vol1num1cov290x4351.jpg] Sheldon Sacks A Chimera for a Breakfast If the editor had done a proper job, his introductory rhetoric would have been superfluous. Indeed in the second fit of hubris immediately consequent upon the heady act of initiatingCRITICALINQUIRY, itscoeditors agreed that the success of our venture must be measured by the precise degree to which this issue was self-defining. Our goals would be fully explained by our accomplishment. Our commitment to reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit would be transformed from proclamation to actuality revealed as less, and therefore more, than pompous aspiration by a collection of essays, individually excellent, which, when viewed together, would represent the full range of interests and values implicit in our commitment. Wayne C. Booth Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing Kenneth Burke is, at long last, beginning to get the attention he de- serves. Among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and rhetori- cians his "dramatism" is increasingly recognized as something that must at least appear in one's index, whether one has troubled to understand him or not. Even literary critics are beginning to see him as not just one more "new critic" but as someone who tried to lead a revolt against "narrow formalism" long before the currently fashionable explosion into the "extrinsic" had been dreamed of. I have recently heard him called a structuralist- before-his-time-and what could be higher praise than that! But in almost everything said about his literary criticism, there is an air of condescension that is puzzling. The tone seems usually to echo that of Rene Wellek (1971), who, as Burke himself laments (1972), "almost overwhelms me with praise," referring to "men of great gifts, nimble powers of combination and association, and fertile imagination," but then deplores Burke's irresponsibility, repudiates his critical judgments, condemns his general method without bothering to look closely at it, and in general makes him look like some sort of idiot savant-a buffoon with a high IQ. Wayne C. Booth received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award in 1962 for his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. His most recent works, A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, appeared this year. His contributions to include "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM: 'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter and W.J.T. Mitchell: "EDITORS' NOTE: Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979). Kenneth Burke Dancing with Tears in My Eyes Booth says, "Burke seems to be claiming to know better than Keats himself some of what the poem 'means', and the meaning he finds is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions he might conceivably have entertained!" The notion underlying my analysis is this: Formal social norms of "propriety" are related to poetic "propriety" as Emily Post's Book of Etiquette is to the depths of what goes on in the poet's search "for what feels just right." Wellek stops with Emily Post. The official aesthetic isn't likely to cover the ground. If I may offer a perhaps "outrageously" honorific example, on pages 329-30 of my Language as Symbolic Action, when discussing a sonnet of mine, "Atlantis," I indicate how one can both know and not know when one's imagination is working at a level of "propriety" not reducible to the official code. My lines had a Swiftian, Aristophanic dimension; and though they were not "programmatically" so designed, my experience with them both ab intra and ab extra indicates how such things can operate. Kenneth Burke's numerous writings include The Complete White Oxen (stories), Towards a Better Life (novel), Collected Poems, and among his critical works, A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, Language as Symbolic Action, and The Philosophy of Literary Form. His contributions to are "ARTISTS ON ART: Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter 1977), "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action" (Summer 1978), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy"(Autumn 1978), and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" (Winter 1978). Quentin Bell Art and the Elite University teachers, as is well known, commit acts of despotism. About three years ago I committed such an act. I told my students that I would not accept papers which included the words protagonist, basic (as a noun), alienation, total (as an adjective), dichotomy, and a few others including elite and elitist. On consideration I decided to remove the ban on the last two for it seemed to me that there was no other term that could be used to discuss what is, after all, an interesting idea. It is of course true that my students and I use the word incorrectly. An elite must surely be a chosen body. Congress, the police, the final heat of the Miss World contest, and the Bolshevik Party are elites, whereas an aristocracy or a plutocracy unless one believes the rich and the nobility to be chosen by God are not. Nevertheless, when we use the word elite in connection with the visual arts it is certainly related to, though not synonymous with, class. An elite is usually a group within a relatively prosperous class. The patrons of the Renaissance were, presumably, at the apex of the social system: on the other hand, the patrons of the Impressionists belonged to a comparatively humble section of the middle classes. But it will be found that an aesthetic elite does always enjoy certain advantages of wealth and leisure and education. Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" (Spring 1975), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979). Henry Nash Smith The Scribbling Women and the Cosmic Success Story This essay deals with American fiction between the early 1850s, when Hawthorne and Melville produced their best work, and the first novels of Howells and James in the early 1870s. The familiar notion that this was the period of transition from pre-Civil War Romanticism to postwar Realism tells us nothing in particular about it. Yet we need some historical frame in which to place both of the later efforts of Hawthorne and Melville and the apprentice work of the next generation of novelists. To this end, I propose to examine a few examples of the popular fiction that held at least quantitative dominance of the field. Hawthorne and Melville believed that the unprecedented sales of a new kind of stories by women writers contributed significantly to the loss of audience they both suffered in the early 1850s; and not only Howells and James but also Mark Twain showed in their early careers an unacknowledged attraction toward the procedures of the popular novelists along with a conscious effort to escape from them...the type of best-seller that appeared in the 1850s was an accidental creation rather than the result of conscious contrivance on the part of either authors or publishers. In fact, it caught the publishers by surprise. According to the author's sister (Anna B. Warner 1909, p. 282), Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World ([1850] 1851) was rejected by "almost all the leading book firms in New York," and the manuscript was returned with the comment "Fudge!" written on it by a reader for Harper's. Miss Warner, a thirty-one- year-old spinster, was the daughter of a once prosperous New York lawyer who had fallen into financial difficulties. The story resembles Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (published three years earlier) to the extent that its heroine is an orphan exposed to poverty and psychological hardships who finally attains economic security and high social status through marriage. But the American writer places much more emphasis on the heroine's piety, and the book sets an all-time record for frequency of references to tears and weeping. Henry Nash Smith, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, received the John H. Dunning prize and the Bancroft Award for hisVirgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. He has also written Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, and Popular Culture and Industrialism. Elder Olsen On Value Judgements in the Arts When we discuss the value of a work of art we are confronted immediately with two difficulties: the terms we use, and the peculiar character of art. No one, to my knowledge, has ever doubted that an artist produces a form of some kind, and that in any discussion of art as art that form must somehow be considered; but the terms we use generally have no reference to form. We miss the form in various ways (1) We use terms that are nonartistic that is, terms that refer to something external to the work, as when we speak of the subject of a painting, of what was depicted rather than the depiction of it, though we know full well that what we respond to is not what was depicted but the depiction of it. "This is a play about Oedipus what does that tell us of the diverse forms produced by Sophocles, Seneca, Dryden, Voltaire, Gide, Cocteau? (2) Or again, we use terms which are analogical, for example, the "rhythm" of a painting; the difficulty with these is that they are ambiguous and also that, while they may relate to the work, they can designate it only insofar as there is similarity between it and the analogue. (3) Again, we use terms which seem to designate a single form when in fact they refer to forms of the utmost heterogeneity, as when we speak of "the novel"; this usually arises out of the indiscriminate application of the term over some considerable span of history, so that the "historical slippage" of meaning is gradual and goes unnoticed. As the term broadens in meaning to include more and more heterogeneous forms, the essence of each is lost, and the term comes to apply only to accidental analogies between the forms. In the end very little can then be said, involving only the most abstract and general accidents of likeness. Henry James' The Art of Fiction, Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel illustrate this condition perfectly. The complaint that it is impossible to discuss tragedy because the term has been diversely employed and its proffered justification (usually nowadays with the citations from Wittgenstein) stem from this condition. The complaint and the justifications are both trivial, and the solution of the difficulty is simple. All that is necessary is to distinguish the different senses of the term by distinguishing the different things to which it is applied. Language is ambiguous, and we use it ambiguously; this in no way implies that the ambiguities cannot be cleared up. (4) Finally, we may use terms which indeed have reference to the form of the work but place the part for the whole; that is, terms which are elements in its definition but do not constitute the complete definition. Thus we designate something, not through the form proper but through the device or method used, as in "drama," "sculpture," "etching," "collage," or through the means or medium, as in "charcoal sketch," "watercolor," "oil painting." The point is not that the object is not, say, a drama or a watercolor; of course it is. The point is rather that these terms do not as such refer to the form and refer to it completely. If in fact they stipulated form, all charcoal sketches would be alike in form, and all oil paintings, and all dramas. One consequence of speaking in such a fashion is that we are likely to confuse the method with the form and talk of, say, "the nature of drama" as though all drama were of the same "nature," whereas the dramatic method is used in a wide variety of forms; or to confuse the medium or means with the form and to assure that the work can have no properties beyond those of its medium, as though artists did not exist and all art were simply nature. Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his verse (Collected Poems, 1963). Among his many works are Tragedy and the Theory of Drama, and The Theory of Comedy. His contributions to are "The Poetic Process"" (Autumn 1975), Part 1 of a "Conspectus of Poetry"(Autumn 1977), and Part 2 of a "Conspectus of Poetry" (Winter 1977). Joshua C. Taylor Two Visual Excursions As some artists discovered early in the century, there is a particular pleasure and stimulation to be derived from works of art created by cultures untouched by our own traditions of form. In part this is probably a delight in exoticism, in being away from home, and in part it possibly is our sentiment for cultures we look on as traditional, in a Jungian sense, or primitive in their unquestioning allegiance to simple cultural necessity. But more significantly, without indulging in philosophical or anthropological speculation, we are forced, in looking at such objects as these elegantly designed boxes and bowls, to revise our visual thinking, our assumptions about unity and grace. Joshua C. Taylor, director of the National Collection of Fine Arts of the Smithsonian Institution, has written Learning to Look, William Page: The American Titian, and catalogues of exhibits of futurism and the works of Umberto Boccioni. Part 1 of this paper has been published in somewhat different form in Boxes and Bowls (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington D.C., 1974).   Frank Kermode Novels: Recognition and Deception This is a shot at expressing a few of the problems that arise when you try to understand how novels are read. I shall be trying to formulate them in very ordinary language: the subject is becoming fashionable, and most recent attempts seem to me quite unduly fogged by neologism and too ready to match the natural complexity of the subject with barren imitative complications. Of course you may ask why there should be theories of this kind at all, and I can only say that they are needed because of what we have missed by always meditating on what we have read and can survey, as it were, from a distance which allows us to think it's keeping still, rather than upon the ways in which, as we read, we deal with the actual turbulence of a text. Much of what I say will seem obvious enough, but it may throw some light on a fact that we all know so intimately that we don't bother to ask questions about it: the fact of plurality, of which the plurality of our own interpretation is evidence. There are interesting side issues: why do some novels seem to be more plural than others, and why, on the whole, do the ones that seem most plural so often turn out to be fairly recent, not to say modern? Also, perhaps, how do interpretations alter in time? And what's wrong with the sorts of theories we already have? . . . For the natural or naive way of reading - a matter of recognition, the medium being a virtual transparency - is neither natural nor naive. It is conditioned and arbitrary, a false return to "story" - to the "wisdom", as Benjamin calls it, of folklore, a pretence that everybody can agree on a particular construction of reality. It is, however, no more apposite to condemn this on moral grounds than to condemn texts that reject narratives, that reject story, theme, closure, authority, that trap us into contemplation of their own opacity, on the ground that this is deceptive. It seems right to allow into the plurality of readings the naive among the rest, though such a text as Ford's is so evidently not naive that naive readers of it would probably soon grow impatient. It calls for virtuosity elaborately built on the basis of naive competence, a development on productive capacity. Even to think of what that virtuosity entails is to encounter novel problems. It is harder to describe it than to do it, like riding a bicycle. But it is worth trying, because of the errors that accumulate in the absence of serious discussion - false notions of plurality, a too simple view of the history of interpretation, even culpable negligence in the reception of new and difficult work. These are problems that arise from problems native to novels - they are the problems of modern criticism, its scope and responsibilities. We know them about as well, as Dowell knew the Ashburnhams. But that is another sad story.   Frank Kermode is King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge University. He is the author ofThe Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, Modern Essays, andShakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), "A Reply to Joseph Frank" (Spring 1978), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence" (Autumn 1980). Morris Philipson Mrs. Dalloway, "What's the Sense of Your Parties?" I submit that the intimations of "inner meanings" as presented in this novel should be reread as a transpositions from the language of sexual intercourse to the language of idealized consciousness, that is, from physical sensation to felt thought. Consider the imagery employed when Mrs. Dalloway reminds herself of her experiences of love:   It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores! Then, for that moment, she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment. [p. 47] What is implied by the phrase "inner meaning" - secret, hidden, private - discoverable only by letting go of the protecting, preserving defenses of the self merged in the most fulfilling involvement with another, through rhythmic participation and withdrawal, is expressed in the superb image of "a match burning in a crocus." The ecstatic, climatic moment bursts into the vision of a flower, even a common flower, a crocus, seen, first as an object of beauty only: for flowers are felt to be useless, as having no use for us other than as objects for aesthetic contemplation, and then, as a match - straight, hard in the center - burning. Thus, the vividness of the visual perception is combined with the thrill of a danger involved, the inherent destructive potential of fire. Thereby, the flower image is experienced as an event, a performance, not a useful means to an end other than itself but of use only as expressive of consummatory pleasure, an end in itself. Expressions of such moments of insight characterize culminating experiences in answer to the question: "What will ever be enough?" to make life worth living. Morris Philipson is the author of Outline of a Jungian Aesthetics, a satirical novel, Bourgeois Anonymous, and a biography of Tolstoy, The Count Who Wished He Were a Peasant, winner of the Clara Ingram Judson award. He has also edited a number of books including Aesthetics Today and Aldous Huxley on Art and Artists. Rudolf Arnheim On the Nature of Photography When a theorist of my persuasion looks at photography he is more concerned with the character traits of the medium as such than with the particular work of particular artists. He wishes to know what human needs are fulfilled by this kind of imagery, and what properties enable the medium to fulfill them. For his purpose, the theorist takes the medium at its best behavior. The promise of its potentialities captures him more thoroughly than the record of its actual achievements, and this makes him optimistic and tolerant, as one is with a child, who has a right to demand credit for his future. Analyzing media in this way requires a very different temperament than analyzing the use people make of them. Studies of this latter kind, given the deplorable state of our civilization, often make a depressing reading.   Among  Rudolf Arnheim'slatest publications are Toward a Psychology of Art, Visual Thinking, and Entropy and Art. A new version of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, will appear this fall. He is professor of the psychology of art, emeritus, at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University. Other contributions to are "A Stricture on Space and Time" (Summer 1978) and "THE LANGUAGE OF IMAGES: A Plea for Visual Thinking" (Spring 1980). Leonard B. Meyer Concering the Sciences, the Arts AND the Humanities Like a number of other writers, [Gunther S.] Stent contends that in essential ways science and art are comparable. As he puts it: "Both the arts and the sciences are activities that endeavor to discover and communicate truths about the world" (Stent 1972, p. 89). Although one cannot but sympathize with the desire to bring the so- called Two Cultures together, a viable and enduring union will not be achieved by ignoring or glossing over important differences. Using the behavior of scientists, artists, and laymen as empirical evidence, the first part of this essay will argue that Stent's union is a shotgun marriage, not one made in heaven, and that his attempt to wed different disciplinary species results not in fecund insight but barren misconception. In the second part, I will suggest that this misunderstanding arises because, like many scientists (as well as a goodly number of artists and laymen) Stent fails even to recognize the existence of the humanist - that is, the theorist and critic of the arts. Yet the humanities must be included, and areas of inquiry within them differentiated, if diverse disciplines are to be related to one another in a coherent and consistent way.   Leonard B. Meyer's most recent book is Explaining Music: Essays and Explanations. He is also the author of Emotion and Meaning in Music, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (with Grosvenor W. Cooper), and Music, The Arts, and Ideas, awarded the Laing Prize in 1969.   See also: "Against Literary Darwinism" by Jonathan Kramnick in Vol. 38, No. 2 Eudora Welty "Is Phoenix Jackson's Grandson Really Dead?" I had not meant to mystify readers by withholding any facts; it is not a writer's business to tease. The story is told through Phoenix's mind as she undertakes her errand. As the author at one with the character as I tell it, I must assume that the boy is alive. As the reader, you are free to think as you like, of course: the story invites you to believe that no matter what happens, Phoenix, for as long as she is able to walk and can hold to her purpose, will make her journey. The possibility that she would keep on even if he were dead is there in her devotion and its single- minded, single-track errand. Certainly the artistic truth, which should be good enough for the fact, lies in Phoenix's own answer to that question. When the nurse asks, "He isn't dead, is he?" she speaks for herself: "He still the same. He going to last."   Eudora Weltyreceived the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Among her other works are The Shoe Bird, Losing Battles, and One Time, One Place. Eudora Welty A Worn Path It was December - a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.   