JOHN R. SEARLE

I WANT TO discuss literary theory, and it is important to say "literary theory"
and not "literary criticism." I will discuss, not in great detail, three different
approaches to questions concerning textual meaning--Stanley Fish's claim that
the meaning of a text is entirely in the reader's response; ¹ the claim made by
Stephen Knapp and Walter Michaels that the meaning of a text is entirely a
matter of the author's intention; and the view of Jacques Derrida that meaning
is a matter of--well, what? Meanings are "undecidable" and have "relative in-
determinacy," according to Derrida. Instead of fully determinate meanings,
there is rather the free play of signifiers and the grafting of texts onto texts
within the textuality and the intertextuality of the text.

It is an odd feature of the extensive discussions in contemporary literary
theory that the authors sometimes make very general remarks about the nature
of language without making use of principles and distinctions that are com-
monly accepted in logic, linguistics, and the philosophy of language. I had long
suspected that at least some of the confusion of literary theory derived from
an ignorance of well-known results, but the problem was presented to me in
an acute form by the following incident. In "The Word Turned Upside Down,"
a review of Jonathan Culler book On Deconstruction that I wrote for the New
York Review of Books, I pointed out that it is not necessarily an objection to
a conceptual analysis, or to a distinction, that there are no rigorous or pre-
cise boundaries to the concept analyzed or the distinction being drawn. It is
not necessarily an objection even to theoretical concepts that they admit of
application more or less. This is something of a cliché in analytic philosophy:
most concepts and distinctions are rough at the edges and do not have sharp
boundaries. The distinctions between fat and thin, rich and poor, democracy
and authoritarianism, for example, do not have sharp boundaries. More im-
portant for our present discussion, the distinctions between literal and meta-
phorical, serious and nonserious, fiction and nonfiction and, yes, even true and

-166-