1. Language is a means of understanding what it means to 'be', rather than a means of expressing a 'given' reality.
2. What it means to 'be' is best seen in terms of socially constructed realities rather than in terms of the world as psychologically 'real'.
3. Analysis of text is therefore a dynamic activity, concerned with language as a dynamic process, not as a static product.
4. Analysis therefore concentrates not just on what language says, but on what language does.
5. What language does is not done through a single voice, but through a process of interaction; it is dialogic (to use Bakhtin's term), so the interactive voices, not the single, individual voice, become the focus of analysis. The ego is therefore decentered and consequently social, institutional and textual constructions of reality are foregrounded.
6. Socially constructed realities are understandable only in terms of ideological variation. Such variation inevitably means that the construction of meanings for texts is a process of indeterminacy. There are no fixed, determinate meanings encoded within the texts; texts are best understood in terms of indeterminate meanings constructed by readers.
7. There is therefore no such thing as 'the' single, correct, meaning of a text.
8. This means that the status of the writer is deprivileged, and the role of the reader, governed by institutional and social discourses, is given a much more prominent role in the construction of meaning.
9. A critical practice informed by these factors therefore concentrates on the analysis of literary texts in terms of reading, not writing.
10. This type of criticism is therefore a political act, aiming to understand not simply what a text means but how a text means.