Practical criticism à la Riffaterre

Author(s): A. W. LYLE
Source: Critical Survey , 1992, Vol. 4, No. 3, Critical theory in the classroom (1992), pp.
241-249
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41555667

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Survey

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Practical criticism à la Riffaterre

A. W. LYLE

In recent years the old-established activity known as Practical Cr

under severe attack from poststructuralists who see in it nothing mor
ation of the theoretically unsound basis of Anglo-American formal
most important things we should be doing as teachers of literatu
student's attention to the way that language functions in a litera
contention of this paper that, however widely we may roam in the fie
turalism, practical criticism is still a valuable pedagogic enter
theories of Michael Riffaterre provide a sophisticated met
undertaking.
Riffaterre has written a very large number of articles and two important books,
Semiotics of Poetry and Text Production. It is on the former of these that I wish to
concentrate, for I believe that the model adumbrated therein provides a subtle,
theoretically sound, yet pragmatic tool for the analysis and interpretation of poetic
texts. I shall first sketch in simplified form the main points of Riffaterre's approach
and then apply it to the first three sonnets of Shakespeare to demonstrate its practical
applicability. The most important features of Riffaterre's theory can be summarised
as follows:
(1) 'The language of poetry differs from common linguistic usage', that is to say, 'a
poem says one thing and means another' ( Semiotics , p. 1). In other words, Riffaterre
subscribes to the belief that literariness consists in controlled deviation from the
norms of everyday discourse.
(2) This implies that the poetic text is non-mimetic. Through displacement, expa
sion, conversion and a whole range of other linguistic devices the poem ' threaten[
the literary representation of reality' ( Semiotics , p. 2). Or, as he claims in Text Produc
tion, 'the referent has no pertinence to the analysis' (p. 15; cf. pp. 27, 33, 87f
199ff.). This is reinforced in his contention that 'Meaning is not based on th
reference of the signifier but lies, instead, in the signifier's reference to other sig
fiers' (Text Production, p. 44).
(3) Not that Riffaterre would deny a referential level of the text: he simply, like Is
regards it as a first stage of reading. The true significance of the poem only emerg
from a necessary rereading.
(4) This rereading is crucial to integrate what Riffaterre, perhaps somewh
unfortunately, calls 'ungrammaticalities' into a higher level of semiosis. Thus, fo
example, in Blake's 'Sick Rose' a heuristic first reading might interpret the first line as
addressed literally to a flower or a girl; but when we come up against the ungrammati-

© C.Q. & S. 1992

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
242 Critical Survey, Volume 4, Number 3

