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Poetics against Itself: On the Self-Destruction of Modern Scientific Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Roger Seamon
Roger Seamon*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
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Abstract

Modern critical theory is commonly thought of as a collection of diverse methods, schools, systems, and approaches. There is, however, a significant pattern in the diversity. This pattern is generated by the conflict between the widespread effort of twentieth-century theorists to make criticism scientific and the internal resistance to that effort presented by the hermeneutic impulse. The scientific tradition is characterized and unified by a set of common theoretical principles and by a common sequence of transformations that each school within it undergoes. The result of these transformations is that every proposed scientific model for criticism changes into an interpretive method and the project of scientific criticism is subverted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , May 1989 , pp. 294 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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