Ben Stolzfus's Lacan and Literature, for me, represents the worst kind of Lacanian literary interpretation. The introduction to the book lays out Stolzfus's methodology, a mixture of reader-response criticism and Lacanian structural linguistics, with dashes of Barthes and Derrida, all of which are laid out as though they were written down on Mt Sinai.

Can it still be called criticism when an author simply assembles a set of theoretical rules and then applies them rigorously to a series of literary texts, as though they were some kind of formula? In other words, can we still call something "criticism" when what it seems to be doing is not "critical" in any real sense, but instead constitutes a kind of analytical sleepwalking?

Stolzfus shows that he is aware of the pitfalls of earlier forms of psychoanalytic criticism - he mentions Marie Bonaparte's book on Poe, for instance - but while he duly avoids attempting to analyze the authors he is writing about, he nonetheless continues to repeat the error of engaging in this kind of programmatic criticism. What Stolzfus is doing here is not literary criticism, it is "decoding."

Shoshana Felman's analysis of famously problematic Freudian readings of literary texts by Poe and Henry James are an object lesson in why this kind of criticism is a dead end. Literary criticism is not merely a form of decoding, which implicitly places the critic in a hierarchical position above the text, but an attempt to enter into the logic of the literary text. That is precisely why, Felman shows, The Turn of the Screw is such a brilliant text - it anticipates and resists the critic who would "decode" its meaning by forcing them to enter into the madness of its protagonist. ( )