| Contemporary
literary theory takes truth and meaning to be dependent on shared
conventions in a community of discourse and views authors' intentions
as irrelevant to interpretation. This view, argues Reed Way Dasenbrock,
owes much to Anglo-American analytic philosophy as developed in the
1950s and 1960s by such thinkers as Austin and Kuhn, but it ignores
more recent work by philosophers like Davidson and Putnam, who have
mounted a counterattack on this earlier conventionalism.
This book draws on current analytic philosophy to resuscitate the
notion of objective truth and intentionalist models of meaning and
interpretation, thereby moving beyond the antifoundationalism of
postmodern theory. It addresses the work of Rorty and Fish as representative
of literary conventionalism, discusses the futility of Derrida's
anti-intentionalism, and shows how poststructuralist thinkers like
Althusser and Foucault have contributed to the "new thematics" of
race, class, gender, and sexual orientation that dominates literary
theory today. Examining the counter-arguments of conventionalists
to have their theory judged by its consequences, Dasenbrock shows
how damaging this antiobjectivism and anti-intentionalism have been
for literary studies. |
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