Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature by Stanley Fish
Published 1972 · 446 pages · 100,000 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature to read?
Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature scores 64 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
- Precise critical vocabulary; introduces reader-response concepts with careful definition.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Abstraction: 73 out of 100
- The theory of the reader's experience operates at a high level of abstraction.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Dense close readings sustaining a theoretical argument across all chapters.
- Narrative indirection: 22 out of 100
- Fish's method deliberately disorients the reader to demonstrate his thesis.
- Symbolic density: 14 out of 100
- Analytical but attentive to figurative dynamics in the texts.
- Ironic distance: 25 out of 100
- The critical method is itself ironic — Fish dismantles the position he temporarily adopts.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- Readings are deliberately destabilized; the performative argument resists closure.
- Structural complexity: 43 out of 100
- Organized by text with an overarching theoretical argument about Protestant poetics.
How Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature is regarded
Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.