General Introduction:

Major Work:

-- "Interpretation is here construed as an essentially allegorical act, which consists in rewriting a given text in terms of a particular interpretive master code." (10)
-- will always recognise the historical origins of its own concepts, the "master codes" it uses, and will never allow the concepts to ossify and become insensitive to  the presuure of reality.
 --will seek to unmask the inner form of a genre or body of texts and will work from the surface of a work inward  to the level where literary form is deeply related to the concrete.

• Criticizes two approaches to history: Antiquarian and Modernist (Structuralist)
• Three levels' of Causality -- Jameson's criticism of Althusser
1.mechanical causality  (billiard ball causality)  applicable to analysis of local events
2. Hegel's and Stalin's "expressive causality"
--homogeniety of the levels and totalization
3. Structural causality

• Mediation

. . . the relationship between the levels of instances, and the possibility of adapting analyses and findings from one level to another.  (39)
-- a process of transcoding: as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or "text," . . . (40)
Mediation is the classical dialectical term for the establishment of relationship between, say, the formal analysis of a work of art and its social ground, or between the internal dynamics of the political state and its economic base.

Different kinds of mediation
Through separation and differentiation -- structural causality
through identification -- expressive causality
"Althusserian structural causality is therefore just as fundamentally a practice of mediation as is the expressive causality to which it is opposed." (41)


• three horizons of criticism--from immanent analysis to transcendent one
1. a level of immanent analysis, = text as a symbolic act
2. a level of socio-discourse analysis, = text as class discourse
3. and an epochal level of Historical reading = text as being embedded in a field of forces of the dynamic of various sign systems

• Other major ideas
1. History as an absent cause: "it [History] is inaccessible except through textual forms. amd . . . our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious." (33)

-- History as Necessity: "History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and set inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis. . . History as ground and untranscendable horizon. . . " (102)
2. Ideologeme -- the discreet ideological unit found in the texts.  Ideology --strategies of containment (53)