Introduction

The critics—especially the continental members of the group —do not accept the premise that the languages of criticism are self-reflexive and that different critical languages have no translation systems. In taking account of the responses of different readers, the critics inevitably find themselves writing literary history. In treating works as part of a comprehensive scheme, the first group necessarily minimizes the reader’s relation to the individuality of the work, just as their essays must push to the background the criteria for reliability of interpretation. Some of the possibilities of new directions available to post-formalist critics are examined in the essays by Svetlana and Paul Alpers, Francis R. Hart, and George Garrett. Theory, criticism, history all presuppose organizing concepts that are necessarily historical.