article «Interpreting the Variorum», in which he flat-out denies even the theoretical existence of texts, is probably the sharpest example, but I suspect that’s only because he expressed himself in clear, readable prose rather than academic sesquipedalian loquaciousness. I must confess that when I see articles with such dense academic language my first thought is not «this guy must be smart» but «this guy must be hiding something».

When reading these articles it sometimes seems that where I see a text, these theorists see only a large collection of holes loosely connected by words whose meaning could be anything.

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