"Inherent" Ideology, "Universal" History, "Empirical" Evidence, and "Context-Free" Writing: Some Problems in E. D. Hirsch's The Philosophy of Composition

In The Philosophy of Composition, E. D. Hirsch translates his theories of literary criticism into principles of composition teaching.' In his critical books, Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976), Hirsch champions an anti-relativistic critical position. He opposes the purportedly objective explication of literary texts by formal methods, from the New Criticism to Derridean deconstruction. When the text is...