1. My interpretation is directly opposed to that of Bennett 1979 and more or less compatible with Sprinker 1987; see also Kavanagh 1982. Macherey (1982) has come to acknowledge grudgingly the necessity for some concept of

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literary practice, while Eagleton waffles back and forth on his commitment to "Althusserianism"; see the preface to Eagleton 1986 and the interview (Eagleton 1982). [BACK]

2. For an expanded critique of contemporary linguistics, see Pêcheux 1969; Pêcheux and Gadet 1981; Ducrot 1972; Henry 1977; and Faye 1972. All of these works share and develop a Structural Marxist approach to discourse and language that I am introducing through Pêcheux alone. For additional discussions of Pêcheux, see Macdonell 1986; Macabe 1979; and John Thompson 1984, a work flawed by its author's failure to acknowledge the common ground shared by Pêcheux, Faye, Bourdieu, and Althusser (Thompson self-servingly identifies Althusser solely with the work of Hindess and Hirst). Thompson deprecates, where he does not ignore entirely, the comprehensiveness and explanatory power of the problematic within which the particular works he discusses are situated in order to inflate the significance, in the minds of uninformed readers, of authors who reflect his own eclectic hodgepodge of phenomenology and critical theory. [BACK]

3. On Gadamer and Reception Aesthetics, see Hoy 1978; Holub 1984; and Hohendahl 1977 and 1983. [BACK]

4. It is more plausible that the historical variation of the "categories of literary reception"—the fact that certain texts are born literary while others become or cease to be so—indicates the presence of a certain type of objective, determinate cognitive activity, something like ideological production, around which aesthetic ideologies of reception and consumption constantly draw and redraw ideological lines of demarcation. Structural Marxism is able to conceptualize both the specific literary effectivity of the text (its autonomy relative to other signifying practices) as well as its determinate conditions of production and reception (its dependence on a variety of historically specific ideological practices). While such knowledge cannot produce an absolute or definitive interpretation of the meaning of the text in the objective idealist manner of Ingarden, Poulet, and Iser, it also cannot be mystified in the subjective idealist manner of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Jauss. Structural Marxism successfully avoids the aporia introduced by positing an "incommensurability" between production and reception in the manner of the so-called New Historicism of Greenblatt, Montrose, and company (see Veeser 1989). Against the New Historicism, we must protest that it is not enough to "juxtapose" text and context, literary and non-literary phenomena (a process that Dominick LaCapra aptly characterizes as weak montage), nor is it legitimate to hide inadequate explanations behind theoretical fig leaves such as the "irreducible complexity" of history, nor, finally, is it justifiable to parade an ideological desire to dissolve the distinction between knowledge and art—why? in order to sustain the notion of the critic as genius? to evade the political consequences of taking a firm position?—under the banner of textualizing history. The New Historicism may indeed answer such burning questions as how a professional middle-class academic from Berkeley might feel if he suddenly found himself in the body of Thomas More, but beyond legitimizing such thought experiments it is difficult to find any theoretical value in the New Historicist enterprise. (For an alternative, "Cultural Materialist'' view of the English Renaissance, a view informed

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by Structural Marxist concepts, see Dollimore 1984; Halpern 1991; and Dollimore and Sinfield 1985.) Nor, finally, is there much to recommend a Marxist version of reception aesthetics, which simply replaces the crude materialist objectivism of reflection theory with an equally crude materialist subjectivism of a historicist reception theory.

It is interesting how a general concept of literary production keeps popping up, even in the works of its avowed enemies. Raymond Williams (1977), for example, begins by attacking the validity of a concept of literature by virtue of its historicity but ends up extolling the practice of literature as the "human essence of creativity." [BACK]

6. Fredric Jameson (1981) has convincingly shown that semantic elements (which he calls "ideologemes") perform an essential function in the realization of the literary styles of Balzac, Gissing, and Conrad. I have not included an analysis of Jameson's important book here despite the strong influence of Althusserian concepts on it—not primarily because of space limitations, although these are prohibitive, but because of the many other influences on Jameson's work. For perceptive evaluations of Jameson, see Eagleton 1986 and Dowling 1984. [BACK]