The road to Xanadu led to Mars: Why structuralism sent me there but the profession went elsewhere

Abstract

Academic literary criticism has become centered on the interpretation of meaning in literary texts. As a consequence, the profession has no consensus account of what texts are or what form is. By following tentative interest in structuralism, semiotics, and linguistics to the analysis of “Kubla Khan” I moved deep into the cognitive sciences with an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. That effectively removed me from the profession, which continued to pursue a wide variety of interpretive approaches. A 21st century discipline would retain interpretation as ethical criticism while incorporating other approaches as description, naturalistic, and computational criticism.