Eudora Weltyreceived the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel, The Optimist's Daughter. Among her other works are The Shoe Bird,Losing Battles, and One Time, One Place. vol1num2cov290x435.jpg] James S. Ackerman Transactions in Architectural Design It may seem reasonable, even inevitable, that architectural practice should be based on an understanding that architects, like lawyers and doctors, should discover their clients' needs and accommodate them to the best of their abilities. But current discussion within the legal and medical professions of the conflict between service to private individuals who can pay, and to the public who cannot, suggest an expanded or altered definition of professional responsibility. Actually, the conflict between public and private interest may be more acute in architecture than in other professions: the kind of buildings architects design are costly and are made possible only by the wealth of a small segment of the population or the state, yet every one raised affects the lives of people other than the one who makes the program and pays the architect for his services. Furthermore, the decisions of architects are embodied in buildings that last for generations, even for millennia, so that the overwhelming majority of people in our culture live and work in places designed not only for other people but for other times and conditions. For this reason, even the "private" practice of architecture involves responsibilities to a widespread constituency.   James S. Ackerman is the author of The Architecture of Michelango, Art and Archaeology, The Cortille del Belvedere, Palladio and Palladio's Villas and is professor of fine arts at Harvard University. He has contributed "On Judging Art without Absolutes" (Spring 1979) to . Ralph W. Radar Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanations We are free to get our theories where we will. As Einstein said, the emergence of a theory is like an egg laid by a chicken, "auf einmal ist es da.1" In practice theories are usually derived as improvements on earlier theories, as better tools are refinements of earlier, cruder ones; and they are directed explanatorily not at the facts of their own construction but at independently specifiable facts which, left unexplained by earlier theories, have therefore refuted them. A new theory should cogently and directly explain all that its predecessors explain and in addition those particular facts which they conspicuously do not explain. The ideal is to have the simplest possible premises explaining most precisely the widest possible range of problematical facts.   ·  1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York, 1971), p.173 n.   Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to are "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" (June 1975), "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976), and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1979). John M. Wallace "Examples Are Best Precepts": Readers and Meanings in_Seventeenth- Century Poetry My title is taken from the frontispiece to Ogilby's translation of Aesop (1665); since every Renaissance poet believed the statement to be true, let me start with my own example.   John Denham's only play, The Sophy, published in August 1642, is a tale about the perils of jealousy. The good prince Mirza, after a miraculous victory over the Turks, returns in glory to his father's court, but leaves it shortly thereafter. In his absense, Haly, the evil courtier, follows a friend's advice to " work on [the king's] fears, till fear hath made him cruel"1 and poisons the king's mind with jealousy against his son. Mirza returns only to be brutally blinded and killed, and the emperor soon dies stricken with remorse. Now it happens that Parliament justified all its actions in the months preceding the civil war on the grounds of the "fears and jealousies" that the king had inspired. Charles was incensed by the slogan and claimed angrily that he, if anyone, had the most cause for fears and jealousies.2   Denham obviously decided that here was the all-consuming topic around which a predominantly royalist drama could be written. He followed what I believe was the standard practice - the method that Fulke Greville said Sidney used and that Congreve repeated at the end of the century when he declared of The Double Dealerthat "I design'd the Moral first, and to that Moral I invented the Fable."3 He found a plot in Thomas Herbert's Travels into Diverse Parts of Asiathat recorded some terrible cruelties and catastrophes caused by jealousy, and he added the point that the emperor's mind had been wrought upon by his counselor. There is no evidence that the play was ever acted, but the most casual reader would have said to himself, "Yes, history reminds us that states destroy themselves through fears and jealousies, and we should abate our own before it is too late."   ·  1. Sir John Denham, The Poetical Works, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2d ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1969), p.245. The references to fear and jealousy are so ubiquitous in the play that they need not be listed here. ·  2. On March 1, 1642, in the angriest of his replies to Parliament so far, Charles exclaimed, "You speake of Jealousies and Feares: Lay your hands to your hearts, and aske your selves whether I may not likewise be disturbed with Feares and Jealousies: And if so, I assure you this Message hath nothing lessened them" (An Exact Collection of All Remonstrances...[London, 1643], p. 94). Although phrases like "distempers and jealousies" had been used earlier, Clarendon on two occasions is quite specific that "fears and jealousies" were "the new words which served to justify all indispositions and to excuse all disorders" in January 1642 (The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray [Oxford, 1888]1:493; see also p. 535). Taken with other evidence, Clarendon's remarks strongly suggest that The Sophy was written after Coopers Hill, and during seven months preceding its publication in August 1642. ·  3. William Congreve, The Complete Plays, ed. Herbert Davis (Chicago, 1967), p. 119. And compare John Donne in Sermons, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson are George R. Potter (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1953-62), 9:274: "All wayes of teaching are Rule and Example: and though ordinarily the Rule be first placed, yet the Rule it selfe is made of Examples...for, Example in matter of Doctrine, is as Assimiliation in matter of Nourishment; The Example makes that that is proposed for our learning and farther instruction, like something which we knew before, as Assimilation makes that meat, which we have received and digested, like those parts which are in our bodies before." John M. Wallace, author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell and articles on Milton, Dryden Denham, Traherne, and Arnold, is professor of English at the University of Chicago. Philip Gossett Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Uses of Convention The existence of extensive written communications between Verdi and his librettists should have prompted scholars to prepare editions of the correspondence and to analyze its meaning and implications. Only rarely can we participate directly in the formative stages of an opera, and available material such as the correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is invaluable.1 Obeisance, at least, has been done to Verdi's correspondence. Alessandro Luzio calls the letters of Verdi to Antonio Ghislanzoni, "versifier" of Aida(we shall return to this formulation in a moment), "the most marvelous course in musical aesthetics in action." Yet, for no opera do we have available a complete editions of the surviving letters between Verdi and a librettist.   ·  1. Willi Schuh, ed., Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briedwechsel, 4th ed. (Zurich, 1970). An English edition, made from an earlier German edition with many omissions, was published as A Working Friendship: The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hans Hammelmann and Ewald Osers (New York, 1961).   Philip Gossett is the general editor of the critical edition of the works of Rossini and author of numerous articles on Renaissance music, Italian opera, Beethoven, and musical theory. Murray Krieger Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist for imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then, should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than answered.   Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is University Professor of English and director of the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor," another contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1974 issue.   See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4, No. 3 Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface As a critic, Virginia Woolf has been called a number of disparaging names: "impressionist," "belletrist," "raconteur," "amateur." Here is one academic talking on the subject: "She will survive, not as a critic, but as a literary essayist recording the adventures of a soul among congenial masterpieces. . . . The writers who are most downright, and masculine, and central in their approach to life - Fielding or Balzac - she for the most part left untouched....Her own approach was at once more subterranean and aerial, and invincibly, almost defiantly, feminine." In other words, Virginia Woolf is not a critic; how could she be? She is a woman. From its beginning, criticism has been a man's world. This is to say not only that males have earned their living as critics but, more importantly, that the conventionally accepted ideals of critical method are linked with qualities stereotypically allotted to males: analysis, judgment, objectivity. Virginia Woolf has had a poor reputation as a critic not merely because her sex is female but because her method is "feminine." She writes in a way that is said to be creative, appreciative, and subjective. We will accept this descriptive for the moment but will later enlarge on it, and even our provisional acceptance we mean to turn to a compliment.   Barbara Currier Bell has written articles on critical theory and modern poetry and has served as a consultant on women's education at both Vassar and Hampshire Colleges. She is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. Carol Ohmann is the author of Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman and several articles on English and American fiction. She coedited Female Studies IV: Teaching about Women with Elaine Showalter and is chairman of the Department of English at Wesleyan University. She has contributed, with Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye (Autumn 1976), and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" (Summer 1977). See also: "The Masculine Mode" by Peter Schwenger in Vol. 5, No. 4; "The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief of Love: A Woolfian Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs" by Mark Spilka in Vol. 5, No. 4 Gerald Mast What Isn't Cinema? When Andre Bazin's most important essays on film were collected together in a single volume and titled What is Cinema?they raised a question that Bazin did not answer. Nor did he intend to. Nor has it been answered by any of the other theorists who have written what now seem to be the major works on film theory and who now seem the most influential (and intellectually ambitious) spokesmen for the art. Rudolf Arnheim, Andre Bazin, Stanley Cavell, S. M. Einstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, Hugo Munsterberg, Erwin Panofsky, and Gene Youngblood have failed to define what cinema essentially is.1 Unlike Ionesco's comically methodical Logician, they have been less than careful about posing the problem correctly. As a result they have been less than successful and less than precise with a deceptively difficult and complicated issue. They have defined some kinds of cinema, they have defined some of the qualities unique to those kinds of cinema, they have defined the characteristics and devices they find most valuable in some of those kinds of cinema, they simply have not defined cinema.   ·  1. Relevant sections of all these theorists can be found in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (London and New York, 1974).   Gerald Mast, associate professor of humanities at Richmond College of the City University of New York, has written A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Filmguide to the Rules of the Game, and Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (coedited with Marshall Cohen). This article is part of a forthcoming book, What Isn't Cinema? He has also contributed "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative" (Spring 1980) to . Francisco Ayala Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic In the history of literary criticism the name of Ortega y Gasset is indispensable, since in this, as well as in all other sectors of cultural activity, the influence of his thought has been most decisive. He opened paths and established guidelines that remain in effect; his vision of the Quijote not only counterbalanced that of Unamuno, against which it purposely rebelled, but also, by underscoring the resources called into play by Cervantes in composing his master work, he has shaped the attitudes of subsequent professional and academic criticism; and his analysis of the personalities of such important writers as Baroja is as yet unsurpassed.   Among his many influential works, Francisco Ayala has written Reflexiones sobre la estructura narrativa (criticism) and España, a la fecha. (essays). His collected fiction appeared in 1969 under the title Obras narrativas completas. At Professor Ayala's request, this essay, and Ideas sobre Pío Baroja, by José Ortega y Gasset, were translated by Richard Ford. José Ortega y Gasset Thoughts on Pío Baroja There are surely some dozens of young Spaniards who, submerged in the obscure depths of provincial existence, live in a perpetual and tacit irritation with the atmosphere around them. I can almost see them, in the corner of some social hall, silent, with embittered gaze and hostile mien, withdrawn into themselves like little tigers awaiting the moment for their vengeful, predatory leap. That corner and that frayed plush divan are like the solitary crag where the shipwrecked of monotony, of utter banality, of the abjection and emptiness of Spanish life, hope for better times. Not far away, playing their card games, making their petty politics, plotting their minimal business ventures, are the "life forces" of the community, these men who contrive this ominous moment in our national life.   To these ungovernable and independent youths, determined not to evaporate into the impurity of their ambience, I dedicate this essay, whose subject is a free and pure man, a man who wishes to serve no one and who would ask nothing from anyone.   José Ortega y Gasset wrote numerous influential works on aesthetics, culture, and philosophy, including La deshumanización del arte[The dehumanization of art],España invertebrada [Invertebrate Spain],and Ideas y creencias [Ideas and beliefs]. This essay, which appeared in 1916 in El espectador, is the author's most extensive treatment of the novelist Pío Baroja. This translation, the first in English, is by Richard Ford. Denis Donoghue A Reply to Frank Kermode It is common knowledge that Frank Kermode is engaged in a major study of fiction and the theory of fiction. I assume that "Novels: Recognition and Deception" in the first number of is part of that adventure, and that it should be read in association with other essays on cognate themes which he has published in the last two or three years. This may account for my impression that the essay is not independently convincing. There are splendid things in the essay, perceptions so definitively phrased that I cannot promise not to steal them. My copy of the journal is heavily marked on Kermode's pages, invariably on passages I dearly wish I had had the wit to write, notably his remark of certain fictions by Henry James that "they create gaps that cannot be closed, only gloried in; they solicit mutually contradictory types of attention and close only on a problem of closure." But these perceptions are like indelible events in the diction of a poem which, as a whole, does not seem to cohere.   Denis Donoghue is professor of Modern English and American literature at University College, Dublin. His recent books include The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature, Emily Dickinson, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction, William Butler Yeats, and Thieves of Fire. David H. Richter Pandora's Box Revisited: A Review Article The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s, like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism also ostensibly based upon Aristotle's example won the concept of genre broader support. And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by, genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth historical studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic," ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled Genreentirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism employing the concept.   David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. vol1num3cov290x435.jpg] Jacques Barzun Biography and Criticism a Misalliance Disputed Many years ago Degas said "Il faut décourager les arts." I am far from agreeing, but I am ready to say that critics of a certain kind are in need of active discouragement. Too much is written about matters that should be taken in by the beholder as he hears or scans the work. It is not desirable that his conscious mind should entertain - or be prepared to entertain - clear statements of what he experiences under the spell of a masterpiece. The very reason why art is finer when it shows rather than tells is that comprehension is then immediate, not discursive. Ideally, the spectator must absorb - in order to be absorbed; and this means that the critic should shut up until he is wanted. We have no need of a study of "Punctuality in Thomas Hardy." I am making up the subject, but everybody can think of dozens of comparable works of pseudo-scholarship and pseudo-criticism. Their only excuse is that the authors wrote them under Ph.Duress and cannot be blamed for being coerced.   Jacques Barzun is University Professor at Columbia University. Among his numerous books are Classic, Romantic and Modern, Berlioz and the Romantic Century, The Use and Abuse of Art and, most recently, Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History, and History. Quentin Bell The Art Critic and the Art Historian But while the literature of art is, in publishers' terms, booming, it has in one respect suffered a loss. During the past two hundred years there has usually been some important figure who acted as a censor and an apologist of the contemporary scene, a Diderot, a Baudelaire, a Ruskin or a Roger Frye. Who amongst our living authors plays this important role? What name springs to mind? I would suggest that no name actually springs; the last of our grandly influential critics was Sir Herbert Read and since his death, whatever else modern art may or may not possess, it has no prophet. This is not to say that aesthetic prophets are necessarily desirable nor that there are not some very conscientious and extremely perceptive critics at work today; in view of the fact that I am within a fortnight exhibiting my work in a London dealer's gallery (December 1973-January 1974), it would be folly to deny it. But it is I believe true that for better or for worse we have no grand pundit of living art and I believe that this lack may be concerned with what I see as a certain diminution in the role of the art critic, a certain decay in this department of literature. It is a tendency which I regret and the causes of which I want to try to discuss. It arises I believe from a misunderstanding concerning the proper functions of the critic and this confusion of purpose will be my theme. First, however, I think that I should glance at two important circumstances which make the work of an art critic particularly difficult today.   Quentin Bell, professor of the history and theory of art at Sussex University, has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists, and, Bloomsbury. His article, "Art and the Elite," appeared in the first issue of Critical Inquiry. "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" was originally delivered as the Leslie Stephen lecture at the University of Cambridge on November 26, 1973. Other contributions are "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979). John G. Cawelti Myths of Violence in American Popular Culture The chief difficulty with most social and psychological studies of violence lies in their assumption that violence is essentially a simple act of aggression that can be treated outside of a more complex moral and dramatic context. This may be the case with news reports of war, murder, assault, and other forms of violent crime, but it is certainly not a very adequate way to treat the fictional violence of a western, a detective story, or a gangster saga. It is true that one can count and catalog the number of violent acts that occur in a day or a week of television and produce distressing statistics about the number of murders and assaults per minute on the typical television show. One can, like the redoubtable Dr. Wertham, amass specific instances where a young person has imitated or thinks he has imitated an act of violence he saw on television, though we should not forget that it can also be said without much fear of contradiction that the literary work which has directly caused more violence in the history of Western civilization than any other is the Bible. One can also construct laboratory experiments in which various groups are shown short films of violent acts and demonstrate that in certain circumstances this experience will cause further aggressive behavior. With procedures such as this, the evidence of a correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior becomes more and more persuasive. But do such studies tell us anything more than that this is a violent age and that there is probably some connection between the violence of actuality and the representation of violence in the media?   John G. Cawelti, author of Apostles of the Self-made Man, Six-Gun Mystique, and Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, is professor in the Department of English and chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Frederick Crews Reductionism and Its Discontents The present disarray of psychoanalytic criticism is no doubt a cause for satisfaction among people who never cared for "deep" interpretation and who now feel confirmed in their resolution to allow literature to speak for itself. The only way to do that, however, is to remain silent a sacrifice beyond the saintliest critic's power. To be a critic is precisely to take a stance different from the author's and to pursue a thesis of one's own. Among the arguments it is possible to make, reductive ones are without a doubt the trickiest, promising Faustian knowledge but often misrepresenting the object of inquiry and deluding the critic into thinking he has cracked the author's code. To forswear all reductions, however, is not the answer: that is the path of phobia. A critic can avoid reductionism, yet still give his intellect free rein, only by keeping his skepticism in working order. If psychoanalysis, originally the most distrustful of psychologies, has by its worldly success and conceptual elaboration become a positive impediment to skepticism, we need be no more surprised than Freud himself would have been at such all-too-human backsliding. A critic's sense of limits, like Freud's own, must come not from the fixed verities of a doctrine but from his awe at how little he can explain. And that awe in turn must derive from his openness to literature from his sense that the reader in him, happily, will never be fully satisfied by what the critic in him has to say.   