Literature, Criticism, and the Theory of Signs

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction: A Guide to the Project 1

Chapter 1. Bakhtin, Dialogism, and Plato’s Dialogues 11
  1 The Dialogical nature of Dostoyevsky’s Narratives 11
  2 The Dialogical Nature of Speech and Thought 16
  3 Dialogical Poetics in Dostoyevsky and Plato 18
  4 Problems in Bakhtin’s Poetics 21
  5 The Voices That We Hear in Plato’s Dialogues 24

Chapter 2. The Text, the Work, and the Reader 30
  1 The Need for Text-Reception History and an Aesthetics of Reading 30
  2 Peirce’s Account of Interpretants and their Signs 33
  3 The Generic Identity of the Literary Work, and Its Design 39
  4 The Mode of Judgment of the Work, and of Its Responsive Articulation 45

Chapter 3. Deconstruction as Poetics 54
  1 Deconstruction and the Sense of Structure 54
  2 Deconstructive Attitudes toward Writing 57
  3 Dialogism and Sophism, Logicism and Creative Rationality 61
  4 The Aesthetics of Non-Graphicist Deconstruction 67

Chapter 4. The Modes of Judgment and the Nature of Criticism 74
  1 Reprise on the Semiotic Approach to Literary Significance 74
  2 The Poetics of Aristotle and Buchler 78
  3 Poetic Responsiveness as the Model of Valid Reading 81
  4 Mimesis as Re-enactment and Expression 84
  5 Assertive, Active, and Exhibitive Judgment 88
  6 Reading as a Communicative Interaction 91
  7 Testing Peirce’s Semeiotic: The Problem of Metaphor 96

Chapter 5. The Contexts of Reading 104
  1 Flawed Texts, Flawed Readings 104
  2 The Transactional Nature of Critical Reading 108
  3 Poststructural Criticism, Modernism and Postmodernism 112
  4 Context-Determined Misreadings 116

Chapter 6. The Semiotics of Reading 122
  1 The Reader 122
  2 The Critic 126
  3 On the Dependency and Autonomy of Criticism 130

Appendix: Ten Classes of Signs 136

Bibliography 140

Index 150