In a manner of speaking (I just love equivocating), Tompkins is accurate in her assessment of Fish's participation in the "guilty silence," although her methods offer up similarities to New Criticism as well.  Strategically speaking, in order to effectively insert into this broad topic, I will attempt a construction of New Criticism, highlighting pertinent planks for comparison/contrast with Reader Response, then, after "formulating" deconstructive strategy, attempt to elucidate the diffusions from New Criticism into Deconstruction.

      New Criticism unfolds around the presupposition that literature teaches itself.  This conceptual framework supposed in New Criticism holds self-evident that the literature is self-contained because the culture is self-contained.  This rhetorical strategy attempts to persuade by rational argument, attempting to "scientificize" literary studies, to grant a privileged status to literature as embodying universal and transhistorical  truths.  "Literature" communicates through a "privileged" medium, conveying knowledge proper per force of its form that can be dissected and extrapolated regardless of authorial intent or the idiosyncratic reader.  Formalism sought, true to the letter of liberal humanism, to defeat relativism, to usher in a disinterested aesthetic value, inherent in the text as one validated his/her reading through rigorous inspection, analogous to an objective, proper scientist dissecting and cataloguing the organism subject's parts and pieces that in summation function as a unified whole.  The text itself actually creates meaning against the "backdrop of deafening silence"  where none prior existed and, through meticulous apprehension of the textual "complexity," the image-series of paradox and irony inherent in a "good" text, the "meaning" of the text manifests clearly as a function of these formal arrangements.  Text production or reception is irrelevant, contaminating the coherent, autonomous text-object with irrational cultural practices that the text has, in its unified and universalized form, transcended.  The reader, a rational, acculturated sentience, has the responsibility to perform "reading" in a manner to produce these images of paradox and irony, to exhume them from the text and consider them in their relation to each other, so as to produce an amalgamated, evident "meaning" from the textual form.  This "rational, acculturated sentience," i.e., the ideal reader, proves to be problematic to say the least for New Criticism on its way to becoming the whipping boy for several theoretical schools, including the Reader-Response theorists and Deconstructionists.  Although the work is isolated, existing outside temporal considerations, the reader is presumed to share a common knowledge (literary history) such that the work manifests its "truth" with minimal assistance.   The "guilty silence" of New Critical formalism is its refusal to acknowledge the cultural ramifications of just how an ideal reader is produced, hazardously shoving together "rational objectivity alongside subjective anxiety."  The New Criticism anticipates singular homogeneity of reader who, in espousing the rigorous impartiality of scientific recourse, will determine an "obvious, centralized" meaning from the text.  This group of scientific inquisitors, supposedly characteristic of the society at large happen to be (in the case of English composition) university educated white males, or, in new critical terms, the ideal readers.

      Following the New Critical formalist inoculations these psychosomatic hives began blistering up, allergic reactions to the "guilty silence" of New Critical "truths" "self-evident in the text."  This in no way insinuates that these theoretical movements in any absolute or "corrective" capacity remedied the misappropriations and cover-ups in New Criticism, although some were identified and neutralized.  However, several strains, including Stanley Fish's version of Reader-Response theory, seem to exhibit a flush of the same New Critical symptoms.

      Stanley Fish, accused by his colleague of participating in the "guilty silence" of liberal humanism, importing the pious wish of unity from the romantic tradition and apprehension-via-rigor from Enlightenment rationalism, must answer to these charges as his rhetorical infrastructure share a few planks from the New Critical church.  In order to demonstrate, I must clarify the discrepancies between the Reader-Response and New Criticism, then contrast Fish's concept of  "interpretive communities" with that of the "idealized reader."  The following, hopefully not negligence mistook for succinctness, is  a brief prospectus elucidating points of divergence in RR (Reader-response) and New Criticism.