Frederick Crews has written books on James, Forster, Hawthorne, and Christopher Robin. He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. The present essay is a chapter from a new book, Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (Oxford University Press, Fall 1975). E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Stylistics Synonymity Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue (as I shall) for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following:   "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2   ·  1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions. ·  2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6.   E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. John Holloway Narative Structure and Text Structure:Isherwood's A Meeting by_the River, and Muriel Spark'sThe Prime of Miss Jean_Brodie Some recent discussions of narrative structure consider the narrative as a sequence of events, and assume that the structure is what is manifested by the relation between any given event and the event (n - 1)1, or perhaps the whole sequence from the first event up to the (n - 1)th event in the book. In the present discussion this approach will be modified in two ways. It will be modified, later on, by considering what would be happening if the writer were revising his work into the final version, out of a penultimate version which was, as it were, a next-most complex version: one to which some final "complexifying" process had not yet been applied. The other way in which the present discussion will modify that approach is that it will consider narrative not as one sequence of events but as an interrelated set of sequences.   ·  1. E.g., R. Barthes, "Introduction à l'analyse structurale du récit," Communications, no. 8 (1966), pp.1-27.   John Holloway, professor of Modern English at the University of Cambridge, has written The Victorian Sage, The Charted Mirror, The Story of the Night, Blake: The Lyric Poetry, and five volumes of verse, such as New Poems. He is presently completing a book on poetic modes from Milton to Hardy and coediting a four-volume series on English and Irish street ballads. His other contribution to ," Supposition and Supersession: A Model of Analysis for Narrative Structure" appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue. Martin Price People of the Book: Character in Forster's A_Passage_to_India The subtlety of the novel lies in its unrelieved tension of flesh and spirit, exclusion and invitation, the social self and the deeper impersonal self. At one extreme are the caricatures caught in the social grid - the Turtons and Burtons. At the other are the characters who slip out of the meshes of social responsibility through despair or obliviousness. We move from the elaborate rituals of Anglo-Indian to Mau, where the only aspects of life we are shown are ecstasy and neglect. Where does the mind rest? The difficulty with looking at reality directly is that reality will tend to dissolve: "not now, not here, not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable." Transcendence dehumanizes, the deeper self is a source rather than a habitation, we cannot see the unseen. We only glimpse it through paradox, violence, or farce; and each of these contributes something to Forster's conception of character.   Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of English at Yale University, is author of To the Palace of Wisdom and the recently reprinted Swift's Rhetorical Art, editor and coeditor of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, and coeditor of Poetry Past and Present. He is currently working on a book on character in the novel. Edward Wasiolek Wanted: A New Contextualism With the publication of Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, Northrop Frye had already recognized that some egress had to be found from the theoretical impasse of insisting on an autonomy that cut literature off from more and more. Whereas American New Criticism saw the structure of the individual work as unique and self-sufficient, Frye insisted that there were structures that overrode the specific contexts of individual works. The structures of individual works were not worlds unto themselves, but were conditioned by contexts and structures broader than they. Works were not made ex nihilo; they were made out of literature, and Frye seemed to imply what T.S. Eliot had stated some thirty years before him: that there was an order of works that affected and was affected by the individual work.1 Unlike the American New Critics who insisted - at least in their extreme period - that the individual poem had an induplicable context, Frye insisted on the duplicable context, and on the fact that certain images and basic structures are repeated throughout Western literature.   ·  1. Frye actually pays high tribute to Eliot's The Function of Criticism and his concept of literature as an ideal order of works and not simply the collection of writings of individuals. He says, "This is criticism and very fundamental criticism. Much of this book attempts to annotate it" (Anatomy of Criticism [Princeton, N.J., 1957], p.18).   Edward Wasiolek, is author of Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction and editor of the five-volume edition of Dostoevsky's notebooks for which he received the Gordon J. Laing Prize. He is Avalon Foundation Professor and chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Eugène Ionesco Ionesco and the Critics: Eugène Ionesco Interviewed by_Gabriel Jacobs GJ: We've talked a lot about critics who are hostile toward you. Do you ever feel the need to make a stand against those who are favourably inclined toward your plays but whose comments seem to you to be stupid?   EI: Well, for better or worse, that's what I've always done: I wrote Notes and Counter-Notes, had discussions with Claude Bonnefoy, I've written articles; and in each case what I've said, in short, is that critics who gave me their approval, did so because they misunderstood me and were mistaken about my intentions.   GJ: Finally, are you at all bitter about the critics?   EI: No. Many have become good friends of mine. But it is a bit disheartening; when I began, a critic who, shall we say, is on the Right, a conservative critic who is very well-known and has since become a friend of mine, called me an impostor, a fraud, and a dummy; and now, twenty-five years later, the Leftists still call me an impostor, a fraud, and a dummy.   GJ: But less often?   EI: Well, I suppose so.   Eugene Ionesco, renowned by playwright , recently was awarded the International Writer's Prize by the Welsh Arts Council. While in Wales, he was interviewed by Gabriel Jacobs, lecturer in French at University College of Swansea; the interview represents Ionesco's most concerted attempt yet to deal with his critics. He is completing a book on the subject which Gabriel Jacobs will translate into English. A. Walton Litz Recollecting Jane Austen The nineteenth century compared her to Shakespeare; in our own time, she has been likened most often to Henry James. Both comparisons reflect a basic difficulty in reconciling subject matter with treatment, in squaring Jane Austen's restricted world - "3 or 4 Families in a Country Village" - with her profound impact upon our imaginations. Over the years her admirers have tried to resolve this paradox in various ways, none quite successful, but throughout all the changes in critical method one thing has remained constant: the high level of admiration. As Edmund Wilson once remarked, in various revolutions of taste which have occurred during the last century and a half, "perhaps only two reputations have never been affected by the shifts of fashion: Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's. We still agree with Scott about Jane Austen, just as we agree with Ben Jonson about Shakespeare." Even in the half-century after Jane Austen's death, when her reputation was limited in comparison with those of the great Victorians, the praise of discriminating critics was remarkably consistent; and it seems safe to predict, as we begin to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of her birth, that this high estimate will remain unchallenged. The bicentennial year will produce the usual tributes, conferences, and collections of essays, but the call for "revaluation" which is usually a ritual part of such occasions will scarcely be heard. The question will not be one of placing Jane Austen in some hierarchy of value, but of trying once again to explain her accepted excellences.   A. Walton Litz has written The Art of James Joyce, Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, and numerous articles. He is professor of English at Princeton University. Gunther S. Stent On Art and Science: A Reply to Leonard_B._Meyer I was surprised to note the critical tone of the discussion which my friend Leonard B. Meyer recently devoted in these pages to an article on the relation of art and science that I wrote for a popular scientific magazine. For I had believed all the while that in my article I was merely presenting to a general scientific audience a watered-down version of what I thought were Meyer's own views. Evidently I was mistaken in that belief, though I have been unable to fathom just where I went wrong in interpreting Meyer's earlier writings, which, more than any other source, are the provenance of my ideas about the nature of art.   Gunther S. Stent, professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses, Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics: An Introductory Narrative, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, and many important scientific papers. In Concerning the Sciences, the Arts AND the Humanities" (September 1974), Leonard B. Meyer took issue with views expressed by Professor Stent in "Prematurity and Uniqueness in Scientific Discovery," published in Scientific American (December 1972). Leonard B. Meyer Leonard B. Meyer's Rejoinder I am very sorry that you were distressed by the "critical tone" of my essay; and I apologize if it was in any way offensive. Though I am afraid that our disagreements remain, it would take another article to reply to the paper you enclosed. Of course, I have no objections to your sending your MS to the editor of , if you have not already done so.) But let me at least try to pinpoint our differences as I see them.   Leonard B. Meyer's most recent book is Explaining Music: Essays and Explanations. He is also the author of Emotion and Meaning in Music, The Rhythmic Structure of Music (with Grosvenor W. Cooper), and Music, The Arts, and Ideas, awarded the Laing Prize in 1969. Frank Kermode A Reply to Denis Donoghue Like all sensible men I feel that to be read carefully by Denis Donoghue is a privilege rather than an ordeal; but although I am clearly to blame insofar as I allowed him to misunderstand me, I can't at all admit that he has damaged the argument I was trying to develop.    I cheerfully concede most of his points, but they don't work against me in the way he thinks. Of course there is a sense in which it can be said that "there is only one story," the facts of which can be had "for the trouble of finding them." That is not in dispute; the question concerns that "trouble" and its products. For we surely mean by right reading something more than the reconstruction of events in causal and chronological order - that is what we do when we read complicated detective stories, though even then, as I have argued elsewhere, our "trouble" involves considerations of a nonnarrative order; and this is true whether or not it is the intention of the author that it should. (Incidentally, I remember lecturing on that topic a couple years ago in Dublin, again, it appears, without convincing my host and friend Denis Donoghue that even in these relatively simple cases no single right reading is possible.)   In the December issue of Denis Donoghue raised objections to Frank Kermode's "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (, September 1974). In his brief comments, Professor Kermode clarifies the issues in dispute. Kermode's other contributions to are "A Reply to Joseph Frank" (Spring 1978), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence" (Autumn 1980). vol1num4cov290x435.jpg] Jorge Luis Borges Walt Whitman: Man and Myth In the year 1855, American Literature made two experiments. The first, quite a minor one, the blending of finished music with sing- song and Red Indian folklore, was undertaken by a considerable poet and a fine scholar, Longfellow. The name of it, Hiawatha. I suppose it succeeded, as far as the expectations of the writer and of his readers went. Nowadays, I suppose it lingers on in the memory of childhood and survives him. Now the other is, of course, Leaves of Grass. Leaves of Grass is a major experiment. In fact, I think I can safely venture to say that Leaves of Grass is one of the most important events in the history of literature. If I speak of it as an experiment, perhaps you will think that I am implying a profanation, a desecration, and a blasphemy, since, when we speak of experiments in literature, we generally think of unsuccessful ones. For example, when we speak of experimental literature, well, we think of works that we do our best to admire and that somehow defeat us (for example, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, may I add the ninety-odd Cantos of Ezra Pound?) because, after all, the word "experiment" is a polite word. Well, in the case of Leaves of Grass the experiment succeeded so splendidly that we think it could never have failed. Somehow when something goes right - and that hardly ever happens in literature - we think it somehow inevitable. We think that Leaves of Grass lay there, lay unsuspected there, ready for anybody to discover and write it down. Jorge Luis Borges Post-Lecture Discussion of His Own Writing You see, I'm not really a thinker. I am a literary man and I have done my best to use the literary possibilities of philosophy, although I'm not a philosopher myself, except in the sense of being very puzzled with the world and with my own life. But when people ask me, for example, if I really believe that the cosmic process will go on and will repeat itself, I say I have nothing at all to do with that. I merely tried to apply the aesthetic possibilities, let's say, of the transmigration of souls or of the fourth dimension to literature and see what could result from them. But really, I would not think of myself as a thinker or a philosopher. And I follow no particular school.  Richard McKeon Arts of Intervention and Arts of Memory:Creation and_Criticism The arts of poetry and the arts of criticism are uncovered and studied in their products, in poems and in judgments. Poetry and criticism, however, the making and judging of poems, are processes. The study of literature as a product - existing poems and existing interpretations and appreciations of poetry - develops a body of knowledge which is sometimes called "poetic sciences." The recognition and use of poetic and critical processes - producing and judging poems which did not previously exist, and uncovering and analyzing aspects of existing poems which were not previously discerned or appreciated - develop things and values by use of arts which are sometimes called "heuristic arts." Knowledge or science is used in the processes of deliberate or artful making; art or criticism is used in the production of things or knowledge of things, natural or artificial. Knowledge is a product of inquiry; criticism is a process of judgment; the two are joined - knowledge of things and use of knowledge - in critical inquiries or critiques of judgment.   Richard McKeon is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Greek at the University of Chicago; he was a member of the U.S. delegations to the first three General Conferences of UNESCO and served as U.S. counselor to UNESCO. His numerous publications include The Philosophy of Spinoza, Freedom and History,and Thought, Action, and Passion;he also has edited The Basic Works of Aristotle and coedited the forthcoming critical edition of Abailard'sSic et Non. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976) and Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot" (Spring 1979). Angus Fletcher Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the 1949 essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which in turn became the Polemic Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism, and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of "Towards a Theory of Cultural History" (1953), which eventually served as Essay 1 of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content as their assumption, namely, that criticism could at least try to become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially segregate and then destroy the claims of particular "minority groups" within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made his name writing on Blake freedom enough, perhaps but it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton.   ·  1. This assumption is to be distinguished from that of "early" Richards, which held that a science for literary studies had to come at literature from the outside, with chiefly psychological instruments. Richards' career has been the most complex critical "life" in our century, I believe, and it should be observed that he has held, and abandoned, more than one assumptive high ground during the course of his long and magnificent involvement with poetry.   Angus Fletcher's numerous writings include Allegory: The Thought of a Symbolic Mode, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus, The Stranger God: A Theoretical Study of the Myth of Dionysus,and Thresholds: A Critical Approach to the English Renaissance. Northrop Frye's response, "Expanding Eyes" appears in the Winter 1975 issue. George Kubler History or Anthropology of Art? In anthropology, works of art are used as sources of information rather than as expressive realities in their own right. In anthropology the work of art is treated more as a window than as a symbol; it is treated as a transparency rather than as a membrane having its own properties and qualities.   For instance, it is usually in social science that art "reflects" life with more or less distortion. Yet no art can record anything it is not actually programmed to register. This programming usually concerns very small sectors of all actuality, and it is limited by the figural traditions and by the technical resources of the artisans....Given my assumptions that art does not "reflect" life; nor does it necessarily imitate nature; nor can it be explained away by texts or informants given these assumptions, we are required to limit our notions about how much "information" the arts can convey.   George Kubler is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His publications include The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, Studies in Classic Maya Iconography, Portuguese Plain Architecture, 1526-1706 and The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean Peoples. Barbara Herrnstein Smith On the Margins of Discourse Asked (or challenged) to define poetry, one is likely to reply with a sigh, a shrug, a look of exasperation or even one of contempt, indicating not only that the question is oppressive but that anyone who asks it must be something of a fool, a pest, or a vulgarian. Though these uncongenial reactions may be interpreted as the signs of intellectual embarrassment, they are, I think, quite justified. For the nature of definition and the particular historical fortunes of the term poetry conjoin to this effect: that a definition of the term will either be a total chronicle of those fortunes or will constitute merely one more episode in them. In other words, a definition of poetry is bound to be either inadequate to the job or, if adequate, then both unmanageable and uninteresting for any other purpose.   Barbara Herrnstein Smith, professor of English and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, for which she received the Christian Gauss and Explicator awards, and the editor of Shakespeare's Sonnets.This article will be part of a book, Fictive Discourse. She has also contributed "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories" (Autumn 1980) to . Nelson Goodman The Status of Style Obviously, subject is what is said, style is how. A little less obviously, that formula is full of faults. Architecture and nonobjective painting and most of music have no subject. Their style cannot be a matter of how they say something, for they do not literally say anything; they do other things, they mean in other ways. Although most literary works say something, they usually do other things, too; and some of the ways they do some of these things are aspects of style. Moreover, the what of one sort of doing may be part of the how of another. Indeed, even where the only function in question is saying, we shall have to recognize that some notable features of style are features of the matter rather than the manner of the saying. In more ways than one, subject is involved in style. For this and other reasons, I cannot subscribe to the received opinion that style depends upon an artist's conscious choice among alternatives. And I think we shall also have to recognize that not all differences in ways of writing or painting or composing or performing are differences in style.   Nelson Goodman, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction and Forecast; Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and Projects;and numerous articles. Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman was published in 1972. His contributions to Critical Inquiryinclude "Metaphor as Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981). David Daiches What Was the Modern Novel? In The Novel and the Modern World I tried to explain the three factors that account for the special characteristics of the modern novel the breakdown in community of belief about what was significant in experience, new notions of time, new notions of consciousness with reference with changes to the social and economic fabric of society, for I was writing in the heyday of "social" thinking about literature that affected so many of us in the late 1930s. But I soon came to feel that this explanation was too slapdash and that a much subtler kind of relationship existed between literature and society than the one I tried to present in 1938. That is why in the new addition of the book I substituted for some of the larger generalisations about society a closer reading of aspects of individual novels. But I have never given up my belief that there is a profound relationship between literature and society and that what might be called the heroic period of experiment and innovation of the novel on both sides of the Atlantic reveals something of that relationship. And in the years that followed the original publication of the book I have found no reason to abandon my general theory, but have applied it, with more subtlety (I hope), to a wider range of writers.   