Speech-act theory revisited: Rule notions and reader-oriented criticism

Abstract

The analogy between interpretive norms and various types of linguistic rules is central to reader-oriented criticism. In particular, critics have related speech-act institutions and speech-act rules to institutionalized critical practices and literary reading operations. This paper first examines an especially influential speech-act account, John Searle's Speech Acts, and finds some conflation of rule descriptions of pre-existing institutions and individual actions invoking institutional norms. It then argues there is a similar confusion of explanatory goals in rule-based critical discussions, often resulting in a variety of behaviors and phenomena (conscious and unconscious interpretive actions, definitional genre statements, literary-specific and general inference-making) explicated with a single gesture toward linguistic and speech-act analogies. These problems eventually culminate in the contradictory rhetoric of the recent ‘Against Theory’ debate (rule-based critical analogies are politically repressive; yet recognition of interpretive constraints produces critical freedom).