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It rejects visual or outside perspectives that treat the critic as merely surveying the work objectively, and it questions extralinguistic explanations that presume an “origin” beyond language. Drawing on Hardy’s image of historical text as woven cloth, the preface frames interpretation as weaving, unraveling, and sometimes “violence” done to textual texture, while also noting that valid readings have limits and can differ in 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does the preface claim that literary criticism is fundamentally about language?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It argues that criticism re-creates in the critic’s mind the consciousness generated by the words within the texts, and that there is no escape from the text’s language in interpretation.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What does the preface reject about how criticism should be understood?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"It rejects visual metaphors that place the critic outside the text and also challenges extralinguistic approaches that explain the work by sources outside language, such as the author’s life or psychology.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How does the preface describe the critic’s role in interpretation?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The critic weaves into the “Penelope’s web” of the text—sometimes unraveling, reweaving, or cutting the cloth to reveal structure—so interpretation inevitably involves “violence” to the text in the act of understanding.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},320273,1790119061,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":39,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},1374391974585,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_276721f389ce27ea32af1340a28f341c","Thomas Hardy  \nDistance and Desire  \nJ.Hillis Miller  \nThe Belknap Press ofHarvard University PressCambridge,Massachusetts  \n1970  \nPreface  \nLITERARY CRITICISM IS LANGUAGE about language,or,toput it another way,a re-creating in the mind of the criticof the consciousness inscribed in the texts studied,gen-erated there by the words.To say this is to put in ques-tion certain habitual metaphors for what happens in theact of criticism.Among these are all those visual met-aphors which set the critic over against the text as aspectator who surveys the literary work as a scientist issometimes thought to survey the thing he investigates,dispassionately and objectively.Illicit also are the met-aphors for criticism which propose to explain the text bysomething extralinguistic which precedes it and which isits generative source—the life or psychology of theauthor,historical conditions at a certain time,some eventwhich is the model“imitated”or \"reflected”or “repre-sented”in the poem or story.The centuries-old met-aphors of mimesis obscure the nature of literary language.The pre-text of a given text is always another text openin its turn to interpretation.There is never an extra-linguistic“origin”by means of which the critic can  \n# viii |PREFACE\n\nescape from his labyrinthine wanderings within the com-plexities of relationship among words.  \nThe critic,moreover,does not possess a power of look-ing from the outside in a sovereign view which sees allthe text at once as a spatial design.To understand thetext he must be inside it.The means of his entry is lan-guage,a medium within which he already dwells.He caninsert himself into the text because both he and it arealready interpenetrated by their common language.Themeans of his interpretation is also language,those wordsof his own which even in the most passive act of readinghe adds to the text as he understands it.If there is noescape outside the text,if language is as much the sourceof consciousness or of history as consciousness or historyis the source of language,then far better than any visualmetaphor for what happens in criticism is that imageemployed by Thomas Hardy in The Dynasts and else-where,the image of the text of history as a woven cloth.1A literary text is a texture of words,its threads and fila-ments reaching out into the pre-existing warp and woofof the language.The critic adds his weaving to thePenelope's web of the text,or unravels it so that itsstructuring threads may be laid bare,or reweaves it,ortraces out one thread in the text to reveal the design itinscribes,or cuts the whole cloth to one shape oranother.In some way the critic necessarily does violenceof the text in the act of understanding it or of interpret-ing it.There is no innocent reading,no reading whichleaves the work exactly as it is  \nThis does not mean that all readings are equally validor of equal value.Some readings are certainly wrong.Ofthe valid interpretations all have limitations.To revealone aspect of the work of an author often means ignoringor shading other aspects.Some approaches reach moredeeply into the structure of the text than others.Thisbook attempts an interpretation of Thomas Hardy'swork in fiction and in verse which is consonant with myprevious essays on nineteenth-and twentieth-centurypoets in The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality.Though this study is longer than any of those essays it toopicks out a single design in the totality of an author'swork.All his individual works are set beside one another,lyrics,novels,and nonfictional prose together.Evidencefor the existence of a given theme is gathered from amultiplicity of works written at different times.Such anapproach implicitly assumes that works composed over acareer spanning almost sixty years can now be thought ofas existing simultaneously within a single totality.Thequestion of whether a given writer “develops”is oftendifficult to answer.There is more than one way in whichan author may evolve.In Hardy's case there is certainl","cbCaiiQnjJjjcN2B","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiiQnjJjjcN2B","pdf",35678826,151,"English","# Preface\n## Criticism as language\n## Limits and validity of readings\n## Hardy’s development and interpretive design\n## Method: tracing persistent structures across works","[{\"question\":\"Why does the preface claim that literary criticism is fundamentally about language?\",\"answer\":\"It argues that criticism re-creates in the critic’s mind the consciousness generated by the words within the texts, and that there is no escape from the text’s language in interpretation.\"},{\"question\":\"What does the preface reject about how criticism should be understood?\",\"answer\":\"It rejects visual metaphors that place the critic outside the text and also challenges extralinguistic approaches that explain the work by sources outside language, such as the author’s life or psychology.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the preface describe the critic’s role in interpretation?\",\"answer\":\"The critic weaves into the “Penelope’s web” of the text—sometimes unraveling, reweaving, or cutting the cloth to reveal structure—so interpretation inevitably involves “violence” to the text in the act of understanding.\"}]","Distance and Desire - Preface | PDF",1789949559,233]