David Daiches, professor of English at the University of Sussex, is the author of numerous books and articles. Among them, New Literary Values, The Novel and the Modern World, Virginia Woolf, and Literary Essays were pioneering studies in modern literature. He is currently working on Was, a book on the nature of memory and the relation of imagination and language. Karl J. Weintraub Autobiography  and Historical Consciousness An autobiographic instinct may be as old as Man Writing; but only since 1800 has Western Man placed a premium on autobiography. A bibliography of all autobiographic writing prior to that time would be a small fascicule; a bibliography since 1800 a thick tome. The ground behind this simpleminded assertion of a quantitative measure cannot be explained away by easy reference to the mass literacy of the modern world or the greater ease of publishing. It is as much a fact of cultural conditions as is the significant relation of rhetoric to the intense public mindedness of classical men, the relative insignificance of tragedy in a thoroughly Christianized world view, the disappearance of epic from a nonaristocratic world, or the powerful assertion of the novel in an age of burghers. The usage of the term "autobiography" itself is suggestive, although this mode of historical explanation is always defective in the sense that such older terms as "hypomnemata," "commentarii," "vita," "confessions," or "memoirs" may well have covered the functions subsequently encapsulated in a newly fashionable term. In German the term makes its appearance shortly before 1800; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes first English usage to Southey in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809.   Karl J. Weintraub, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is the author of Visions of Culture and numerous articles. His introduction to a new edition of Goethe's Autobiography (Chicago, 1974) will prove of special interest to our readers. Paul K. Alkon Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B._Toklas Past, present, and future are reversed in the reader's encounter with the illustrations selected by Gertrude Stein for her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.1 After the table of contents there is a table of illustrations that encourages everyone to look at the pictures before they begin reading. During that initial examination, the illustrations forecast what is to be discovered in the text. Expectations are aroused by photographs showing Gertrude Stein in front of the atelier door, rooms hung with paintings, Gertrude and Alice in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and both with a car in front of Joffre's birthplace. It is natural although, as it turns out, not altogether correct to assume that the accumulation of paintings will be explained, that the life lived within the rooms will be fully depicted, and that conventional narrative explanation will be provided to account for the presence of Gertrude and Alice together in such disparate settings as Venice and the French marshal's home.   ·  1. For useful comments on several pictures as well as evidence that "even the book's sixteen photographs were carefully placed in the first edition," see Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 219.   Paul K. Alkon, professor of English at the University of Minnesota, is author of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Among his recent articles are "Boswellian Time" and "The Historical Development of the Concept of Time." He is writing a book about time in Defoe's fiction.   See also: "The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein" by Catharine R. Stimpson in Vol. 3, No. 3; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3 Stanley E. Fish Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader Ralph Rader's model of literary activity is built up (or rather down) from a theory of intention. A literary work, he believes, embodies a "cognitive act,"1 an act variously characterized as a "positive constructive intention" (Fact, p. 253), "an overall creative intention" (Conception, p.88). To read a literary work is to perform an answering "act of cognition" (Fact, p. 250), which is in effect the comprehension of this comprehensive intention, the assigning to the work of a "single coherent meaning" (Concept, p. 86). Both acts the embodying and the assigning are one-time, single-shot performances. They are "ends" in two senses; the overall intention is the end to which everything in the work must be contributory, and its comprehension is something the reader does at the end (of a sentence, paragraph, poem, etc.).   Rader offers this model as if it were descriptive, as if it made explicit rules of behavior we unerringly follow, rules which underlie our "tacit or intuitive capacity" (Fact, p. 249) of intention producing and intention retrieving; but the model is, in fact, prescriptive since it quite arbitrarily limits this same capacity: authors are limited to no more than one positive constructive intention per unit, while readers or interpreters are limited to its discovery; whatever cannot be related to that discovery or interferes with it will either be declared not to exist (Rader will later say that such interferences "are not actively registered") or, if its existence cannot be denied, it will be labeled a defect, an "unintended and unavoidable negative consequence of the artist's positive constructive intention" (Fact, p. 253).   ·  1. My argument will engage two of Rader's articles. They are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation," 1, no.2 (December 1974): 245-72, and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth- Century Studies," in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York, 1974), pp. 79-115. In what follows they will be referred to as Fact and Concept along with the appropriate page number.   Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at John Hopkins University, responds in this essay to Ralph W. Rader's "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" (, December 1974). Professor Fish is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost,and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to include "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980). Jay Schleusener Literary Criticism and the Philosophy of Science: Rader's_"Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" I do not believe that Ralph Rader succeeds in his attempt to borrow from the philosophy of science, and I am interested in his essay as an example of the difficulties we face when applying theoretical studies in another discipline to the theoretical problems of our own. My argument is largely negative I mean to show that Rader's account of critical explanation is inadequate and in some respects inconsistent but even negative arguments have their place, and I hope to make a few useful suggestions as a result.   Rader's argument depends on the possibility of recognizing unintended consequences when we meet them in a text. It is not enough that they exist; we must also be able to say which consequences are intended and which are merely the by-products of art. If we cannot, then the distinction has no use for practical criticism. But the logical structure of Rader's unintended consequences is shared by some artistic defects and by some critical misapprehensions as well. What should we think when we encounter a fact of the text this notion wants defining which is inconsistent with our sense of the author's purpose but which is a consequence of his means? We might take it as an "unintended and unavoidable negative consequence of the artist's positive constructive intention,"1 but we might take it instead as evidence of a failure in his judgment or as evidence of our own failure to understand his purpose in the first place.   ·  1. Ralph Rader, "Fact, Theory, and Literary explanation," 1, no.2 (December 1974):253.   Jay Schleusener, assistant professor of English at University of Chicago, is author of a book on the rhetoric of Piers Plowman. He has contributed "Convention and the Context of Reading" (Summer 1980) to . Ralph W. Rader Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish In replying to Jay Schleusener, I have also answered many of the objections put less abstractly, though often more sharply, by Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish's assertion that my category of unintended negative consequences "will be filled by whatever does not accord with what Rader has decreed to be the positive constructive intention" (p. 884) is essentially the same charge brought by Schleusener and requires no further substantive answer than I have already offered here and, for that matter, in my original essay. I would point out, however, that in this remark as elsewhere Fish loads his statements with inaccurate pejoratives: I do not decree but postulate the positive constructive intention and test it for explanatory adequacy by deduction open at every point to the counterdemonstration of fallacy. (We may constrast this with Fish's truly arbitrary procedure of assigning interpretations ad hoc to local features as he encounters or wishes to construe them, with no interpretation constraining any other.) I would point out also that, in making this charge, he operates under different explanatory standards from those he adopts elsewhere. The statement quoted imputes to my theory as a special defect the fact of its supposedly self-fulfilling and nonfalsifiable character, whereas later Fish clearly asserts that all interpretations including his own are necessarily self-confirming.   Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to include "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" (Winter 1974), "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms"(Autumn 1976), and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1980). vol2num1cov290x4351.jpg] Saul Bellow A World Too Much with Us Wordsworth in 1807 warned that the world was too much with us, that getting and spending we laid waste our powers, that we were giving our hearts away, and that we saw less and less in the external world, in nature, that the heart could respond to.   In our modern jargon we call this "alienation." That was the word by which Marx described the condition of the common man under Capitalism, alienated in his work. But for Marx, as Harold Rosenberg has pointed out,   it is the factory worker, the businessman, the professional who is alienated in his work through being hurled into the fetish-world of the market. The artist is the only figure in this society who is able not to be alienated, because he works directly with the materials of his own experience and transforms them. Marx therefore conceives the artist as the model man of the future [...]   Thus Rosenberg. And why do I associate him with Wordsworth? Simply because we have now a class of people who cannot bear that the world should not be more with them. Incidentally, the amusing title of Mr. Rosenberg's essay is "The Herd of Independent Minds."   Saul Bellow, recipient of three National Book Awards and of the Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, was the first American to receive the International Literary Prize. His most recent novel, Humboldt's Gift, appeared this fall. Ricardo Gullón On Space in the Novel Literary space is that of the text; it is there that it exists, and it is there that it has an operative force. What is not in the text though is reality itself, irreducible to a written form. One of the functions of the narrative "I" is to produce this verbal space, to give a context for the motion which constitutes the novel; a space that is not a reflection of anything, but, rather, an invention of the invention which is the narrator, whose perceptions (transferred to images) engender it. Manuscript corrections as well as page proofs modified by the author show that these perceptions are progressively refined so as to be more convincing.   Ricardo Gullón is the author of numerous books and articles on Latin American, English, French, Spanish, and American literature, art, and critical theory and has lectured extensively in the Americas and in Europe. Direcciones del Modernismo; Galdós, novelista moderno; and García Marquez,el arte de contarare among his more influential books. A critical study of his works, La obra crítica de Ricardo Gullón, by Barbara Bockus Aponte was recently published in Spain.   See also: "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory" by W. J. T. Mitchell in Vol. 6, No. 3 Bertrand H. Bronson Traditional Ballads Musically Considered A folk tune is brief enough to be readily grasped and remembered as a whole; it has an inner unity that makes it shapely to the ear and mind. As a temporal event, or succession of notes, it consists of a little tour through a sonic landscape; so that as we follow the course we recognize its topography; the setting forth, the approach to a turning point, a moment of heightened interest, a pause of retrospection or anticipation, a homecoming. It falls naturally into related, self-defining stages of its whole extent, revealing balance, contrast, and decision. The balance normally relies on approximately the same number of stresses in corresponding phrases; the contrast (also an aspect of balance) usually on tonal sequence and management; the decision appears in cadential statement, and held, or repeating, notes, like signposts at an intersection or junction. Because the tune is seized as a whole, and because several parts have these mutual references, we gain already the suggestion of stanzas of a certain pattern and identical length. Since the phrasal cadences get their weight and meaning from their relative emphasis and relation to the tonic, they inherently prompt corresponding verbal emphases of rhyme or pause. By their perceptible division or separation they exert, moreover, a pressure on the verbal partner, so that the total syntactical and rhetorical structure is palpably affected, and restricted, by their influence.   Bertrand H. Bronson is the author of such influential works as Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays, In Search of Chaucer, and Facets of the Enlightenment and is the editor of the four-volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. Among other honors, he has received the American Council of Learned Sciences Award. "Traditional Ballads Musically Considered" will appear in a slightly different version as the introduction to Singing Tradition, to be published by Princeton University Press. Thomas Flanagan Yeats, Joyce, and the Matter of Ireland We are concerned here with two towers. One is a Norman keep in the Galway barony of Kiltartan, some twenty miles from the western seacoast. The second, one of a chain constructed by the British to withstand a Napoleonic invasion, stands facing eastwards towards the Irish sea at the village of Sandycove, a few miles south of Dublin. Yeats's tower at Ballylee Ballylee Castle as it was grandly termed and the Martello tower in which Joyce lived in for a few weeks in 1904, the setting upon which Ulysses opens, take on central and symbolic roles in the art of each man and enter also those shorthands of symbols by which we, in our turn, hold the two writers in our imagination.   I propose to consider the very different manner in which each man came to accept his identity as an Irish writer. And this in its turn involves some consideration of what for convenience we may term the "matter of Ireland," the body of oral and written Irish literature, and the accumulated symbolic powers of the word "Ireland" itself. If I place their two towers, Ballylee and Martello, as twin emblems at our entrance way, it will at last appear, I trust, that I do so for substantial rather than decorative purposes.   Thomas Flanagan, chairman of the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Irish Novelists, 1800-1850 and many studies of contemporary literature. Elder Olson The Poetic Process In general, discussions of the poetic process have tended to fall into one of three classes. The first of these, generalizing the process, analyzes the faculties or the activities supposedly involved and arranges these in their logical order, to produce distinct stages or periods of the process. The second kind describes the working habits of an individual poet in terms of characteristic external or internal circumstances or conditions. The third kind gives us, in the same terms, the history of the composition of a particular poem. To illustrate these in reverse order: W. D. Snodgrass' essay The Finding of a Poem tells us how he discovered the meaning for him of the elements entering into a particular poem; Paul Valéry's essays on his own poetry Poésie et pensée abstraite, for example generally describe his working habits and his experiences while at work; and the following passage gives a typical account of the poetic process as a series of logically ordered stages: "There is, first, a period of hard thinking, during which the mind explores the problems; then a period of relaxation, during which the rational processes of the mind are withdrawn from this particular problem; then the flash of insight which reveals the solution, organizes the symbols, or directs the thinking, during which the formula is tested, the work of art shaped and developed...Graham Wallas calls the four stages Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification..." [Wilbur L. Schramm, "Imaginative Writing," 1941]   Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his work. He is the author of, among other works, Penny Arcade, a collection of poetry, and of criticism, On Value Judgment in the Arts and Other Essays. His contributions to are "On Value Judgments in the Arts" (September 1974), Part 1 of a "Conspectus of Poetry" (Autumn 1977), and Part 2 of a "Conspectus of Poetry" (Winter 1977). Annette Kolodny Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism" A good feminist criticism . . . must first acknowledge that men's and women's writing in our culture will inevitably share some common ground. Acknowledging that, the feminist critic may then go on to explore the ways in which this common ground is differently imaged in women's writing and also note the turf which they do not share. And, after appreciating the variety and variance of women's experience as we have always done with men's we must then begin exploring and analyzing the variety of literary devices through which different women are finding effective voices. As a consequence of this activity, we may even find ourselves better able to understand and to encourage women writers' continued experiments in language in stylistic devices, genre forms, and image making experiments which inevitably expand everyone's abilities to know and express themselves.   Annette Kolodny, assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the study of women in society. She has written articles on American literature and culture and a feminist analysis of American pastoral, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Edward T. Cone In Defense of Song: The Contribution of Roger_Sessions In a single richly suggestive word, "song," Sessions sums up all the factors melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, dynamic, articulative that contribute to what I have called musical line: "Each one of these various aspects derives its functions from the total and indivisible musical flow - the song. . . . [M]usic can be genuinely organized only on this integral basis, and . . . an attempt to organize its so-called elements as separate factors is, at the very best, to pursue abstraction, and, at the worst, to confuse genuine order with something which is essentially chaotic."1 Analysis, whose functions as a valuable tool for the training of composer and performer Sessions has so well explicated and demonstrated, is now all too often called on to justify and to further this essentially unmusical, or at best nonmusical, pursuit of abstraction. Herein lies the explanation for the increasing doubt of the general usefulness of the discipline that Sessions has lately evidenced.2 For the creation and analysis of art are two distinct activities, confused at the artist's peril. ". . . [A]nalysis cannot reveal anything whatever except the structural aspects of a completed work . . . Discoveries after the fact are necessarily verbalized in terms of preexistent contexts; it hears forward, as it were, in terms of the contexts.3   ·  1. "Song and Pattern in Music Today," The Score 17 (September 1956): 77-78. ·  2. See, e.g., "Song and Pattern," p. 78, and "To the Editor," Perspectives of New Music 5 (1967): 92-93. ·  3. Questions about Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 109-110.   Edward T. Cone, composer and professor of music at Princeton University, has written Musical Form and Musical PerformanceandThe Composer's Voice, edited Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and coedited Perspectives on American Composers and Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky. In a slightly different form, this essay was delivered as an address at Amherst College on the occasion of a music festival honoring Roger Sessions. Roger Sessions Heinrich Schenker's Contribution At the basis of Schenker's teaching lies the most important possible goal - that of effecting some kind of rapprochementbetween musical theory and the actual musical thought of the composer. It should be hardly necessary to point out, at this late date, the vital necessity of some such rapprochement. The older theory of harmony, virtually a compilation and standardization of the purely practical teachings of earlier days, consisted in little more than a systematic catalog of "chords" and what was a chord but the simultaneous sounding of any two or more notes, regardless of their syntactical significance? That the harmony books catalogued only the simplest of such phenomena does not in the slightest alter the fact that fundamentally the conception went no further. While distinctions were made between "harmonic" and "non-harmonic" tones, and the number of possible chords limited by professional fiat, such distinctions and limitations were patently arbitrary and often contrary to the true order beneath what was assumed to be merely conventional, and therefore sanctified by tradition. There even exist harmony books which dogmatically assert the inferiority of certain cadence formulas, on the ground that the masters used them less frequentlythan others of different structure!   