Abrams How To Do Things With Text PDF
Abrams How To Do Things With Text PDF
Abrams How To Do Things With Text PDF
Senthil Nathan
Assistant Professor
PG and Research Department of English
Sri Vidya Mandir Arts and Science College
Katteri; Uthangarai, Krishnagiri :636902
Tamilnadu. India.
Abrams introduces the term ‘New reading’ to identify the theories of those critics
which ‘propagate a new way of reading that subverts accepted interpretations and
replaces them with unexpected alternatives’. He characterised the recent history of
literary criticism as the triumph of the ‘Age of Reading’ over the ‘Age of Criticism’ a
revolution that began sometime after the mid-decades of this century. According to
Abrams ‘the great upholders of this Age of Criticism are the American Critics and
European Formalists’.
Fish states that all reading ‘strategies’ are self-confirming and there is no ‘right
reading’ of any part of the text. There are only agreements among readers who belong to
an interpretative community which happens to share the same ‘strategy’.
Finally Fish claim that all values as well as meaning of a text are ‘relative’ to the
concept or scheme of a particular interpretive community are ‘incommensurable’.
Therefore, there is no available standpoint in a literary text. Thus his theory is half-
humanism and what he calls as ‘affective stylistics’.
Conclusion
Coming close to the analysis, Abrams put forth a reply for the third question
which makes the newreader to have diverse meaning of the text. The chief reason is that
our use and understanding of language is not a science but a practice. Human are born
into a community of speakers and writers who have already acquired this skill. The
successful practice of language depends on our mastery of linguistic uniformities that we
call conventions, or norms, or rules. Therefore the linguistic meanings we find in a text
are relative to the interpretive strategy.
When a new reader, on the basis of his contrived interpretive strategy interprets a
text, he is playing a double game or find out the diverse meaning from the text. Derrida is
able to deconstruct any text into a suspension of numberless undecidable significations,
Fish can make it the occasion for a creative adventure in false surmises and Bloom can
read it as a perverse distortion of any chosen precursor-text. Abrams concludes by saying
that each new strategy, on the other hand, is a discovery procedure which guarantees new
meanings. Thus it provides freshness of sensation in reading old and familiar texts.
To conclude with the words from Washington Post , “One of the respected
literary scholars alive…Abrams stands for understanding and conciliation, calling for
a kind of humanism that can embrace the good in all literary theories’.
Reference
Sethuraman. V.S , Contemporary Criticism: An Anthology, Edited. 1989,
MacMillian, Publishers India Limited.