cality of 'invisible worm' in line 2 we are forced to modify our decoding of the text for
what Riffaterre terms 'the truly hermeneutic reading' ( Semiotics , p. 5). Linguistic,
literary and intertextual competence will enable the reader, as he moves through the
text, to perform 'a structural decoding' ( Semiotics , p. 6) and eventually retroactively
integrate ungrammaticalities into a higher level of significance. This transformation of
signs from the mimetic plane constitutes the true semiotic activity. Riffaterre again
stresses the difference between units of meaning, which 'may be words or phrases or
sentences', and ' the unit of significance' which is the complete text ( Semiotics , p. 6).
(5) Central to Riffaterre 's theory is the idea of matrix and hypogram. Poems he
regards as transformations of a structural matrix, 'an abstract concept never actu-
alized per se' ( Semiotics , p. 13), but available as a single word or binary opposition of
which the poem is the fully articulated concrétisation. In other words, 'the text is in
effect a variation or modulation of one structure- thematic, symbolic, or whatever'
(Semiotics, p. 6). This matrix in turn articulates itself through what Riffaterre calls
hypograms or clichés which activate the poeticity of the text. Hypograms 'may be
potential, therefore observable in language, or actual, therefore observable in a
previous text' ( Semiotics , p. 23). Thus, in Shakespeare's sonnet 'That time of year
thou mayst in me behold', the matrix word 'ageing', which is not overtly stated in the
text, engenders the hypogram 'I am in the autumn of my life', which in turn is
converted into the text as we have it, the total unit of signification. The hypogram is
truly semiotic because it implies a 'descriptive system . . . whose nuclear word
remains unsaid' ( Semiotics , p. 31). Riffaterre's theory is therefore primarily intertex-
tual: hypograms form part of the reader's literary competence (see Text Production,
pp. 46ff., 91ff. , 112ff.). As an example of this, Riffaterre quotes Baudelaire's Une 'О
Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu' and shows how this is derived from the
commonplace Vergilian line quoted in all the grammar books 'monstrum horrendum,
informe, ingens, cui lumen adeptům' ( Semiotics , p. 25). As another example, he
shows how the matrix 'much time will pass' generates the cliché 'il passera beaucoup
d'eau sous le pont depuis que', which in turn is expanded in Lautréamont's line
'Tamise brumeuse charriera encore une quantité notable de limon avant que mes
forces soient complètement épuisées' ( Text Production, p. 45).
For Riffaterre, text production combines expansion with conversion (see Text
Production, pp. 53ff., 56ff.). His first rule is that expansion transforms the con-
stituents of the matrix sentence into more complex forms. Thus, in Gautier's portrait
of Gerard de Nerval, the key word 'esprit pur' is developed into the code of
'hirondelle apode'; this exemplum, drawn from ancient natural history, 'makes
explicit those semes of esprit that oppose it to matter, the semes that have organized
countless representations of elevated spirituality as a soaring upwards' ( Semiotics ,
p. 48). This in turn creates the phrases and sentences that constitute the complete
text. Riffaterre rightly connects this procedure with the rhetorical device 'labelled
amplificado' ( Semiotics , p. 49). As he explains, repetition is aided by 'changes in the
grammatical nature of the model sentence's constituents: pronouns into nouns, for
instance, nouns into groups, adjectives into relative clauses, and so forth' ( Semiotics ,
p. 51). His example here is the way in which in Baudelaire's 'Les Bijoux' the com-

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Practical criticism à la Riff aterre 243

monplace semic matrix of 'striking erotic poses' is transferred from the body-limb
code to a 'suppleness' seme, implicit in such words as 'reins', 'cynge' and 'onduleux'
(Semiotics, p. 52). But this conversion is in no way random. Riffaterre's second rule is
that 'conversion transforms the constituents of the matrix sentence by modifying them
all with the same factor' ( Semiotics , p. 63). His example here is Baudelaire's first
'Spleen', in which he demonstrates how the cliché 'all-pervading gloom' converts the
hypogrammatic 'opposition inside/outside into an equivalence' ( Semiotics , p. 68). It is
worth noting furthermore that Riffaterre relies on C. S. Peirce's concept (cf. Inter -
textuality, p. 80) of the sign for the 'shift from meaning to significance . . . Any
equivalence established by the poem and perceived by retroactive reading may be
regarded as an interprétant' ( Semiotics , p. 81). He goes on to distinguish between
lexematic and textual interprétants, the former of which are mediating words which
'presuppose two hypograms simultaneously' ( Semiotics , p. 81); the latter constitute
texts 'either quoted in the poem or alluded to' ( Semiotics , p. 81). Once again inter-
textuaUty is the key to the system, or, as Riffaterre later puts it, 'the poem carries
meaning only by referring from text to text' ( Semiotics , p. 150).
We will now apply a Riffaterrian analysis to Shakespeare's first three sonnets as a
way of validating the pedagogic usefulness of such an approach.