Roger Sessions was an American composer who taught at Smith College, Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. Sessions received two Pulitzer prizes. Christopher Ricks Lies . . . I should like to ask some questions about a particular obviousness: that lie in English means both to say something false while knowing it to be so, and to rest or (expressive of bodily posture) to be in a prostrate or recumbent position. A pun, after all, is likely to be a compacting or constellating of language and literature, of social and cultural circumstance.   There is potency in the pun or the suggestive homophone. "Miscegenation" must be a bad thing. Does it not confess that it is a mis-something? (All it really confesses, of course, is that it is a miscere-something, but the word still carries its infection.) Similarly, "What's good for General Motors is good for America" presses us to concede the claim made by general (not invidiously particular or sectional, and with a touch of "captains of industry" authority); a quite other route would have to be taken if the language were to press us to concede that "What's good for A.B. Dick is good for America." Again, the political energy of a strike (and perhaps the credulity as to its effectiveness) profits from the crisp energy of the word, a word strike which accords to an enterprise which is one of withdrawal, passivity, and attrition the associations of something which is on the offensive, active, and speedy.   Christopher Ricks, professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Milton's Grand Style, Tennyson, Poems and Critics, and Keats and Embarrassment. He is also editor of the journal Essays in Criticism. Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen Photography, Vision, and Representation Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but by laymen. Furthermore, for most of this century the majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important way and require different methods in interpretation precisely because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each other by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings and people who believe they are (in some ways, at least) superior; by people who think that photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe that they should at least try.   Joel Snyder teaches criticism and history of photography at the University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own photographs. His contributions to include "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980) and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue.Neil Walsh Allen produces educational audio-visual materials and has designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and applications of photography for the Smithsonian Institution. Richard Strier The Poetics of Surrender: An Exposition and Critique_of_New Critical Poetics Like the determinist, the New Critic must proceed by assuming what he hopes to prove; he assumes the existence of "objective" relations between the words of the poem he is studying and then attempts to perceive such relations.1 The distinction between "objective" that is, in some sense verifiable and purely subjective or personal meaning must necessarily be a central one for this type of poetics. New Critics are constantly protesting that they are not "reading into" works, that the meanings they ascribe to the words or images of a literary text are objectively there rather than subjectively imposed. Empson declares, speaking of a recurrent image in Donne's poetry, "the point is not so much what 'connotations' this 'image-term' might have to a self- indulgent reader as to what connotation it actually does have in its repeated uses by Donne" there is clearly a semantic distinction to be made here, for Empson is using the same term, "connotation," to describe both what he does and what he does not mean.2   ·  1. On this procedure in general, see Nelson Goodman's remark on "virtuous circles" in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 67 ff. ·  2. "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," Kenyon Review 11 (Autumn 1949): 580; reprinted in Paul Alpers, ed., Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), pp. 63-77. Empson's quotation marks indicate that for the purposes of discussion he is adopting the terminology of Rosemond Tuve.   Richard Strier, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, has written articles on religious poetry and is currently completing a book on Herbert and Vaughan. Rawdon Wilson On Character:A Reply to Martin Price Price commits the Fallacy (so to call it) of Novelistic Presumption. This is clearly evident to his earlier essay ["The Other Self"], but it is certainly implicit in "People of the Book." He assumes that the novel (whatever that is) possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature. In this perspective, a specific element of the novel (say, character) will seem validly detachable from literary history in general. I think that this is an error and that if a theory of character should emerge, it will necessarily account for go to the heart of all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric. "By any inclusive definition of the term, Gerontion can be a character; yet he is at once less and more."1 Such a statement can be correct only if it masks "less and more than a character in a novel."   ·  1. Martin Price, "The Other Self: Thoughts about Character in the Novel," in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London, 1968): p. 291.   Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, has contributed articles and short works of fiction to literary journals in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He contributed "The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term" to in the Summer 1979 issue. Rawdon Wilson responds in the present essay to Martin Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India" (, March 1974). Martin Price's rejoinder, "The Logic of Intensity: More on Character" appears in the Winter 1975 issue of . [/uploads/banners/banner stripe.png] vol2num2cov290x4351.jpg] Northrop Frye Expanding Eyes This article grew out of a profound disinclination to make the kind of comment that I was invited to make on Angus Fletcher's article in a previous issue [June 1975]. I felt that such a writer as Mr. Fletcher, who clearly understands me, and, more important, himself, ought to be allowed the last word on both subjects. Besides that, I have a rooted dislike of the "position paper" genre. In all arts, adhering to a school and issuing group manifestoes and statements of common aims is a sign of youthfulness, and to some degree of immaturity; as a painter or writer or other creative person grows older and acquires more authority, he tends to withdraw from all such organizations and become simply himself. Others in the same field become friends or colleagues rather than allies. I see no reason why that should not be the normal tendency in criticism and scholarship also. About twenty years ago I was asked, in a hotel lobby during an MLA conference, "What is your position relative to Kenneth Burke?" I forgot what I mumbled, but my real answer was, first, that I hadn't the least idea and, second, that anyone who could really answer such a question would have to be a third person, neither Burke nor Frye.   Northrop Frye's contribution to contemporary thought has been discussed by prominent critics in Northup Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute(1966). The most comprehensive bibliography of his publications and of commentaries on them has been compiled by Robert D. Denham in Northup Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography (1974). Angus Fletcher's interpretation of Professor Frye's works, "The Critical Passion," appeared in the June 1975 issue of . Harold Rosenberg Metaphysical Feelings in Modern Art The aesthetic is present everywhere in the street, in department stores, movie houses, mountainsides, as in the art gallery, the cathedral, the sacred grove. By universalizing the concept of the aesthetic, modern art has destroyed the barrier that once marked off Beauty and the Sublime as separate realms of being. In the eyes of modern art and modernist aesthetics, anything can legitimately appeal to taste. President Eisenhower, complaining about modern art, said that he had been brought up to believe that art was intended to carry one away from the dangers and unpleasantness of everyday life but that the new paintings (Abstract Expressionist) reminded him of traffic accidents. A recent statement by Francis Bacon, the celebrated British painter, also mentions traffic accidents. Bacon agrees with Ike that this type of event is not excluded by modern art. But Bacon finds traffic accidents to be a source of beauty. "If you see somebody lying on the pavement with the blood streaming from him," he explains in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in spring 1975, "that is in itself the color of the blood against the pavement very invigorating . . . exhilarating. . . . In all the motor accidents I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty."   Harold Rosenberg is a professor, poet and art critic for the New Yorker. Among his influential works are The Tradition of the New, The Anxious Object, Artworks and Packages, Act and Actor, The De- Definition of Art, Discovering the Present, and Art on the Edge.   Harold Bloom Poetry, Revisionism, Repression The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior texts as openings for its own totalizing and unique interpretations. Strong poets present themselves as looking for truth in the world, searching in reality and in tradition, but such a stance, as Nietzsche said, remains under the mastery of desire, of instinctual drives. So, in effect, the strong poet wants pleasure and not truth; he wants what Nietzsche named as "the belief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief." No strong poet can admit that Nietzsche was accurate in this insight, and no critic need fear that any strong poet will accept and so be hurt by demystification. The concern of this book, as of my earlier studies in poetic misprision, is only with strong poets, which in this series of chapters is exemplified by the major sequence of High Romantic British and American poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens, but also throughout by two of the strongest poets in the European Romantic tradition: Nietzsche and Freud. By "poet" I therefore do not mean only verse-writer, as the instance of Emerson also should make clear.   Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. This article is the first chapter of his new book, Poetry and Repression, to be published by the Yale University Press. The book completes a tetralogy, of which the earlier volumes are The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Kabbalah and Criticism.   See also: "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1 Bruce Morrissette Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of diegesis but also of structure.   A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was considered to be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre- modern and modern periods.   Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of .   Berel Lang Space, Time, and Philosophical Style It is a continuing irony that in an age of philosophical self- consciousness philosophers have been largely indifferent to questions about their own means of expression. It is as though they have tacitly established a distinction between form and matter, and had also asserted an order of priority between them: the "matter" was what they would deal with the form of its expression being an accidental feature of the acts of conception and communication. To be sure, there is a method, or at least a dogma, behind this inclination. If one assumed that philosophical discourse cloaks the outline of a natural propositional logic, then the mode of discourse would indeed be arbitrarily related to its substance; at most, the medium of discourse would reflect an aesthetic decision where "aesthetic" is meant to suggest a matter of taste, and "taste" in turn, a noncognitive ground. However one first put the utterance, it could be translated into a proposition of standard form which was either true or false.   Berel Lang, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, has written Art and Inquiry and numerous scholarly articles, edited the forthcoming Philosophical Style: An Anthology about the Writing and Reading of Philosophy, and coedited Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism. He has contributed "Style as Instrument, Style as Person" (Summer 1978) to . The present article stems from his current work on philosophical and literary style.   Arthur Heiserman Aphrodisian Chastity It seems that a Greek romance named Chaereas and Callirhoe if it was in fact written about A.D. 50 might be the oldest extant romantic novel.1 Chaucer's Troilus, Chretien's Erec, Apuleius' Metamorphoses, and for all l know Homer's Odyssey have already blushed under this dubious accolade; and I do not mean to celebrate an old Greek book by thrusting an English genre-label upon it. But nothing quite like Callirhoe survives from an earlier period of western literature; and following our inclination to comprehend such a phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories we would call it a Greek romance because it is written in Greek, a novel because it is an extensive prose fiction of ordinary moral life that conforms to a recognizable canon of realism, and a romance because its admirable protagonists suffer the most serious threats to their lives and values but survive them all. Its author, a certain Chariton of Aphrodisia, a small city in the province of Caria in Asia Minor, places his book about Callirhoe in the Hellenistic genre of the erotikon pathematon a story of erotic suffering. This is an accurate label and perhaps a bold one, as erotic pathemata were thought to be more suitable for epic or elegiac verse than for prose. In any case, I am not here concerned to argue that Callirhoe is the precursor of such entities as the novel, nor to speculate about its cultural origins, nor to point out its obvious likenesses to later narratives. I do want to discuss the habits of narrative art Chariton exploits in his book, and to explore a few of the ways he makes erotic suffering pleasurable for his readers us, and the leisured, literate members (perhaps mostly ladies) of the bourgeois households that had for centuries flourished in the great Hellenic cities of the eastern Mediterranean basin.   ·  1. I accept the date accepted by Ben E. Perry, The Ancient Romances (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), p. 350. The standard edition is W.E. Blake's (Oxford Classical Texts [Oxford, 1938]), whose translation (Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe [Ann Arbor, Mich., 1939]) I use throughout. Chariton's work did not see print until 1750, so it did not enjoy the vogue enjoyed by other Greek romances (Heliodorus' Aethiopika, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, etc.) in the Renaissance.   Arthur Heiserman is the author of several articles, short stories, and Skelton and Satire. 'Aphrodisian Chastity" will appear as a chapter in his forthcoming book, Romance in Antiquity: Essays and Discussions about the Beginnings of Prose Fiction in the West.   Giulio Carlo Argan Ideology and Iconology Is it possible to compose a history of images? It is obvious that history can be composed only from that which is intrinsically historical; history has an order of its own because it interprets and clarifies an order which already exists in the facts. But is there an order in the birth, multiplication, combination, dissolution and re-synthesis of images? Mannerism had discredited or demystified form with its pretense of reproducing an order which does not exist in reality. But is the world of existence, like the world of images, chaos or cosmos?   Erwin Panofsky's1 great merit consists in having understood that, in spite of its confused appearance, the world of images is an ordered world and that it is possible to do the history of art as the history of images. In order to do this, he had to begin, as indeed he did, with the demonstration that classical art, in spite of the deep-rooted theoretical certitude, is also an art of the image; its forms are nothing if not images to which one tries to attribute the consistency of concepts, with the sole result of the demonstrating that even concepts are images and that the intellect is still another sector or segment of the image.   ·  1. See, e.g., Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Art: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1957; Harmondsworth, 1970); Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1939, 1962, 1967); Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969); Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeshicte der ålteren Kunsttheorie (Leipzig and Berlin, 1924) [Idea: a concept in art theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia, S.C., 1968)].   Giulio Carlo Argan, who has seriously influenced the course of art history and criticism in postwar Italy, is professor of modern (post-medieval) art at the University of Rome. He has written on Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Borromini, Brunelleschi, and Gropius and three volumes of critical essays on modern art. His Skira volume on Baroque art, Europe of the Capitals, is his only major work published in English. "Ideology and Iconology" originally appeared in Italian in the journal Storia dell'arte, which he edits, and in Psicon. Rebecca West, translator of this article and assistant professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, presently is collaborating on a translation of Dario Fo's theater. She has translated "Narrative Structures and Literary History" by Cesare Segre, for the Winter 1976 issue of Critical Inquiry. Robert L. Carringer Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, and Some Conventions_of_American Narrative It is widely thought that what finally characterizes American literary narratives is a preoccupation with Americanness. If the "great theme" of European fiction has been "man's life in society," Walter Allen writes in The Modern Novel, "the great theme of American fiction has been the exploration of what it means to be an American." The best American film narratives also seem to bear out this proposition, especially those of the great American naturals like Griffith and Ford and Hawks, and most especially Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941), regarded by many as the greatest American film. Welles' film belongs to that category of narratives which take a prominent figure from contemporary American life (here William Randolph Hearst) and use him to stand for what are conceived to be representative traits of the collective American character. Understandably, then, there are many general resemblances in the film to other well-known stories of American entrepreneurs, magnates, and tycoons. Long before the flourishing of tycoon biographies in the American sound film, well before F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser, before even Henry James, certain conventions and associations had become well established in stories of this type. The up-and-coming young American was shrewd and practical, an image of compulsive energy, a man with his eye always on the future. His Americanness also consisted of such traits as enterprise, indomitable idealism, a certain naturalness and openness to experience, and a relentless will to succeed. His geographical origin could be made to carry moral force, and he or another character who equated American commercial noblesse oblige with universal morality could be a useful thematic touchstone.   Robert L. Carringer is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches and writes on film, American literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature. This study is the first in a series of essays in progress on American films and American narrative tradition. He has also contributed "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" (Winter 1978) to .   Wayne C. Booth Irony and Pity Once Again: Thaïs Revisited Mad about it they still were, in 1926, when Hemingway's splendid spoofing appeared in The Sun Also Rises. But it was not everybody who had been responsible. It was mainly Anatole France, abetted by his almost unanimously enthusiastic critics. And of all his works, the one that must have seemed to fit the formula best was Thaïs, already a quarter of a century old when Jake Barnes learned of irony and pity.   It is not a bad formula for the effect of Thaïs, as formulas go. It is at least as useful and at least as misleading as "pity and fear" for tragedy. There is, however, a surprising difference. If I tell you the story of any classical tragedy, even in very brief form, you will know at once why someone might talk about that story using the terms "pity" and "fear." But if I tell you of the priest who lost his soul converting the prostitute, you will not be able to predict any determinate reaction except perhaps that the story will have for everyone a slight bit of ironic wonder at the grand reversal. In other words, a teller will be able to turn such material almost any direction he chooses, making it into a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a celebration of God's wonder and mystery or a tale playing with pity and irony.   Wayne C. Booth's most recent books are A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. He is now completing a book on critical warfare and critical pluralism (a revision of his Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton University, 1974). A version of one chapter from that book, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," will appear in the Spring issue of Critical Inquiry. Other contributions to include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978), "Ten Literal ‘Theses'" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Winter 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).   