      Reader-Response theory traces its roots historically back to Heidegger's  phenomenology, a philosophical view "that posits a continuous field of experience between the perceiver (subject) and the object of experience and focuses on bringing to light the relations of subject and object."  RR debases the "nature" of the relationship between the distinct subject and object in New Crit, positing instead the inseparability of the text and its reception.  Eagleton characterizes this in his situation of rhetoric, emphatic of the essential function but also the social aspect of language and literature ("its intersubjective affects"), as the place where formalism (devices of language) and history (point of consumption) intersect. Literary experience is a gestalt, rudimentarily, almost chemically impervious and irreducible, for an attempt to distill the text from reader or reader from culture or culture from text  would atomize the "experience" altogether.  RR combats formalist approaches to literature "by emphasizing reading or interpretation as an activity, as an ongoing performative act rather than as a static or contained event."  Through this polarization and magnification, a conundrum arises in RR itself, namely,  who dominates the performative act?  Is the reader in charge of the text, the text acting merely as a set of evocative possibilities pulling forth "experiential" meaning already in-tow by the reader, or, the does text as a product of authorial-function seduce the reader with its intentions, transporting a targeted meaning into the reader?  In order to escape this limbo between phenomenology (the former) and subjectivism (the latter), Fish proposes to constrain reading so as to produce a "valid" interpretation of a particular text.  His theory cites the personal limitations of readers, exhibiting tendencies to interpret texts in fairly narrow and prescribed ways.  These particular interpretive choices are based on the reader's membership in an "interpretive community" of other readers, this "community allowing certain readings as normative and others as untenable.  From communal censorship, "valid" readings of a text will emerge, and literary "competency" will be measured according to the adroit apprehension and deployment of these "reading" conventions. And here we arrive at the crux of the matter.  RR, in its proclamation to dispel the phony universalism of New Criticism, seems merely to have relocated interpretive authority from the text to a community of readers. His essay zeroes in on "regarding controversy itself as evidence of an ambiguity that readers have always experienced" (grounding this on Sausserian linguistics as a model for semiotics, i.e., the arbitrary nature of the sign), revolving around those oppositional relationships essential in New Criticism.  RR's "close reading," parallels the painstaking analysis of New Crit, directed toward recognizing ambiguities, ironies, tensions, and paradox.  These moments of contrariness, Fish proposes, constitute the instances of interpretive communities intersecting.  Precariously enough, these "interpretive communities" seem to have a circumference of everywhere but a mass of nowhere, yet pre-existing the individual  while molding "ideal readers."  The "personal responses a text engender" in RR, habitual dictates of "interpretive communities," consign the reader to the generalizing practices of formalism, rendering "reading" a process of the deployment and application of aesthetic criterion.  These "interpretive communities," a plentiful and protean bunch, are indicated rather than explicated, acting as agents inculcating not just readers but "ideal" readers, irregardless of race or gender (formalism at its finest).  Fish boldly states in his essay that "to construct the profile of the at-home reader is at the same time to characterize the author's intention and vice versa, because to do either is to specify the contemporary conditions of utterance, to identify, by becoming a member of, a community of those who share interpretive strategies."  Fish participates, albeit stealthily and steadfastly, under the  universalizing precept of contemporary criticism,  attempting the production of a theoretical schema that accounts for culture, the "collective and local" decried by Enlightenment humanism, as a no longer silent but vociferous partner in the goings-on of meaning.  This universalizing aim although recognizing the temporal and local aspect of meaning, still aspires to cohesion, nestled snuggly under an umbrella theory and out of the incessant mis en abime downpour.  These interpretive communities are Fish's "epistemologically immovable movers," the impregnable centers that must be first in action so that they might be talked about. (Deconstructionists thrive on these philosophical preferences, attempting, in paraphrasing Derrida's words, to blow them up.)  Fish's unspoken assumptions advocate the ubiquity of institutions such as "history" and "reason" as pertinent to the semantic economy, contrivances the deconstructionists are unwilling to concede as the deconstructionists concede nothing.  Additionally, the indispensability of "text" and "reader" in the waltz producing meaning seems to implicate a fetishism of "literature" characteristic of New Criticism, not only privileging certain  "writings" as "text or literature," but by privileging the written word as an inexorable component to meaningfulness. Now, having thoroughly scourged RR theory as a deconstructionist might, onto the precariousness of deconstruction. Deconstruction works with a different overall aim than the rigorous and "scientific" analysis of formalism and Fish's RR structuralism.  "Instead of attempting to account for how things are, their order, deconstruction and poststructuralism aim at describing the limits of understanding in terms of such various factors as the intellectual assumptions that allow definitions and limits to be assumed, the social relationships of power that are served by these definitions, and individual and 'subjective' ends that are served."

