Activity

there is no such thing as a purely 'literary' response: all such responses, not least those to literary form, to the aspects of a work which are sometimes jealously reserved to the 'aesthetic', are deeply imbricated with the kind of social and historical individuals we are.

To secure the meaning of a work for all time, rescuing it from the ravages of history, criticism has to police its potentially anarchic details, hemming them back with the compound of 'typical' meaning. Its stance towards the text is authoritarian and juridical

Heidegger describes his philosophical enterprise as a 'hermeneutic of Being'; and the word 'hermeneutic' means the science or art of interpretation

the main critical debt to phenomenology is evident in the so-called Geneva school of criticism

For Husserl, knowledge of phenomena is absolutely certain, or as he says 'apodictic', because it is intuitive