Nonfiction | December 01, 1987

The full text of this essay is currently not available online.

Ten years ago my title might have been catchy or at least puzzling. These days, anyone who keeps up with the trends in criticism assumes that I will somehow play upon the principle–most commonly associated with Stanley Fish–that the meaning of a text “has no effective existence outside of its realization in the mind of a reader,” that each reader creates the text during the process of absorbing the words that an author has strung together.

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