Sonnet 1

Our first heuristic reading presents few problems: it is natural to wish to preserve
beauty, but the addressee refuses to perpetuate his own loveliness by engendering
children. This linear reading represents the unconverted 'prose' sense of the text. Our
actual experience retroactively confronting the poem's richness as an accomplished
sign will be very different. We notice first of all that the text is based on a series of
manifest oppositions- increase/decease, we/thou, famine/abundance, die/bear,
tender heir/tender churl, waste/niggarding and so on. These all seem to be hypogram-
matic variants of the cliché 'preserve beauty before it's too late'. We must now ask if
the generating matrix is within the poem or consists in a word or binary opposition
that remains unstated. If we take the text to be an expansion of the binary opposition
'barrenness/fecundity', an intertextual stereotype detected by Riffaterre himself in
Gautier's 'In Deserto' ( Semiotics , p. 10), then it would appear obvious that the matrix
of this sonnet lies in the alUteratively foregrounded 'bud/buries' contrast in line 11.
This matrix generates all the hypogrammatic expansions within the text, 'bud'
energising a clichéd spring/flower code, 'buries' acting as the generator of an equally
traditional grave code. We can represent this schematically:

fair die
increase decease
riper time
tender heir contracted
bear self-substantial
abundance famine
sweet cruel

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
244 Critical Survey, Volume 4, Number 3
fresh ornament
spring
bud buries
content waste
world's due glutton
grave

Siting the young man at the interface of these polarities, Shakespeare is able to
engender a further intertext- no less than the familiar Narcissus legend. While 'bud'
activates a code of increase (an expansion matrix), 'niggarding' involves the seme of
contraction, that is, the sterile, inward-directed, self-contemplative, narcissistic code
articulated in words like 'contracted', 'self-substantial', 'foe' and 'cruel'. These
semantic variants of a secondary matrix which we might call 'selfishness' find their
expansive form in the eating metaphor of the final couplet, itself activated by the
binary opposition 'famine/abundance' of line 7. The young man, by refusing to pay
his debt to time ('heir') and nature ('world's due'), is paradoxically gluttoning on
himself, a barren activity which can only lead to the finality of the grave.
This leads us to the realisation that a strong temporal code is operative in the
poem- that of birth and death. The ultimate closure of the grave is placed in dramatic
contrast to the desire for increase and the hope that 'beauty's rose might never die'. A
similar semantic conflict is found in the seasonal code activated by the contrast
between nature and man- winter may come (and the implications of this we shall see
spelt out in sonnet 2), but spring will return, whereas on the human level, as 'the riper
... by time decease[s]', it is crucial to preserve the 'memory' of beauty by bearing a
'tender heir'. We might finally note another intertextual cliché between light and
darkness in line 6. The familiar image of the fire burning out reminds us of the
darkness of the grave, while the positively marked semes of 'bright eyes' and 'light's
flame' provide, as it were, the now ('fresh ornament') of the poem, a potential to
defeat time ominously undercut by the young man's refusal to contemplate futurity.

Sonnet 2

In this sonnet a similar pattern can be detected. The first heuristic reading seems
equally simple and could be summed up in the paraphrasable or abstract prose sense
as something like 'when you get old your beauty will be decayed: therefore preserve it
now by engendering a child'. Again we notice the underpinning structure of binary
oppositions- youth/age, new/old, warm/cold, treasure/thriftless and so on- but here
the matrix word takes the form of what Riffaterre calls 'dual meaning' or 'intertextual
punning' ( Semiotics , p. 82). The initial ungrammaticality contained in the metaphor
of winter besieging a brow activates a familiar warfare code, reinforced by the word
'trenches' in line 2, and alerts us to the binary opposition inherent in the single word
'field'. The matrix thus becomes the opposition between battlefield (aligning with the
grave code of sonnet 1) and fertile field, already predicated in the barrenness/fertility
and winter/spring codes adumbrated in the first sonnet.
The metaphor in lines 1 and 2 thus generates the hypogram 'age brings wrinkles',

