Abstract

In replying to Jay Schleusener, I have also answered many of the objections put less abstractly, though often more sharply, by Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish's assertion that my category of unintended negative consequences "will be filled by whatever does not accord with what Rader has decreed to be the positive constructive intention" is essentially the same charge brought by Schleusener and requires no further substantive answer than I have already offered here and, for that matter, in my original essay. I would point out, however, that in this remark as elsewhere Fish loads his statements with inaccurate pejoratives: I do not decree but postulate the positive constructive intention and test it for explanatory adequacy by deduction open at every point to the counterdemonstration of fallacy. I would point out also that, in making this charge, he operates under different explanatory standards from those he adopts elsewhere. The statement quoted imputes to my theory as a special defect the fact of its supposedly self-fulfilling and nonfalsifiable character, whereas later Fish clearly asserts that all interpretations including his own are necessarily self-confirming. Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms", and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks"