Two Models

Abstract

It appears that criticism today is in a state of flux. It is pulled in one direction by its role as a moral discipline, and in another by its mission to take its place as a knowledge alongside the other human sciences. It is championed by some who locate its object in the luminous and unsurpassable moment of the literary response. And it is challenged by others who see in this response nothing more than the experience of a ‘pre-theoretical’ subjectivity: an experience which must be clarified and transcended through a fundamental reflection on its linguistic, psychological or social conditions of possibility.