Literary Meaning

Today's student of literature is faced with an overwhelming variety of critical approaches, this work argues. The need to evaluate their usefulness in furthering our understanding of literature is therefore a growing concern. In this work the author explores the fallacies behind the fashionable hermeticism that insists that the meaning of a text is indeterminate and divides language from any reality beyond itself. Harris then puts forward a case for the return to hermeneutics, in which an understanding of the author's intended meaning is the first step in reading, and at the same time insists upon the hollowness of the current mode of professionalism in literature departments.