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Practical criticism à la Riff aterre 245

which 'canned' cliché or 'préexistent word group' ( Semiotics , pp. 23 and 39) energises
and controls all the other codes and semes in the text. Hence the 'bud' of sonnet 1,
with all its potentiality for growth (now), becomes, in keeping with the prevailing
agrarian code, a 'tattered weed' (then). The 'beauty' and 'treasure' of the youth's
'lusty days' are similarly (like the 'fresh ornament' of sonnet 1) narcissistically con-
verted to a 'within' register as 'deep-sunken eyes' replace the 'bright eyes' of the
preceding sonnet. We further notice that in the phrase 'all-eating shame' the
metaphor of self-cannibalism expounded in the couplet of sonnet 1 is here strongly
reinforced, paralleling the homologues 'niggarding' and 'thriftless'. This in turn leads
to a logical rearticulation in terms of an overt economic code of the 'paying the debt
to nature' hypogram that we observed inherent in the first sonnet: the expression 'sum
my count' converts the 'tender heir' of sonnet 1 into the expanded line 'Proving his
beauty by succession thine'.
In a similar manner, the seasonal clichés spring/ winter and ripeness! grave are
metonymically transformed into the human opposition between warm blood and the
coldness of death. It becomes obvious that the effectiveness of this sonnet depends
not only on a system of conventional codes expanded and concretised into particular
images but also upon the specific utilisation of the previous sonnet as a hypotext. A
dual intertextual relationship is thus established.

Sonnet 3

This offers a virtually identical heuristic message but expresses it in even more
explicitly narcissistic terms. We notice first how the text is based on an opposition
between the looking glass of line 1, which reveals only 'wrinkles' (cf. 'trenches' in
sonnet 2), and the metaphoric glass of line 9 in which the young man reflects the
beauty of his mother. This is further enriched by the complex homologous metaphor
of 'windows', transparent glass through which age can perceive in its descendants the
'golden time' of youth. This, however, does not provide the primary matrix of the
text: in order to locate this we must first survey all the binary oppositions on which the
text depends. Once again, these can be presented schematically:

fresh repair beguile

renewest unbless
mother
fair unear'd
womb tomb
tillage
husbandry self-love
posterity wrinkles
lovely April age
prime single
golden time remember'd not
live die/dies

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
246 Critical Survey, Volume 4, Number 3

From this it becomes obvious that the bud/buries matrix of sonnet 1 is being here
rearticulated in the foregrounded rhyme womb /tomb, a place of expansion and
burgeoning growth contrasting as before with the finality of the grave- two
enclosures, but one of fecundity, the other of termination. This matrix is reinforced
by a repetition of the agrarian code in which the 'unear'd womb' of an 'unblessed
mother' is denied the 'tillage' of the young man's 'husbandry'. This double-entendre
is in turn underpinned by the overdetermined mother/spring code and contrasts
dramatically with the 'selfishness' seme we observed in sonnets 1 and 2, now,
however, explicitly stated as 'self-love'- a theme that, incidentally, will spark off
intertextual reverberations in several of the later sonnets (notably nos. 9, 10, 62).
As in the two previous sonnets, a strong temporal dimension is activated by the use
of words like 'time', 'fresh', 'renewesť, 'posterity' and 'age': in other words, if the
young man does not (now) repair his freshness, memory will be obliterated and once
again the irremediable closure of the grave will be all that is left (then) as his 'image
dies' with him.

Having thus conducted, in the voice of Riffaterre, an analysis of three familiar texts, it
is now time to enquire briefly into the relative strengths and weaknesses of such an
approach. The pedagogically beneficial aspects of Riffaterre's theory can easily be
summarised. In the first place, by locating the generative forces of the poem firmly in
language as deployed by the text and perceptible in it, he avoids the biographical
fallacy on the one hand and naive psychologism on the other. Riffaterre would thus
agree with Mikel Dufrenne that the real author is a critical irrelevance- it is the
author as imminent in the text that our reading of the work reconstitutes, or, as
Dufrenne puts it, 'It is his work, not his biography, that informs us concerning the
creator' (The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 100). Or, as Riffaterre
phrases it, 'the author is a by-product of the text' (Text Production, p. 5). When it
comes to the experience of reading, Riffaterre comes close to the valuable insights of
Wolfgang Iser in seeing a dialectical relationship between the controlling power of the
text and the reader's degree of freedom to concretise or actualise its virtual dimen-
sion, i.e. the gaps or indeterminacies which may require literary or intertextual
competence to fill in. While conceding that reading is 'unstable, and interpretation is
never final', he also claims that 'the poem's saturation by the semantic features of its
matrix' limits the reader's freedom of interpretation and denies 'the opportunities for
hermeneutic deviance; the reader is therefore under strict guidance and control as he
fills the gaps and solves the puzzle' (Semiotics, p. 165). This, as we shall see shortly, is
by no means an unproblematic stance, but it is worth noting that, in his most recent
study of the subject, Riffaterre again claims that intertextuality 'leaves little leeway to
readers and controls closely their response' ('Compulsory reader response: the inter-
textual drive', in Intertextuality: theories and practices, ed. M. Worton and J. Still,
Manchester University Press, 1990).
Thirdly, it is worth pointing out that Riffaterre's allegiance to a semiotic procedure
(which links the text to other sign systems) and to intertextuality (which links the text
to other texts, préexistent genres, word groups, conventional codes and so on) places

