After publishing his study of Racine 1963, Roland Barthes came under fire for what many critics of French literary establishment saw a misreading of iconic dramatist. One particularly hostile member of Sorbonne, Raymond Picard, charged Barthes with denying possibility of self-evident objective knowledge literary (Keuneman xiv). stage was set, Francois Dosse recounts, all elements assembled for duel, which was cast like some great Racinian tragedy of twentieth century (223). But Barthes refused to take stage. He responded to Picard's attack, which was entitled New Criticism or New Imposture?, with a short treatise of his own entitled Criticism and Truth. Philip Thody characterizes this exchange by explaining that instead of taking up Picard's somewhat acerbic criticisms and responding with a comparably mordant wit, [Barthes] moved debate on to higher ground (viii). Despite Picard's best attempts to pick a fight, Barthes, it seems, avoids any antagonism altogether. Yet, there is a strain of antagonism at work Criticism and Truth, an antagonism between critic and text: as soon one claims to examine work itself, from point of view of its make-up, it becomes impossible not to raise broad questions of symbolic (Barthes 16). This concept of symbolic, or second-order meaning, which Barthes addresses most notably Mythologies, transforms critic into a perennial antagonist dedicated to demystifying, demythologizing, and unmasking text. A wave of recent criticism suggests that predominant view of relationship between critic and text literary studies today is one of antagonism. However, what should be a dialogic battle most often turns out to be a one-sided interrogation of text, which theorists have variously described paranoid, suspicious, and symptomatic. (1) As literary critics, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus observe, we [have been] trained to equate reading with interpretation: with assigning meaning to a text or set of (1). In fact, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that in context of recent U.S. critical theory [...] to apply a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' is, I believe, widely understood a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities (5). Best and Marcus and Sedgwick have tackled this problem, Rita Felski does her essay Suspicious Minds, by situating hermeneutics of suspicion one unique approach among many. (2) But Felski points out, this discussion has focused primarily on the suspicious dimensions of contemporary styles of and not the related issue of how works of literature encourage suspicion readers (216n). Rather than jettisoning language of antagonism altogether others have done, (3) this essay takes up issue of textual agency, considering how texts incite, provoke, and generally antagonize readers. Recognizing agency of literary text its antagonism with reader, I argue, revises our current critic-driven hermeneutic by abandoning unnecessary limitations on practice of reading that drown out text's voice and ultimately enslave critic to never-ending practice of demystification. Texts have agency to antagonize because of their capacity to elicit and control cognitive and emotional responses through formal features such point of view and characterization. To be sure, many prevalent approaches to reading offer some recognition of textual agency. The formalists and New Critics argue tirelessly that critics should attend to text itself. John Crowe Ransom, for instance, stresses the autonomy of work itself existing for its own sake (598). Reception theorists, such Wolfgang Iser, conceive of reading a phenomenological process which the reader uses various perspectives offered him by text order to relate patterns and 'schematised views' to one another, he sets work motion, and this very process results ultimately awakening of responses within himself (280). …