Criticism should start looking outside the text to the extra-textual world of real references.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parodic critique of the communist revolution (and by association, all such revolutions). Shakespeare’s King Lear is a not so subtle warning to King James (it was first played to him and his small court) not to lose his throne. What we have come to understand as historicism develops as a way of extending the reach of our literary knowledge so that we can talk about its relation to historical events and processes. This is what we might call extrinsic criticism. The text now has its meaning located outside itself.
What fundamentally we are left with is a defining distinction—that is not itself fully explicable—between fiction or, more generally, rhetoric and reality.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parodic critique of the communist revolution (and by association, all such revolutions). Shakespeare’s King Lear is a not so subtle warning to King James (it was first played to him and his small court) not to lose his throne. What we have come to understand as historicism develops as a way of extending the reach of our literary knowledge so that we can talk about its relation to historical events and processes. This is what we might call extrinsic criticism. The text now has its meaning located outside itself.
What fundamentally we are left with is a defining distinction—that is not itself fully explicable—between fiction or, more generally, rhetoric and reality.
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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