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Practical criticism à la Riff aterre 247

the text at the heart of a communicative methodology and thus severely limits and
restricts both random subjectivity and Crocean aesthetic absolutism: 'all texts are
communicative acts', he insists ( Text Production, p. 75).
Moreover, we can perceive an obvious value in regarding the text as essentially
non-mimetic. Here again Riffaterre agrees with Dufrenne, who states unequivocally
'that the work of art does not have its truth in verisimilitude' and 'does not claim to
imitate the real' ( Phenomenology , pp. 118, 167, cf. p. 136). Riffaterre thus avoids
subscribing to any theory of language as directly referential or transparent. Equally
useful is the stress we find throughout Semiotics on the integrative process of retro-
active reading. As Riffaterre points out in 'Compulsory reader response' (p. 62), that
which makes 'a second reading possible and indeed compulsory' is very often an
intertext which explicates the poem's apparent ungrammaticalities by evoking the
literay and cultural allusions or codes upon which the text's ultimate significance
depends.
I would claim that the Riff aterrean procedures enumerated above, and rigorously
demonstrated in Riffaterre 's own interpretative practice, provide a useful
methodology for dealing with the poetic text. However, the system is by no means
impregnable: there are certain areas of weakness or inconsistency, and it is to these
that we must now turn our attention.
In the first place it must be said that the distinction between literary and non-
literary language, a distinction that Riffaterre maintains in his latest contribution
(Intertextuality , p. 57; cf. Text Production, p. 1) is difficult to sustain: he provides us
with no definition of everyday discourse against which literariness or poeticity can be
measured. This lack of precision brings him dangerously close to subscribing to a
norm/deviation theory. As he says in Text Production, 'We can speak of ungram-
matically, however, only if we first determine what the pertinent norm is' ( Text
Production, p. 200); but no attempt to articulate that norm is ever provided. We
might further note that the methodology inherent in the matrix/hypogram analytic
process would seem to involve what Cleanth Brooks has called the heresy of
paraphrase.
In criticising this approach, Jonathan Culler points out how Riffaterre thus 'encour-
ages reductivism' (The Pursuit of Signs, p. 91). Indeed the separation of prose or
paraphrasable 'saying' from the unique 'meaning' of the final text as the complete
unit of signification would appear to involve a theoretically indefensible separation of
form from content. Riffaterre himself admits this when he claims that 'the literariness
of the verbal work of art' depends upon 'a subordination of content to form' ( Inter-
textuality, p. 56). Another objection that might be levelled concerns the problem of
'correctness'. It seems that the reading of a poem is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle:
'the text guides the reader towards a correct interpretation' ( Textual Practice, p. 159;
cf. p. 144), or, in Semiotics, p. 12, 'Then suddenly the puzzle is solved, everything
falls into place.' This is reassuringly comforting, but, as Culler has observed, it tends
to privilege Riffaterre's readings over those of his predecessors and seems to
invalidate the possibility of a multiplicity of interpretations, 'all equally correct'. It
also allows little room for what Dufrenne calls 'the sensuous' or the aesthetic attitude,