T. H. Adamowski "Being Perfect: Lawrence, Sartre, and Women in Love" To compare a novel to a work of philosophy is, admittedly, a risky exercise in analogy. When the novelist is Lawrence and the philosophical text is the ponderous and dialectical Being and Nothingness, such a comparison may seem willfully perverse and peculiarly open, insofar as it deals with Lawrence's great theme of sexuality, to his anathema of "sex in the head." Furthermore, modern criticism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has tended to be wary of critical approaches that lean on notions that are not derived from literature itself - a tendency that is being reinforced these days by the structuralist insistence on the "literariness" of the Text. Now, despite its metaphorical statement as a form of dramatic "gesture," Sartre's book is very definitely not a work of literature. T.H. Adamowski, associate professor of English at Erindale College, the University of Toronto, has written articles on English, American, and French literature. This essay is part of a larger study on progress on Lawrence's "sexual poetics." Martin Price Critical Response: "The Logic of Intensity: More on_Character" Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" raised a great many questions, and I should like to deal with lesser matters before going on to those of more consequence. He has found in my work the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. To commit this unnatural act is to assume "that the novel (whatever it is) possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature." Let me say at the outset that I am not trying to frame a restrictive definition of the novel. Novels are whatever most critics agree to call novels, and if I speak of "the novel" I can only hope that the phrase will be taken as convenient shorthand rather than an attempt to define an essence. And of course the novel has a history of its own, just as the state of Connecticut has a history even as it remains one of the fifty states, just as literature has a history although it is only one of the arts or institutions of our culture. Mr. Wilson wants a theory of characters that "will necessarily account for - go to the heart of - all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric." To that I can only reply with E.M. Forster's sentence: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." In this essay Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of English at Yale University, responds to Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" (Autumn 1975) which raised objections to Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India" (March 1975). Lawrence W. Hyman Critical Response: "The "New Contextualism" Has Arrived: A_Reply_to Edward Wasiolek" I agree with much of what is said in this article; and I also will quote Roland Barthes, but for a different purpose. But I believe that it is a mistake to judge contextualism by its theory rather than its practice. If we look carefully at what is actually done in contextualist criticism, we will find that the "contradictions in its basic premises" which trouble Wasiolek have also allowed it to overcome the limitations that a strict construction of "autonomy" would impose. We will also find that what really distinguished contextualism, what the concept of autonomy leads to in practice, is not an impoverishment but a deepening and enrichment of the literary experience and, third, that the theoretical developments in other critical schools have vindicated at least one cardinal principle of contextualism, namely, that the meaning of a literary work is inherently ambivalent or indeterminate. By following the lead (and I will explain how this indeterminacy differs from "plurisignification"), we can, I believe, provide a better theoretical base for contextualism, although I am not sure that it would be or should be one that "includes the world rather than excludes it," as Wasiolek demands it (p.627). Lawrence W. Hyman professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is the author of a book on Milton's poetry,The Quarrel Within, and articles on critical theory. He responds in this essay to Edward Wasiolek's "Wanted: A New Contextualism" (, March 1975). Hyman has also contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Harpsichord Exercises and My Lai Massacre" (Summer 1980) to . Edward Wasiolek Critical Response: "Texts are Made and Not Given:_A_Response_in_a Critique" The issue is not whether we should or should not reduce the facts of literature to those of some other order or to make it causally dependent on such things as history, religion, or philosophy. These are the phantoms of forty years. Nor is the issue whether a contextualist can be flexible enough to do other kinds of criticism. Empson was a poor contextualist and an atrocious Freudian; and if the man was the same, the activites were not. One can do both in turns and doing both tells us nothing about the flexibility of contextualism. Empson was indefatiable in multiplying ambiguities and notoriously indifferent to contexts, a fact that is drawing some attention and admiration today from some structuralists. Nor is the issue whether or not contextualism has been vindicated by other schools of criticism because it held that poetic language was ambivalent. The  evidence that is brought forth from psychoanalysis to support this point undermines it. If Freudianism holds that poetic language is ambivalent - and it does - then it does not vindicate the contribution of contextualism, since it antedates contextualism by many years. And as a matter of fact, poetic ambivalence has been held by many critics and aestheticians - Croce is an example - long before New Criticism and contextualism. Nor is the issue, finally, wheher or not literature defamiliarizes usual or habituated language. I suppose it does, but this does not tell us very much. The term was used by the Russian Formalists to describe the process by which new literary forms come into being as they separate themselves from "conventionalized" or "canonized" forms. The Russian ostranenie could be translated as "deconventionalizing," just as well as the more usual "making strange," and the less usual "defamiliarization" that Mr. Hyman has taken from Lemon and Reis. The Formalists quickly abandoned the term because it was too vague and general to account for the increasingly complex process that was involved in the interchange of literary forms. The term was not used to describe the relationship of literary language to nonliterary language, as Mr. Hyman uses it. This is a New Critical reflex, which tends always to see the literary context as something opposed to something outside itself. But Mr. Hyman's misuse is also the right use because his misunderstanding and misapplication of the term takes us to the real issue, one that he has been unwilling or unable to face despite all the grace and complaisance of his argument. [/uploads/banners/banner stripe.png] vol2num3cov290x4352.jpg] E. H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A_Correspondence [E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:]   . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which has invaded our art schools and resulted in the doctrine (which I have read in print) that art could not possibly be taught because only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is creativity (they used to call it originality) it is not possible to teach it. Q.E.D. I recently asked my history finalists what "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . .   [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:]   .  . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist? Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school children. With me there was a much better teacher (better in that she could interest and control a class and organize things and was in fact a very admirable and sensible person). One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of (to my mind) the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror.   "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self expression" was as precious as virginity.   E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles,and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to include "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979),"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976). Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" (Spring 1975), "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979). Wayne C. Booth M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as_Pluralist When M. H. Abrams published a defense, in 1972, of "theorizing about the arts,"1 some of his critics accused him, of falling into subjectivism. He had made his case so forcefully against "the confrontation model of aesthetic criticism," and so effectively argued against "simplified" and "invariable" models of the art work and of "the function of criticism," that some readers thought he had thrown overboard the very possibility of a rational criticism tested by objective criteria.   In his recent reply to these critics,2 Abrams concentrates almost entirely on whether his critical pluralism is finally a skeptical relativism. He does not even mention his great historical works, The Mirror and the Lampand Natural Supernaturalism, and he has nothing to say about how his pluralistic theories would be applied to the writing of history. But then, surprising as it seems once we think about it, neither of the two histories has much about his method either.   What is the true achievement of these aggressive raids into our past, and how does Abrams see them in relation to other possible histories of the same subjects? Knowing in advance that he has agreed to reply to my nudging, I should like both to propose that everyone has with Abrams' own encouragement understated the importance of what he has done and to ask: What kind of pluralist is he?   ·  1. "What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts," In Search of Literary Theory, ed. Morton Bloomfield (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), pp. 3- 54.   ·  2. "A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism," ELH 41 (Winter 1974): 541-54.   Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), >"Preserving the Exemplar: Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979). M. H. Abrams Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply_to_Wayne Booth In retrospect, I think I was right to compose Natural Supernaturalism (let us, following Booth, focus our discussion on this book) by relying on taste, tact, and intuition rather than on a controlling method. A book of this kind, which deals with the history of human intellection, feeling, and imagination, employs special vocabularies, procedures, and modes of demonstration which, over many centuries of development, have shown their profitability when applied to matters of this sort. I agree with Booth that these procedures, when valid, are in a broad sense rational, and subject to analysis and some degree of definition. But the rules underlying such a discourse are complex, elusive, unsystematic, and subject to innovative modification; they manifest themselves in the intuitive expertise of the historian; and the specification of these rules should not precede, but follow practice. . . . After the fact, nevertheless, a book like Natural Supernaturalism is subject to close critical inquiry about its methods and rationale. I am grateful to Booth for opening up such an inquiry, and for doing so in a way that is not only disarming, but seems to me to be the most promising of useful results. That is, instead of adopting a prosecutorial stance, demanding: "Justify the rationality and probative force of what you have done; it looks dammed suspicious to me," he has adopted the friendly tactic of saying: "Your book, in my experience of it, has yielded discoveries that I want to call knowledge, by methods, however deviant from standard rubrics of valid reasoning, that it seems irrational to call non-rational. Let's set out to clarify what these methods are, and to see what grounds we can find for the claim that they provide warranted knowledge."   M.H. Abrams' contributions to are "The Deconstructive Angel" (Spring 1977) and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'" (Autumn 1977). Stanley E. Fish Interpreting the Variorum The willows and the hazel copses green Shall now no more be seen Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. [Milton, Lycidas, Ll. 42-44]   It is my thesis that the reader is always making sense (I intend "making" to have its literal force), and in the case of these lines the sense he makes will involve the assumption (and therefore the creation) of a completed assertion after the word "seen," to wit, the death of Lycidas has so affected the willows and the hazel copses green that, in sympathy, they will wither and die (will no more be seen by anyone). In other words at the end of line 43 the reader will have hazarded an interpretation, or performed an act of perpetual closure, or made a decision as to what is being asserted. I do not mean that he has done four things, but that he has done one thing the description of which might take any one of four forms making sense, interpreting, performing perpetual closure, deciding about what is intended. (The importance of this point will become clear later.) Whatever he has done (that is, however we characterize it) he will undo it in the act of reading the next line; for here he discovers that his closure, or making of sense, was premature and that he must make a new one in which the relationship between man and nature is exactly the reverse of what was first assumed. The willows and the hazel copses green will in fact be seen, but they will not be seen by Lycidas. It is he who will be no more, while they go on as before, fanning their joyous leaves to someone else's soft lays (the whole of line 44 is now perceived as modifying and removing the absoluteness of "seen"). Nature is not sympathetic, but indifferent, and the notion of her sympathy is one of those "false surmises" that the poem is continually encouraging and then disallowing.   Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The Reader inParadise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other contributions to include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980).   See also: "Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum" by Douglas Bush in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?" by Steven Mailloux in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" by Stanley E. Fish in Vol. 3, No. 1 Earl Miner That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge We are much given to supposing that "knowledge" designates a few prize classes of of what I am not sure, but matters quite distinct from, superior to, others. It seems we are beginning to understand that: "Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, recall, problem-solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition."1 The imagery of Macbeth refers to a hypothetical stage or aspect of cognition, as does problem solving using algebra. For that matter, it might be argued that "cognition" itself is hypothetical, only a part of knowing, only an abstraction of a human activity. But we must have terms to make sense, and we can take "cognition" to designate the activity that we otherwise designate in specific result as knowledge. In such a view, what we know is all "a human being might possibly do." That "all" is inexplicable apart from doer-knower, from a postulated "real world," and from activities by organs or tissue collectively referred to as the brain.   · 1. Ulrich Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York, 1967), p. 3.   Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present (of which he is editor and a contributor) and Japanese Linked Poetry. He has contributed "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems, Part 1" (Winter 1978) and "On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems, Part 2" (Spring 1979) to Critical Inquiry.   Maurice Friedberg The U.S. in the U.S.S.R.: American Literature throughout_the_Filter of Recent Soviet Publishing and Criticism The advent of the post-Stalin "thaw," particularly the period after 1956, was marked by a spectacular expansion in the publishing of translated Western writing and also, on occasion, of editions in the original languages: the virtual ban on import of Western books was, as of 1975, never relaxed. The more permissive political atmosphere favored the publication of a vastly larger variety of Western authors and titles and provision for the Soviet public of much larger quantities of such books in the country's bookstores and libraries. While the improvement was very impressive in itself, abundant data attest that it was far from adequate to satisfy reader demand.1 Among the beneficiaries, books by American authors stood out the more prominently since it was these that were most discriminated against during the years immediately preceding.2 Decades of neglect, to say nothing of politically inspired selectivity, resulted in such incongruities as the first Russian translation of Melville's Moby Dick in 1961 more than a century after the novel's appearance and the first Soviet publication of any work by Henry James (who was a friend of Turgenev a century earlier!) in 1973. It was not until the 1960's that Russians had an opportunity to read Faulkner but then, the same was true of Kafka. However unevenly, the range of American literature, both old and new, now made available to Soviet readers is gradually expanding.   ·  1. The overall problem is discussed in detail in this writer's forthcoming book, A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post- Stalin Russia, 1954-64 (Bloomington, Ind., 1976).   ·  2. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the fate of American literature in the U.S.S.R. from the Revolution until the early post-Stalin years, see Deming Brown, Soviet Attitudes toward American Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1962). Interesting statistical data on the first post-Stalin years may also be found in Melville J. Ruggles, "American Books in Soviet Publishing," Slavic Review 20, n.3 (October 1961): 419-35. A useful, very brief list of selected works of American writing published by 1968, though not entirely as complete as it purports to be, may be found in M.O. Mendel'son, A.N. Nikolyukin, R.M. Samarin, eds., Problemy literature S. Sh. A. XX. veka (Moscow: "Nauka," 1970), pp. 391-517. Unfortunately, the Soviet bibliography contains no information on press runs of the books listed.   Maurice Friedberg, head of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois, is the author of numerous essays and articles on Soviet literature. Professor Friedberg's most recent book,A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954-1964, will be published this year. James E. Miller, Jr. Henry James in Reality In working his way through his complex conception of the relation of fiction and reality, [Henry] James thus found the unconscious moral dimension inextricably embedded within "realism" itself. In following the threads of realism (or reality) back to consciousness itself, James invariably found there intertwined with its roots those aspects and elements that other theorists kept carefully separate. By exploring experience to its source, he found imagination. By following objective life from "out there" to conception, he found individual vision. By following the seeming oneness of the passing show back to perception, he found infinite variation and multiplicity. By following the uncolored flux and flow of events to their embodiment in the fictional medium, he found coloration of personality. And by following the "felt life" back to the artist's "prime sensibility" (consciousness), James found there the "moral sense" and the "enveloping air of the artist's humanity" that which gives "the last touch to the worth of a work."   James E. Miller, Jr., professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman; F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique; J.D. Salinger; Theory of Fiction: Henry James; and numerous articles on American literature and education. He contributed "Catcher In and Out of History" to , Spring 1977.   Jerome J. McGann Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of_Criticism_Once Again Teachers and critics have much to learn from [Harold] Bloom's work, and in this paper I want to try to show what it is we can learn from him and how we might go about it. In doing so, I also mean to analyze his attack upon formal criticism and to consider the merits of that attack. In the end, I propose an assessment of what in my view is the crucial weakness of both formal and dialectical criticism alike. This will involve an explication of the meaning of critical care and an enlargement of our customary understanding of critical method and procedure. . . . In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom presents theory based frankly upon Freudian models, or what Bloom calls Family Romance. Every new poet is caught up in a struggle with his forebears, or precursors. Being Freudian forebears, they naturally both teach the poet and threaten him as teachers. The problem for the poet is to learn from his forebearing (or perhaps overbearing) family without losing his integral self. If he succeeds he becomes what Bloom calls a "strong poet," and, hence, again quite naturally, he lives to present much trouble to coming generations, who have their own paths to go.   Jerome McGann, professor of English at John Hopkins University, has written books on Byron and Swinburne and is presently working on the Oxford English Text edition of Byron's Complete Poetical Works, Don Juan in Context, and a collection of poetry, Air Heart Sermons.   See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1 [/uploads/banners/banner stripe.png] vol2num4cov290x435.jpg] Sheldon Sacks Chimera II: The Margins of Mutual Comprehension The publication in this issue of Leonard B. Meyer's superbly detailed analysis of the Trio of Mozart's G Minor Symphony became the occasion of us to reexamine and restate some of the general aims of .   From its inception was based on the assumption that we can indeed understand each other, at least to the point where critical exchange becomes meaningful and fruitful. It is this belief, for example, that has led us to eschew the more fiery debates and to concentrate instead on articles in which distinguished critics of all the arts attempt to explore the issues that divide them the correspondence between Gombrich and Bell, for example, Booth's attempt to represent his understanding of Abrams followed by Abrams' representation of how he understands his own work, or, similarly, the exchange between Angus Fletcher and Northrop Frye. Even in our more heated Critical Response section, we have tended to reject those arguments that reflect primarily the egos of the disputants in favor of discourse that reveals the actual issues that separate them. We have been fully conscious that such a focus eliminates some of the excitement of fiery battle, and we are aware as well that we have not always succeeded in our attempt. C. Truesdell The Scholar: A Species Threatened by Professions Progress cannot be reversed; what it has killed, we cannot restore to life. Professionalism, like pollution, is here to stay. However, the fact that professionalism and pollution are facts does not force us to welcome and implement them. Indeed, there are those who would accelerate "progress," their effective definition of which is what is going to happen willwe nillwe. I wonder why progressive thinkers do not, since it is inevitable we shall all die one day, advocate present universal suicide.   