I.A. Richards: Theory of Metaphor, Theory as Metaphoric Variation
A Summary of Richards' theoretical contribution over the entire span of his career. An appreciative response by Richards himself is appended at the end of the piece.

The Rise and Fall of New Criticism
A brief theoretical history of New Criticism from its inception with Richards, Hulme, Eliot, and Pound to its effective demise during the early sixties.

Northrop Frye's The Critical Path
Reviewed from a Marxist perspective.

Norman Holland's Poems in Persons
"Holland's "affective" approach in the interpretation of poetry is rejected in favor of the treatment of poetry as an artifact expressive of unconscious needs imbedded in the poem itself, relatively independent of the identities of poets and their readers.

Me, Steinbeck, and Rose of Sharon's Daughter
Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath  effectively illustrates principle of literary deception, since his historic perspective turns out to have been misguided. Tom Joad's radicalism never came to pass because of World War II and the prosperity that followed. Most important, the novel might have future relevance.

Theory of Negative Poetics
A theory of literary deception that emphasizes denial, with particular emphasis upon plot as a reversal strategy that asserts false truths.

History of Deception Theory
A large number of literary theories emphasizing deception is surveyed, culminating with an explanation of my own as compared to the rest.

Levels of Deception in works of Austen, Dickens, Conrad, and Stein
Four authors who effectively integrated truth and deception in some of their most popular works, even Stein's poem, "a rose is a rose is a rose."

A Homeostatic Model of Literary Response
A theory of literary structure that emphasizes how literary involvement produces catharsis as a reduction in emotional tension.

The Dialectics of Paranoid Form
An essentially Freudian explanation of literary form emphasizing projective denial. Projection occurs when the reader identifies with literary figures, and denial when the story produces an outcome that reverses their circumstances.

Young Goodman Brown
A psychoanalytic interpretation of Hawthorne's story as a useful example of the paranoid dialectic in action.

Metaphoric Hypersignification, Metonymic Designification
A theory of metaphor is proposed to demonstrate how it serves to compound signification through its unique access to vagrant connotations, as opposed to metonymy, which defers and thereby tends to simplify signification, most obviously by bringing into play the principle of closure (the end signifying the whole).

The Metaphor-Metonymy Binarism
A history of the formalist theories of metaphor and metonymy in the history of Russian formalism, American New Criticism, and trends since then.

Defense of the Homophobic Imagination
An explanation of literary experience that gives homophobic tendencies as much importance as the homosexual tendencies they serve to deny. I try to explain how the conflict between the two can manifest itself in the tension between local suggestiveness and its denial throught linear momentum toward closure based on conventional demands.

Up Against the Mending Wall: Frost, Shakespeare, and Coleridge
Three poets who used metaphor as a source of confessional honesty denied by theme and final closure in a suitable ending.

The Affirmative Fallacy
An argument that the excessive reliance on affirmation manifests denial, as may be observed in literary criticism as well as literature itself. Marxist, psychoanalytic, and formalist theories (structuralism and deconstructionism included) are examined to demonstrate how each of them does this.

Three Affirmists: Trilling, Booth, and Gardner
A dialectic assessment of three American critics who partipated in the reaction of the seventies against the sixties' emphasis on authenticity.

Roland Barthes
A dialectic explanation of Barthes' remarkable career that began with conservative politics and ended with confessed homosexuality and mother identification.

Psychostylistics as a Behavioral Science
An effort to describe how short-term memory experiments can be used to measure poetic response on a statistical basis in order to confirm critical theories otherwise inaccessible to verification. In effect, the experience of literature is treated as conscious behavior that can be submitted to quantification for the purposes of analysis.