>The opening paragraph:
>
>IT IS no new discovery that the period we used to associate with an
>organicist aesthetics, which accomplished the fusion of the signifier
>and the signified, in fact produced a Large number of texts, intentional
>in structure, that make that fusion problematical. This paper will be
>concerned specifically with a phenomenon I shall call the disappearance
>of narrative, dramatic, or conceptual actualization, a phenomenon which
>results in the absence from Romantic texts of embodied or achieved
>meaning as opposed to discarnate meaning. The problem is most obvious in
>the many Romantic texts that are fragments, where the written "text"
>does not coincide with what we may call the "work,"' the essential
>meaning which Romantic hermeneutics discovers through a reading which is
>psychological and divinatory rather than grammatical and structural
>
This was interesting. It basically makes exactly the same argument about
the Romantic period as the classic Meyer H. Abrams, 1971. /The Mirror
and the Lamp : Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition/; the only
difference being that it expresses Abrams' insightful (and very clear)
description and pellucid metaphors (mirror vs lamp) in the more
difficult terminology of the deconstructionsts. This is understandable
inasmuch as that terminology was the offically accepted language of
criticism for the last twenty years, but you could not conclude, from
this example, that this terminology advanced Abrams' observations by one
inch; it just recast them in a more fashionable jargon.
Joanna