Question

In the mid-twentieth century, formalist literary criticism championed the principle of the "affective fallacy"—the doctrine that a poem’s meaning is entirely independent of the emotional responses it elicits in the reader. Formalists argued that evaluating a text based on its psychological effects reduces literary analysis to mere impressionism, thereby stripping the discipline of its objective rigor. To the formalist, the text is a self-contained artifact; its meaning resides exclusively within its structural properties, such as irony, paradox, and internal tension, rather than in the subjective experience of the audience.

The subsequent ascent of reader-response theory in the 1970s challenged this paradigm by arguing that a text does not possess meaning a priori. Instead, theorists like Wolfgang Iser posited that meaning is an event—a dynamic negotiation between the text's structures and the reader's cognitive faculties. According to this view, the formalist attempt to isolate the text from the reader is not merely misguided but ontologically impossible, because the "text itself" remains an inert sequence of symbols until it is actualized by a perceiving consciousness.

Yet, contemporary post-critical theorists note a peculiar symmetry between these two ostensibly opposed camps. While formalists locate meaning in the autonomous text and reader-response theorists locate it in the temporal act of reading, both frameworks operate under the shared structuralist assumption that "meaning" is a singular, determinable entity that can be definitively located. By remaining trapped within this spatial metaphor of meaning as a tangible "thing" to be excavated or built—whether it is hiding in the architecture of the stanza or taking shape in the mind of the reader—both approaches inevitably...

Which of the following most logically completes the final sentence of the passage?