Close readings of texts from either the past or the present will reveal instability and the multiple meanings of language in use. These instabilities of meaning and linguistic uses are no more “made up” than the themes that emerge in any other kind of reading, and yet many historians and critics have responded to deconstruction with great hostility particularly because of its challenge to the idea that fixed and certain meanings are inherent in written texts, and because of its apparent disregard of any serious consideration of authorial intention or historical context. As the eminent literary critic M. H. Abrams complained, Derrida's method of interpretation produced “ghostly non-presences emanating from no voice, intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.”