Preferring to cling to the remains of life rather than renounce it, preferring to strive for light so long as I can see a glimmer, I first recall the qualities ideal in one who is to search and trace the development of science.1   The workshop of the scholar in the history of science is the periods in which his authors lived. He should know those periods' ways of life and belief and education, both the common and the eccentric; their political histories; their variety in aspects; their social and economic structures; their architectures, literatures, and arts. He should feel at home in the houses of those times, sit easily in their chairs, both figurative and wooden, and discern what was then mostly admired or rejected in painting and sculpture and decoration. He should have read not only the books that carried the intellectual products of his period but also those that were then the fare of young minds as they were taught, such books having been commonly of an earlier time. The student who does not command, as a minimum, the main episodes of Holy Scripture, classic mythology, and the corpus of golden Latin is glaucomatose in the modes of thought of Western men educated before 1900.   ·  1. The text printed here is based on an address delivered at the banquet of the History of Science Society and the Society for the History of Technology, Washington, D.C., December 29, 1972. So as to retain definiteness and immediacy, I have not blurred the original focus upon the history of science and technology, trusting that any reader who can understand me at all will be able to turn the same lens upon his own field of learning or pseudolearning.   Clifford Ambrose Truesdell, III, Professor of Rational Mechanics at John Hopkins University, is the author of, among others, Rational Thermodynamics, Six Lectures on Modern Natural Philosophy, and Essays in the History of Mechanics. He has edited or coedited six volumes of the Encyclopedia of Physics; he has founded three international journals of scientific and historical research and continues to edit two of them. Among his many honors, Professor Truesdell is a Foreign Member of seven European National Academies of Science. Paul de Man Political Allegory in Rousseau In the Social Contract, the model for the structural description of textuality derives from the incompatibility between the formulation and the application of the law, reiterating the estrangement that exists between the sovereign as an active, and the State as a static, principle. The distinction, which is not a polarity, can therefore also be phrased in terms of the difference between political action and political prescription. The tension between figural and grammatical language is duplicated in the differentiation between the State as a defined entity (Etat) and the State as a principle of action (Souverain) or, in linguistic terms, between the constative and the performative function of language. A text is defined by the necessity of considering a statement, at the same time, as performative and constative, and the logical tension between figure and grammar is repeated in the impossibility of distinguishing between two linguistic functions which are not necessarily compatible. It seems that as soon as a text knows what it states, it can only act deceptively, like the thieving lawmaker in the Social Contract, and if a text does not act, it cannot state what it knows. The distinction between a text as narrative and a text as theory also belongs to this field of tension.   Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the French department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His forthcoming study of the theory of figural language, of which this essay will be a part, centers on Rousseau and involves as well Rilke, Proust, and Nietzsche. He has also contributed "The Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978) to . Joyce Carol Oates Jocoserious Joyce Ulysses is certainly the greatest novel in the English language, and one might argue for its being the greatest single work of art in our tradition. How significant, then, and how teasing, that this masterwork should be a comedy, and that its creator should have explicitly valued the comic "vision" over the tragic how disturbing to our predilection for order that, with an homage paid to classical antiquity so meticulous that it is surely a burlesque, Joyce's exhibitionististicicity is never so serious as when it is most outrageously comic. Joyce might have been addressing his readers when he wrote to Nora in 1909: "Now . . . I want you to read over and over all I have written to you. Some of it is ugly, obscene, and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual: all of it is myself."   Joyce Carol Oates is the author of, among others, them, Wonderland, and The Assassins. "Jocoserious Joyce" is part of a book on tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to , include "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall" (Winter 1980).   Alistair Elliot and Richard Stern A Poetic Exchange [Alistair Elliot:]   Inside the margins of a book through the screen doors of ink you find yourself among explained people whom you imagine from one clue, or two, people you cannot bore or smell, who will not love you or seduce your friend. They have names out of telephone books Baggish and Schreiber but of course they are not real.   [Richard Stern:]   Dear Mr. Elliot. Or for these lines anyway Dear Alistair ("invisible, recognisable reader"). I wish I were as fictional as Baggish And could answer with impalpable visibility, but here I am, beside a Dutch canal, two hundred clumsy pounds and one American election older than you. (I read the Contributor's Note.) Your poem is on the bed beside my socks.   Alistair Elliot is the author of Air in the Wrong Place, a collection of his poetry, and has translated Euripides' Alcestis and Aristophanes' Peace. He is presently compiling a new collection of his verse entitled Contentions. In addition to the novel which generated this poetic exchange, Richard Stern's works include the fictions Golk, In Any Case, and Other Men's Daughters, and an "orderly miscellany," The Books in Fred Hampton's Apartment. Leonard B. Meyer Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart's G Minor Symphony Few will, I think, doubt that the Trio from the Minuetto movement of Mozart's G Minor Symphony (K. 550) seems simple, direct, and lucid even guileless. Its melodies are based upon common figures such as triads and conjunct (stepwise) diatonic motion. No hemiola pattern, often encountered in triple meter, disturbs metric regularity. With the exception of a subtle ambiguity..., rhythmic structure is in no way anomalous. There are no irregular or surprising chord progressions; indeed, secondary dominants and chromatic alterations occur very frequently. The instrumentation is quite conventional, and no unusual registers are employed.   In this essay, Leonard B. Meyer, Benjamin Franklin Professor of music and humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, further explores and details the significance of theories advanced in his book, Explaining Music: Essays and Explorations. His previous contribution to, "Concerning the Sciences, the Arts - AND the Humanities," appeared in our first issue. Peter F. Dembowski Vocabulary of Old French Courtly Lyrics - Difficulties_and_Hidden Difficulties Literary difficulties vary. Certain genres are "easier" than others. And a knowledge of the historical process, involving what is called convention certainly seems to make difficult works easier. Such is the case of courtly lyrics. They are "simple" and essentially conventional; a reader knows what to expect in them. But the problem of literary difficulties remains there too. The essential difficulties of courtly lyrics are under the surface. They become apparent to a more careful, more thoughtful reader. The realization that such difficulties exist is the first step toward studying them, and only through studying them can we appreciate the real aesthetic wealth of courtly poetry and, I believe, of most of the poetry of other ages and other cultures.   Peter F. Dembowski is the author of La Chronique de Robert Clari: Etude de la langue et du style and the editor of critical editions of Old French chansons de geste. His recent edition of all known Old and Middle French versions of the Life of Saint Mary of Egypt appears in the series, Publications françaises et romanes. Richard McKeon Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy_in Religion and Culture The history of freedom is the record of what men have said and done and the interpretation of the remains of what they have made. The history of freedom of thought and expression, the history of literature and of criticism, is constructed by interference from those records and remains. The documents and artifacts in which thoughts are embodied and expressed and in which historians detect ideas and uncover their consequences in thought and action are the primary matter of the history of freedom of thought and expression. The production of books or other modes of expression, their preservation, dissemination, interpretation, and use are results at each stage of the interplay of freedom and restraint, spontaneity and judgment. The freedom of writers to write, the freedom of readers to read, and the freedom of critics or judges or censors to select criteria which establish communities united by common opinions, beliefs, or institutions supplement and delimit each other.   Richard McKeon, editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle, delivered this paper at the International Conference on Freedom of Thought and Expression in the History of Ideas held by the International Society for the History of Ideas in Venice, September 28 October 2, 1975. The essay will be included in a volume of the papers read at the conference to be published by the Society. His contributions to include "Arts of Invention and Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" (Summer 1975) and "Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot" (Spring 1979). William W. Morgan Feminism and Literary Study: A Reply to Annette_Kolodny Like Kolodny, I think feminism one of the most vital and energizing forces in literary criticism today, but for two reasons I found her exposition of the topic disappointing. It seems to me that (1) she underplays the most crucial of the many aesthetic and pedagogical issues raised by feminist literary study, and (2) she endorses a kind of intellectual defeatism when, in the conclusion of her essay, she places a "Posted" sign between the male readers of and her own area of work. Both flaws (as I would call them) arise, it appears, out of her underestimation or understatement of the revolutionary implications of feminist literary study. On the other hand, both flaws may be evidence of her problem in writing for so general an audience, for in addressing a very heterogeneous audience about a topic so potentially incendiary, she has to confront the rhetorical problem of how to tell the truth and still be heard. It is that problem, I think, that may have led Kolodny and other feminists to propose an intellectual separatism of sorts as a necessary interlude. It seems to me that once the revolutionary implications of feminist literary study are understood, separatism can be seen to be one of the most damaging proposals one could make.   William W. Morgan, associate professor of English at Illinois State University, is a contributor to Thomas Hardy: An Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him and has published essays on Hardy. He is presently working on a book on Hardy's poetry. This essay is a response to Annette Kolodny's "Some Notes on Defining a 'Feminist Literary Criticism'"(Autumn 1975). Beverly Voloshin A Historical Note on Women's Fiction: A Reply_to_Annette_Kolodny While I appreciate Annette Kolodny's attempt to clarify the aims of feminist criticism, I would like to correct a historical misconception in her recent article, "Some Notes on Defining A 'Feminist Literary Criticism.'" When Kolodny comes to defining a feminist criticism, near the end of the essay, she advocates applying to individual works, without preconceived conclusions, "rigorous methods for analyzing style and image." . . . Kolodny implies that Hawthorne wrongly condemned domestic novels without having read them and that once he began reading this body of fiction he reversed his views in short, that his initial response was unthoughtful and, in current jargon, sexist. Second, Kolodny implies that the modern reader will find the domestic novels of the 1850s as fascinating as Hawthorne found Ruth Hall.   Beverly Voloshin is a teaching associate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current area of study is mid-nineteenth- century American domestic fiction. Annette Kolodny The Feminist as Literary Critic Reading Morgan's eloquent explanation of himself as a "feminist," self-taught and now wholly enthused at the prospect of teaching a Women Writers course, one comes away sharing Morgan's concern that he not be left out in the cold. It is, after all, exciting and revitalizing to be part of a "revolution" especially if, like Morgan, one can so generously and wholeheartedly espouse its goals; and, at the same time, it is surely comforting and ego-affirming to experience oneself as a legitimate son of that sacred brotherhood, The Community of Scholars. What clearly disturbs Morgan is any suggestion that the two may not yet be compatible and that, further, if forced to choose, Morgan might find himself without viable options on either hand. For, if the larger academic "community" continues to close its professional ranks to women in general and feminists in particular (as it has also excluded, for example, blacks and Marxists), then Morgan, as a self-styled "feminist" will be forced to seek shelter among the female feminists, many of whom have closed their ranks to men. . . .   Beverly Voloshin's Note restores to print some factual information which, for the sake of brevity, I cut from my original article, directing the reader, instead, to James D. Hart's concise summary of the original context of Hawthorne's letter to Ticknor (see my n. 19, p. 88). While she and Hart make much the same point, her longer explication is, of course, welcome. Additionally, her fine explanation of "what was so daring about Ruth Hall" further reinforces my argument that there are fascinating texts to be discovered in the "feminine fifties" - even if only one or two; certainly, that's better than condemning all the women writers of that decade to obscurity. Moreover, since we teach a number of male texts simply on the grounds of their historical or "sociological" interest, why not also include women's texts on these grounds as well? especially if, as Voloshin suggests, they reveal "numerous covert rebellions against male authority." How fascinating! One looks forward to her doing more than this. Finally, my main point was not the "feminine fifties" per se, but a plea for the careful reconsideration "of texts by women which have, for one reason or another, been either lost or ignored" (p.88). Stretching the "feminine fifties" by only two years, for example, one discovers Rebecca Harding Davis' Life in the Iron Mills (1861), recently reissued by the Feminist Press (New York, 1972).   Annette Kolodny, assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship for the study of women in society. She has written articles on American literature and culture and a feminist analysis of American pastoral, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. vol3num1cov290x435.jpg] Josephine Miles Values in Language; or, Where Have Goodness,Truth, and_Beauty_Gone? As you might guess, the words goodness, truth, and beauty are not of heavy poetic value today. Terms of concept may be stressed again someday, and maybe soon, but at the moment have gone out of poetry in favor of more concreteness, more imagery, more connotative suggestion, less effect of the naming and labeling virtues, which Ezra Pound and other twentieth-century leaders have told us not to use. But actually these terms of abstract concept were lessened in major usage in poetry long before the twentieth century. They had flourished in a setting of kings and courts. The love poetry, the political poetry, the philosophic poetry not only dealt directly with truth and goodness but used them constantly for evaluative commentary of other subjects. People, as well as moral issues, were good; lovers, as well as propositions, were true . . . Love and honor, good and true, these were terms of value in which poetry worked so strongly that a large proportion of its reference was limited to these alone, and so thoroughly that there was not a poet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who did not share in this emphasis.   Josephine Miles is a poet, critic, and University Professor of English at Berkeley. Her works of criticism include The Vocabulary of Poetry,The Continuity of Poetic Language,Eras and Modes in English Poetry,Style and Proportion, and Poetry and Change. She is also the author of a number of books of poems, from Lines at Intersection (1939) to Poems 1930-60, Kinds of Affection (1967), and To All Appearances (1975). Carol and Richard Ohmann Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye The front page of the [New York] Times on July 16, 1951, serves to outline, quickly enough, the situation of the world into which The Catcher in the Rye made such a successful and relatively well- publicized entrance. The main action of the world, the chief events of its days were occurring within a framework of struggle between two systems of life, two different ways of organizing human being socially, politically, economically. The opposition between East and West, between socialist and capitalist, was determining what happened in Kaesong, Budapest, Madrid, Teheran, Washington, New York. Name-calling the Administration, Republicans threw out the term "socialist," and the bid for millions to build schools in the five boroughs of New York would finally have to dovetail with allocations of taxes for defense.   The review of The Catcher in the Rye in the back pages of the Times made no mention of any of this. The kind of reality reported on the front page belonged to one world; the new novel was about to be assimilated into another, into the world of culture, which was split from politics and society. And this separation repeated itself in other reviews: typically, they did not mention the framework of world history contemporary with the novel; they did not try to relate Catcher to that framework even to the extent of claiming that there was only a partial relationship or complaining, however simplistically, that there was none. Our concern from here on will be to try to sketch what reviewers and what academic critics after them did see in the novel and what they might have seen in it. We are interested in the conceptual frameworks, the alternatives to history, they used to respond to and interpret Catcher as they passed it on to its millions of lay readers.   Carol Ohmann is currently working on a book about Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Her previous contribution to , "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemic Preface" (with Barbara Currier Bell), appeared in the December 1974 issue. Richard Ohmann's most recent book is English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. Both are professors in the department of English at Wesleyan University, and contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the Historically Particular" to in the Summer 1977 issue. John Holloway Supposition and Supersession: A Model of Analysis for_Narrative Structure The first and preliminary part of this discussion examines Todorov's remark, in his article "Structural Analysis of Narrative" (Novel 3, no. 1 [Fall, 1969]), on certain tales in the Decameron. These are advanced as dealing with a "concrete problem" which "illustrates" what Todorov "conceive[s] to be the structural approach to literature." The second part (Sections II-V) offers an alternative analysis of the Decameron tales. The third part comprises some observations, from a similar point of view, on Crime and Punishment. The anterior purpose of the whole discussion is to identify at least some points where insights about "structure," in a fairly strict sense, seem to bear genuinely upon the insights of the literary critic.   John Holloway, Professor of Modern English at the University of Cambridge, is the author of, among others, The Victorian Sage, The Charted Mirror, The Story of the Night,Blake: The Lyric Poetry, The Proud Knowledge, Planet of Winds, and five volumes of verse. His previous contribution to , "Narrative Structure and Text Structure," appeared in the March 1975 issue. J. Hillis Miller Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line The story of Ariadne has, as is the way with myths, its slightly asymmetrical echoes along both the narrative lines which converge in her marriage to Dionysus. Daedalus it was who told Ariadne how to save Theseus with the thread. Imprisoned by Minos in his own labyrinth, he escapes by flight, survives the fall of Icarus, and reaches Sicily safely. Daedalus is then discovered by Minos when he solves the puzzle posed publicly by Minos, with the offer of a reward to the solver: How to run a thread through all the chambers and intricate windings of a complex seashell? Daedalus pierces the center of the shell, ties a thread to an ant, puts the ant in the pierced hole, and wins the prize when the ant emerges at the mouth of the shell. Thread and labyrinth, thread intricately crinkled to and fro as the retracing of the labyrinth which defeats the labyrinth but makes another intricate web at the same time pattern is here superimposed on pattern, like the two homologous stories themselves.   J. Hillis Miller is Gray Professor of Rhetoric and chairman of the department of English at Yale. He is the author of Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels, The Disappearance of God, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, Fiction and Repetition, and a study of narrative terminology, called Ariadne's Thread, of which his essay in this issue of is a part. His contributions to are "The Critic as Host" (Spring 1977) and "Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch" (Summer 1980). Jean Ricardou Composition Decomposed On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglésia, previously the Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses. The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into five categories.   With the dissociation and decimation of the army . . . and the disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it . . . an entire military order is in the course of demolition.   