It was the beginning of a 'reification' of the literary work, the treatment of it as an object in itself, which was to be triumphantly consummated in the American New Criticism.

New Criticism's view of the poem as a delicate equipoise of contending attitudes

Whereas New Criticism sunders the text from rational discourse and a social context

the so-called 'phenomenological reduction', is Husserl's first important move. Everything not 'immanent' to consciousness must be rigorously excluded; all realities must be treated as pure 'phenomena', in terms of their appearances in our mind, and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin

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

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

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

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

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.

The Prague school of linguistics [...] elaborated the ideas of the Formalists, but systematized them more firmly within the framework of Saussurean linguistics