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
248 Critical Survey, Volume 4, Number 3

though it should be noted that his latest article mitigates this stance by allowing
greater freedom to reader response theory ( Intertextuality , pp. 68, 76).
A more serious objection, to which I have already alluded, concerns the ambiguous
nature of 'the dialectical exchange between text and reader' ( Text Production, p.
158): on the one hand Riffaterre grants authority to the text to control interpretation;
on the other he seems to advocate the freedom of the reader to construct his own
actualisations of the work, or, as Culler has pointed out, he does not describe 'how
readers do and must read', but instead offers 'a genetic theory, a method of interpret-
ation based on origins' (The Pursuit of Signs, p. 98).
Over and over again Riffaterre insists on the importance of the intertext in decod-
ing the poem in hand; for example, he sees in the Abbé Delille's line 'Le meurtre
insatiable a lassé les bourreaux' the 'palimpsest or watermark' of Juvenal's descrip-
tion of Messalina: lassata necdum satiata ( Text Production, p. 46; cf. pp. 91ff. , 1 12ff . ) .
In many places he seems to require cognition of the intertext as an indispensable
factor in interpretation (e.g. his claim that 'There cannot be an intertext without our
awareness of it' ( Intertextuality , p. 75) ). Yet elsewhere he stresses that it is not
necessary to identify specific intertextual relations, notably in Text Production, p. 87,
where he explicitly states that even 'when a literary tradition is forgotten and cultural
changes wash away the paragram', the text remains explicable. 'Obviously', he
admits, 'the reader who shares the author's culture will have a richer intertext', but
even if he 'is denied access to the intertextual paragram' he will still perceive 'the
imprint left upon the verbal sequence by the absent hypogrammatic referent . . . He
does not even need to understand fully' (cf. Text Production, pp. 102-3). Indeed he
goes so far as to claim that our ignorance of 'the nineteenth-century railroading term
mouvement de laceť actually 'contributes to the stylistic effectiveness of the word'
( Text Production, p. 38). Similarly, he contends that in 'the case in which words have
completely lost whatever meaning or function they had . . . Textual analysis will still
be able to detect secondary structures they have generated within their context' ( Text
Production, p. 104). This seems to bracket history in a way that many theorists such as
Fredric Jameson might find difficult to accept.
Finally we might remark that Riffaterre's approach seems valid only for poetry and
primarily for nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry that presents overt
ungrammaticalities- surrealism, automatic writing and the like. Yet, as I hope I have
shown, by applying the technique to three apparently unproblematic texts, the
method does yield interpretative dividends.
My conclusion, based on empirical classroom practice, is therefore that we have
here an excellent and easily graspable methodology for practical analysis of literary
texts. Students are chary of practical criticism because there is no obvious starting
point, hence the woolly and naive attempts to interpret in terms of the author's life or
the social history of the period or their own (often vaguely articulated) 'feelings' etc.
Clearly there is nothing wrong with these approaches if applied with a sufficient
degree of theoretical rigour, just as it can be equally profitable to read as a Marxist or
a feminist or a phenomenologist; but it is the contention of this paper that the old-
fashioned attention to 'words on the page' comes first. Of course we can (and should)

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC4:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Practical criticism à la Riff aterre 249

locate the text in all sorts of other critical loci, but in my teaching experience the
infectious verve and subtle penetration of Riffaterre's readings of poems can hardly
help but stimulate the student to a newly found enjoyment of poetry combined with
the intellectual security of possessing a versatile tool for its interpretation. And that,
after all, as teachers is what we should be striving for. Vivat practical criticism!

Bibliography
Culler, J. The Pursuit of Signs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Dufrenne, M., The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
Riffaterre, M., Semiotics of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1978).
Riffaterre, M., Text Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
Riffaterre, M., 'Compulsory Reader Response', in M. Watson and J. Still (eds), Intertextuality: Themes and
Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

This content downloaded from

128.122.149.92 on Tue, 27 Oct 2020 12:07:07 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms