Tenets of Liberal Humanism:
--a firm belief in the stable values of literature, that good literature is of timeless significance, that good literature transcends the limitations and peculiarities of the age in which it was written, and thus speaks to what is constant in human nature
--a firm belief that the literary text contains its own meaning within itself, and this meaning can be perceived through close textual analysis without the elaborate process of placing it in socio-political, literary-historical, or autobiographical contexts. This is an essentialist belief in the primacy and self-sufficiency of the text
--a firm belief that human nature is essentially unchanging, that the same passions, emotions, and situations are seen again and again throughout human history, that literature reveals what is constant in human nature
--a firm belief that individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our own unique essence. Despite all changes in environment and situation, there is always a core of “me” that is unchanging and constant. This is an essentialist belief in a transcendent self, a self that transcends all of the forces of society, experience, and language. There is something in you that will always be you, something that can never be transformed
--a firm belief that the job of criticism is to interpret the text, to mediate between it and the reader, critics are those who are specially trained to uncover the subtle, often hidden meanings and symbols in a text
--a firm belief that texts have specific authors who are responsible for the craft, structure, and meanings of their texts.

Rejection of Liberal Humanism:
--a belief that there are no stable, unchanging “givens” in the world as we know it, all of the “givens” we have accepted as stable (gender, identity, nationality) are actually fluid and unstable things rather than fixed and reliable essences. Instead of being solidly “there” in the real world of fact and experience, they are “socially constructed,” that is, dependent on social and political forces and on shifting ways of seeing and thinking (essentialism versus relativism)
--a belief that all thinking and investigation is necessarily affected and largely determined by prior ideological commitments. The notion of disinterested enquiry is untenable and often fraudulent
--a belief that language itself conditions, limits, and predetermines what we see. All reality is constructed through language, so that nothing is simply “there” in an unproblematical way—everything is a linguistic/textual construct. Language does record reality—it shapes and creates it, so that the whole of our universe is textual.
--a belief that meaning is jointly created by writers, editors/publishers, and readers and that all meanings are contextual, that there can never be one definitive (fixed and reliable) reading/interpretation of a text
--a disbelief in all “totalizing” notions—such as notion that there is a stable category of great or classic books (since all books are culturally constructed within a specific context), or the notion that there is a human nature that transcends all experience and all situations and transcends all of the particularities of race, gender, and class. Such concepts of human nature have tended to be Eurocentric and androcentric.