  Instead of seeking "understanding," i.e., the way of incorporating new phenomena into coherent models, deconstruction seeks to exhume the unexamined axioms that give rise to those models.  This is not to say that Deconstruction supplanted New Criticism, or RR, or anything for that matter.   Deconstruction is strategy of reading, described by Derrida as starting from a philosophical hierarchy in which two opposed terms are presented "as the 'superior' general case and the 'inferior' special case."  In Western modes of conceiving and understanding, the preferred "superior" half of a binary opposition, defined in terms of its opposite (see Saussere), assumes unanimity, centralized and unique, governing structure "while escaping structurality."  In a method parallel to New Criticism, Deconstruction seeks to identify the oppositions in a text, although it posits a different procedural "turn."  Whereas New Crit assumes that the various elements of a text work to produce a unified effect, Deconstruction proposes the opposite, that, upon "close reading," a text will contradict itself. Deconstruction does not abandon altogether "formalism" of structure, rather, "it complicates it with temporality and history...making context a constituent aspect of meaning."  The concern is not textual autonomy, or reception, or even production; rather, Deconstruction is concerned with the actual process of production.  Deconstruction is formalism without reductions, "without the reconciliations of conflicting forms-which is to say, it is formalism at odds with itself."  Deconstruction safeguards against "premature" closure, interrogating and terrorizing the centers that by the nature of meaning machination are arbitrary (Derrida's quest), reversing and reinscribing the terms of the hierarchy.  However, if the purpose were merely to invert value systems, then this would confirm the system of opposition, formalizing the strategy as a bonafide critical approach.  Instead, deconstruction in perpetuity confronts any system attempting to "ground" meaning at an origin free from the order of the sign with another interpretation of interpretation turned from the origin.  Since the system has no absolute referents (positive terms) or absolutely closed contexts (centers or grounds), textuality is and will always be underway and unfinished, i.e., undecidable.  This system promotes revolution as Camus defines revolution, not simply superceding the empowered figure, but toppling the entire system that "prefers" that figure (a loose and general interpretation of Camus's The Rebel).  This deconstructive play offers "a virtual model of the continual revolution of critique in its drive to overturn the status quo and then to institute a new order."  The system at length demonstrates mutual interdependence of meanings and values as local, historical, and constantly in flux, thus routinely destabilized. And what comes of this?  If gridlocked in aporia, then does the deconstructionist actually affirm anything, other than the transitionary dynamics of meaning?  Silence is a form of consent, allowing the status quo to proceed with business as usual, deferring meaning to ill-defined and unexplored "centers."  Deconstruction, although at times politically unconscious and edging toward formalism, offers a practical precaution against premature closure, against a lattice-crystallization that would attempt to conceal its "origin" under the pretext of a "self-evident" consistency.  In Graff's essay, the discussion scrutinizes the field coverage model dominating university departmental organization, some philosophical hybrid species between Arnoldian Humanism and the scientific method.  Teaching the conflicts, he argues, would give the students some sense of how faculty aligns and dissents, some perspective relativity on "literature" and theory as culturally situated and executed.  Although Tompkins chastises Fish, and probably every other theoretical proposal, she nonetheless affirms the value of the university (betraying her theory?) as a bastion for theoretical discourse, maintaining a forum for the continual subjection of theory to inversion and reinscription.  But, from the luster of its illusory efficacy, it is difficult to portend the toppling of the university "center."  And why is this "preferred," privileging the university educated (whose cultural dynamic has changed drastically), fashioning a reader battalion with "access" to the modes of meaning and understanding?  This sounds a lot like New Critical rhetoric revisited.  Teaching the conflicts is inordinately not simple; student accessibility, professional specialties, job opportunities, and qualified mediators-all factor in as strains on practicality. In spite of these obstacles, a trend initiated by Graff gives me cause to halt and take up academic optimism.  Graff calls out those "privileging" the modes to meaning, his own colleagues, suggesting that "an academic writer should no longer use as cover for bad writing the blanket excuse that academic complexity and richness of thought can be housed only in convoluted rhetoric and the most specialized terminology.  As academics we are spoiled, writing for other academics in our field...this protection from outside perspectives lets us fall into cozy ways of thinking and expressing ourselves."  Graff, in practicing deconstructive criticism, simultaneously affirms the responsibility of academia while hazarding a proposal for a reinscriptive trend. But then again, why "simplify?"  Might the complexity of the issue require a unique, if not esoteric terminology?  Who is served and who devalued by this inversion gesture?  And so it goes...

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