Consumerist structuralism

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.