Unorthodox Views, Vol. 111

Much of contemporary critical theory holds that meaning is relative and subjective. This book scrutinizes the principal assumptions and beliefs about mind, language, meaning, truth, and reality governing current debate and discussion not only in literary criticism and theory but also in the broader academic culture. In doing so, the volume brings support to the growing number of scholars who are expressing renewed interest in authors, determinate meanings, formal and aesthetic issues, and related concerns, but who have been laboring without sufficient theoretical arguments or justifications. Moving beyond critique, the book offers rigorous defenses of alternatives to the prevailing critical orthodoxies.

The first five chapters address foundational issues, arguing against or exposing the limitations of the most common forms of linguistic idealism, social constructivism, and relativism. These initial chapters prepare the way for subsequent discussions of more text-based matters, such as the authorial determination of artistic effects, the bases of our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction, the justifications of our decisions about intrinsic merit and artistic value, and other matters crucial to our understanding of the meanings and values implicit in human expression.

Exposes the intellectual and argumentative weaknesses of relativistic and social constructivist theories in literary criticism and the broader academic culture.

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Battersby (English, Ohio State U.) presents a broad philosophical attack on the postmodern/poststructural "orthodoxy" in literary criticism that argues that all conceptual schemes are socially constructed by historical/political forces and ideological formulations. He provides justifications of determinate meaning, objective truth, ontological realism, and a correspondence theory of truth. Building on these theoretical matters, he moves on to such matters as the determination of artistic effects by authors, the possibility of correct interpretation of authorial meaning, the complex relations of fictional facts and factual fictions, the bases of our emotional and evaluative responses to representations of human life, and the justifications supporting our decisions about intrinsic merit. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

JAMES L. BATTERSBY is Professor Emeritus of English at Ohio State University and has previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively on 18th-century literature and criticism, the works of Samuel Johnson, and modern critical theory. His most recent books include Paradigms Regained: Pluralism and the Practice of Criticism (1991) and Reason and the Nature of Texts (1996).