Noel Carroll argues that anti-intentionalist structuralist criticism aims to maximize aesthetic enjoyment, at the expense of all other purposes of art and literature. This, he argues, “has a very ‘consumerist’ ring to it. In Buberesque lingo, it reduces our relation to the text to an I/it relationship.” By contrast, Carroll attempts to “defend the idea that, with art works, we are also interested in an I/Thou relation to the author of the text.”
The irony is fairly thick here: In the name of challenging bourgeois reading habits, structuralists simply replicate those habits at a deeper, theoretical level.
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