It takes the average reader 3 hours and 55 minutes to read Literary Meaning by William Ray
Assuming a reading speed of 250 words per minute. Learn more
This book is both a guide to, and interpretation of, the course of modern literary theory. Exploring the various theories of reading which have informed post-war literary criticism, it shows that for all the fervour of current debate about new movements in criticism, all these different approaches share at root a common notion of literary meaning. Through a successive examination of the most influential theoretical works, William Ray provides the reader with a clear view of how literary critics have conceived their object of study and of how they have sought to grasp the nature of fictional meaning. Starting with the French and German critics who brought the notion of consciousness to the fore in the fifties and sixties, he proceeds lucidly through expositions of Reader Response Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Structuralism, Semiotics and finally Deconstruction. These different schools, Ray argues, all implicitly acknowledge that one cannot account for literary meaning purely in terms of 'structures' or 'events', yet they have persisted in trying to do just that. Some writers, such as the psychoanalytic and reader response critics, see meaning as deriving from the author's intention or the individual act of reading. Others, notably the structuralists and semioticians, hold that meaning has its source in the shared conventions of an author's and reader's culture. The repeated failure of either position to provide a critical practice consistent with its theory has driven literary criticism towards post-structuralism. The paradoxical formulations of deconstruction are best understood, Ray suggests, as an extreme, but historically predictable, attempt to bring the 'structural' and the 'eventual' definitions of meaning together within a peculiarly elusive, perhaps inconceivable, notion.
Literary Meaning by William Ray is 228 pages long, and a total of 58,824 words.
This makes it 77% the length of the average book. It also has 72% more words than the average book.
The average oral reading speed is 183 words per minute. This means it takes 5 hours and 21 minutes to read Literary Meaning aloud.
Literary Meaning is suitable for students ages 12 and up.
Note that there may be other factors that effect this rating besides length that are not factored in on this page. This may include things like complex language or sensitive topics not suitable for students of certain ages.
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