The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain, when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle, we detect a direct reversal of the civic order.   In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles . . . and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general tide of dilapidation and decay.   The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies . . .   The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is subject to a similar vitiation.   Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes (Les Editions de Minuit, 1961), La Prise de Constantinople(Minuit, 1965),Les Lieux-dits (Gallimard, 1969), and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1967), Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1971), and Le Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1973)."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction" appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of . Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva. Philipp Fehl Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in_the_History of Art It was the general practice until not at all long ago (and in some quarters it is still the practice) to look at Turner as one of the moderns, if not as one of the founding fathers of modern art. He was a man straddling the fence between two periods, but he was looking forward. In a history of art that marches through time, forever endorsing what is about to be forgotten, wrapping up, as it were, one style to open eagerly the package of the next, such a position is most enviable for, no matter where the times may be going, it is a hallmark of greatness to be ahead of one's time. There were things to be explained, of course, Turner himself, a keen pessimist, did not approved of the future and had little use for the present.1 His love of art was schooled on Reynolds' Discourses, and he remained loyal to them; his poets were Thomson and Pope and, among contemporaries, the rather frigid but delicate Samuel Rogers, a classicist par excellence. Above all, however, Turner looked back to classical antiquity for training and guidance, and for the delectation of his heart. And the poetry of the ancients, such as he could obtain it in translation, was as important to him as their art. What does one do with a declared classicist whom a historicizing hindsight feels compelled to rescue as a man of the future by making him a Romantic? It is a challenge stylistic analysis likes to meet, for it goes beneath what it declares to be the surface of a work of art to find its style, the essence that must conform to the presumed spirit of the age in question. The triumphant result of such studies in depth is a forgone conclusion as much as it is a surprise to the uninitiated. The facade of the Louvre, for example, used to suffice to make it a building in the classical style; it took the acumen of a Wölfflin to prove that it really was "baroque." The more the artist struggled not to be of his time, the more, poor man, he betrayed to the analyst that he was of his time. The Louvre facade stands convicted of being "classicizing-baroque."2   ·  1. On Turner's view of the modern art of his time see John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York, 1969), pp.97-105. On his literary education and taste see the seminal essay by Jerrold Ziff, "Turner on Poetry and Painting, " Studies in Romanticism 3 no. 4 (Summer 1964): 193-215. Turner's poetical writings have been edited by Jack Lindsay, The Sunset Ship: The Poems of J.M.W. Turner (London, 1968). For the most recent and also most elegantly practical introduction to the work and life of Turner, see the catalogue of the Turner Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery, Turner, 1775-1851 (London, 1975).   ·  2. This is now a commonplace of art historical teaching. See, for example, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 6th ed. Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey (New York, 1975), p. 632. On the theory behind the application to the particular case, see Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York, 1932).   Philipp Fehl, artist and art historian, is currently preparing a collection of essays, Art and Morality: Studies in the History of the Classical Tradition. He is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting" was published in Summer 1979 in . Ralph W. Rader The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting. The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is (a) nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and (b) complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical.   Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" (December 1974), "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" (June 1975), and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1979). Professor Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth- century Studies." Albert William Levi De Interpretatione: Cognition and Context in the History_of_Ideas One can sympathize with [Leo] Strauss' ultimate aim to protect the validity of moral judgment against that form of relativism which would assess the value of great philosophic works simply in terms of how they satisfied the needs of the times for which they were written. But in believing that "historicism " meant "relativism," and that all attention to the temporal relevance of great doctrines in the history of ideas was somehow perverse, Strauss was profoundly mistaken. Hermeneutics is not axiology. Questions of truth and validity are fundamental, but they are dependent upon a prior solution of the problem of meaning. And for the establishment of meaning, contextual analysis is crucial. For it is not as if (as Platonism maintains) ideas were the ghostly inhabitants of another world, logically cut off from human purposes and intentions. All three things exist: ideas, agents, and social contexts, and the best history of ideas is, I believe, constituted by the careful consideration of the multiple interrelationships between them. It is false to believe (as the New Critics, Hutchins and Adler, and Strauss did) that texts exhaust their own meaning. For there is always an historical grounding and a web of person and social events that give them wider and deeper significance. And this is precisely why we must ask such questions as: What sort of society was the author writing for and trying to persuade? What were the conventions of communication and the literary forms of discourse current at the time? What was the author's class affiliation, his place in the social hierarchy of his age? And perhaps above all: What were his moral commitments, the structure of his ideals?   Albert William Levi, David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, Saint Louis, is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics;and Philosophy as Social Expression, and The Idea of Culture. His "Culture: A Guess at the Riddle" appeared in , Winter 1977. Douglas Bush Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum No one would deny that Mr. Fish is an acutely perceptive and provocative reader; nor, probably, would anyone deny his formidable prolixity, here as, on a large scale, in Self-Consuming Artifacts. A main reason seems to be that, while he charges formalists with "primarily sins of omission" (p. 469), he does not recognize his own sins of commission. Formalists assume a degree of intelligence in readers; Mr. Fish seems to assume that they are mentally retarded and must have every idea laboriously spelled out, as if their minds moved in unison with their lips. Whatever the occasional rewards, this assumption and procedure are not altogether winning.   Douglas Bush, Gurney Professor of English literature emeritus at Harvard University, responds in this essay to Stanley E. Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum" (, Spring 1976). In addition to the Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton, Professor Bush's many influential contributions include English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, John Milton, John Keats, and Jane Austen. Steven Mailloux Stanley Fish's "interpreting the Variorum": Advance or Retreat? The crux of Fish's argument in "Interpreting the Variorum" is that people read in different ways (they write different texts) because they belong to different interpretive communities. True enough. However, in the course of his argument Fish seems to collapse the distinction between the interpretive act of reading and the interpretive act of criticism. Fish uses the term interpretive strategies to refer to both the interpretive strategies performed by readers and to his critical strategy which describes these acts. However, critical models are not isomorphic with reading strategies; that is, critical interpretations like Fish's are descriptions of perpetual strategies (in reading) and not the strategies themselves. Fish's implicit dismissal of the reading process/reading description distinction for his own approach leads him to dismiss the distinction for other approaches. And since he has already acknowledged that people read in different ways, he concludes that different critical models are equally valid. Therefore, according to Fish, critics disagree because they read differently.1 But, as I will show, critical interpretations differ, not because critics belong to different interpretive communities of readers, but because they belong to different interpretive communities of critics.   ·  1. Of course, the definition of readingbecomes crucial here. I am using the term to refer to the temporal interaction of the reader with the text, the moment-by-moment psycholinguistic process that occurs from the instant I open a book and perceive the title or first line, "In my younger and more vulnerable years . . ." to the moment I comprehend the final sentence, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."   Steven Mailloux, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric, linguistics, and literature at the University of Southern California, is coeditor of Checklist of Melville Reviews, and his Herman Melville: The Critical Receptionand Henry David Thoreau: A Reference Guide are now in press. He is currently working on a book about contemporary movements in American literary criticism. Stanley E. Fish Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum" Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem in interpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper they criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of the paper more seriously (or at least with a different kind of seriousness) than I do, and Mr. Mailloux complains that I do not take it seriously enough. In their different ways they seem to miss or slight (or perhaps resent) the playfulness of my performance, the degree to which it is an attempt to be faithful to my admitted unwillingness to come to, or rest on, a point. Professor Bush seems to think that I am mounting an attack on the Variorum. Let me say at the outset that I intended no such attack, that I am sorry if anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regret any offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the Variorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to be perfectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it as a text. As a document, as a record and history of research and interpretation, it is a model of its kind, full, judicious, and above all, honest. The editors pay us the compliment of not pretending to an impossible objectivity. They leave us the valuable record of their own occasional disagreements, and thus suggest (to me at least) that they know very well that theirs is an interim report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it is not a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt to put to them a question the editors quite properly do not ask: what does the history of the effort to determine the meaning of Milton's poems mean? In short, I am extending the scope of interpretation to include the interpreters themselves and, rather than attacking the Variorum, taking one step further the task it has so well begun.   Stanley E. Fish's "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criticism" was published in the Special Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976. His contributions to include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980). vol3num2cov290x435.jpg] Geoffrey Hartman Literary Criticism and Its Discontents Literary criticism is neither more nor less important today than it has been since the becoming an accepted activity in the Renaissance. The humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries created the institution of criticism as we know it: the recovery and analysis of works of art. They printed, edited, and interpreted texts that dated from antiquity and which had been lost or disheveled. Evangelical in their fervor, avid in their search for lost or buried riches, they also put into circulation certain influential ideas. Perhaps the most important of these was that the authoritative version of a book is the original version, freed from interpolation and accretion. A correlative idea was that, similarly, one could rely on an original or natural light (ingenium) in the interpreter, an intuitive good sense that helped him to a true understanding of a text if it was a genuine text. . . .   There are signs that we are now nearing the end of this Renaissance humanism. Not because of a determinist or providential march of history, but ideas eventually exhaust what influence they may have. Today, after all, there is no dearth of ancient texts, or of new ones. Editing, moreover, has become only too conscious of the difficulty of recovering an "original" version or edition: in Wordsworth scholarship, for example, the authority of the 1850 Prelude, the text approved by the poet shortly before his death, was challenged by the 1805-6 Prelude printed by de Sélincourt in the 1920s; and the authority of this is in turn being eroded by antecedent manuscripts, the so-called "Five-Books Prelude" and "Two-Part Prelude." It is equally precarious to establish the text of Emily Dickinson's poems which of the variants are to be chosen as definitive? Or, from another angle, Melville's Billy Budd has become a mine for genetic speculation. Even when no editorial problem exists, a philosophicalissue arises as to the concept of originality itself.1   ·   1. For the time being, it is enough to quote Hegel's provocative attack on all "Ur-Metaphysics": "What comes later is more concrete and richer; the first is abstract, and least differentiated."   Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of The Unmediated Vision, Andre Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, and most recently The Fate of Reading. He is currently working on a book to be published in late 1977, Criticism in the Wilderness. Norman N. Holland Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis Let me start with my general thesis: that psychoanalysis has gone through three phases. It has been a psychology first of the unconscious, second as psychology of the ego, and today, I believe, a psychology of the self. . . .   To a surprising extent, the modern American literary critic (and more recently the European) has sought the same impersonal, generalized kind of quasi-scientific knowledge. We anglophones reacted against the over-indulgence in subjectivity by Victorian and Georgian critics. We also reacted against the uncritical use of extraliterary knowledge, connections that were often aimless and unconvincing between literary works and their authors' autobiographies or literary periods. We sought instead an analytical rigor, at first by searching out the organic unity of particular literary works, then by extending the methods of close reading we developed that way to the total works of an author, to myths and popular arts, to the language of everyday life, and even to such artifices as Volkswagens, supermarkets, and political candidates.   Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of six books, of which Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966), The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968), Poems in Persons (1975), and Five Readers Reading (1965) deal directly with problems of psychological criticism. His contributions to are "Human Identity" (Spring 1978) and "Why Ellen Laughed" (Winter 1980). Dore Ashton No More than an Accident? In the modern mind the circumstance of Jewishness has been burdened with many questionable associations, particularly in the arts. Although Harold Rosenberg writes that, "in regard to art, being Jewish appears to be no more than an accident,"1 vulgar associations of Jews with art stubbornly subsist, an extreme example being Nixon's "now the worst thing is to go to anything that has to do with the arts . . . the arts, you know they're Jews, they're left wing in other words, stay away. . . ."2   Despite the recurrence of such cloudy associations, the issue has remained curiously submerged. It is commonplace in our century to find a kind of reflexive yoking of Jews with art, particularly avant-garde art. The incalculable effects of such attitudes on modern art itself are rarely weighted. Accidental as the Jewish artist may be in his own view, he remains a somewhat suspect accident in the eyes of others. Can we continue to regard the fact of being a modern Jewish artist as "accidental," or is there a significant context which must be acknowledged?   ·  1. Harold Rosenberg, "Jews in Art," The New Yorker, 22 December 1975. ·  2. Nixon to Haldeman: Watergate tapes, Newsweek, 19 August 1974.   Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, has served as the curator of art exhibitions both in the United States and abroad and as an art critic for The New York Times. She is author of, among others, Abstract Art Before Columbus, Poets and the Past, The Unknown Shore, A Reading of Modern Art, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, and Yes But...A Critical Study of Philip Guston. She has also contributed "On Harold Rosenberg" (Summer 1980) to . Leo Treitler Wozzeck and the Apocalypse: An Essay in Historical_Criticism Among the central meanings in Büchner's Woyzeck, there is one that comes clear only when we read the play in the context of the history of ideas specifically in the light of certain currents of thought about human history and eschatology. Aspects of the play's expression are thereby elucidated, that are forcefully brought forward through the organization and compositional procedures of Berg's Wozzeck.   Near the end of the long third scene of the opera, Wozzeck appears suddenly at Marie's window and alludes cryptically to the mysterious signs that had come to him in the field the scene before, confiding to her that he is "on the track of something big." As those signs had first been presented through Wozzeck's eyes, they seemed like the imaginings and fears of a simple man about Freemasons and who knows what other objects of superstition, But now in the third scene he gives them a scriptural context, as though through a sudden insight: "Isn't it written, 'And behold, the smoke went up from the land, as the smoke from a furnace'?"   What Wozzeck has recalled here is a passage in the Book of Genesis, chapter 19: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. . . . and, behold, the smoke went up from the Land as the smoke from a furnace." The image is repeated in the New Testament Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse), chapter 9: "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of the great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit."   Both passages are about a holocaust visited by a wrathful God upon a corrupt and debauched people, and that is the idea that begins to form in Wozzeck's mind as he stands for the first time on the stage before his mistress. And he asks, "What will it all come to?" The answer to this thematic question lies in the strange unfolding of the drama, pressed forward by forces that lie, as Büchner had once put it, "Outside of ourselves"1 and by Wozzeck, who guarantees the outcome as he imagines himself becoming aware of what it must be.   ·  1. Letter to his family, February 1834: "I scorn no one, least of all because of his understanding or his education, for it lies in no one's power not to become a dumbbell or a criminal because we have all become alike through like circumstances, and because the circumstances lie outside of ourselves . . ." Werner Lehmann, George Büchner: Såmtliche Werke und Briefe (Hamburg, 1971), 2:422.   Leo Treitler, professor and chairman of the department of music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of, among other works, "Dufay the Progressive" and "Homer and Gregory: The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant." Cesare Segre Narrative Structures and Literary History In this article, I am starting with a question which many years ago was at the center of the debate on structuralism. Are structures to be found in the object (the literary work) or in the subject (the critic who analyzes the work)? If we take one of the famous analyses by Jakobson, we ascertain that as long as attention is brought to bear on the graphemic or phonological elements, or on rhymes and accents, then the objectivity of the examination is incontestable. The absolute or relative computation of phonemes or groups of phonemes and the specification of their place in the text are independent of the critic's subjectivity. Subjectivity begins to impose itself when categories like "abstract" and "concrete" or "metaphor" and "symbol" are introduced, and even more so when these categories are grouped into classes the denomination of which (a denomination which is discriminating according to the effects of the categories' own capacities) does not have its basis in the data offered by the text but in nomenclative schemata developed by the critic (such as intrinsic and extrinsic, empirical and mythological, etc.).   Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Pavia and president of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals Strumenti Critici and Medioevo Romanza and the series Critica e Filologia. His principal works of linguistic and semiotic criticism are Lingua, stile e società, Esperienze ariosteche, Semiotics and Literary Criticism (also in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), I metodi attuali della critica in Italia (in collaboration with M. Corti), La tradizione della Chanson de Roland, and Le strutture e il tempo (also in Spanish). His editions of old Italian and French texts are Fornival's Li bestiaires d'Amours, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giamboni's Libro de' Vizi e delle Virtudi, and the Chanson de Roland. "Narrative Structures and Literary History" originally appeared in Strumenti Critici (1975). His contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Culture and Modeling Systems," appeared in Spring 1978. Rebecca West's previous contribution to was the translation of Guilio Carlo Argan's "Ideology and Iconology" (Winter 1975). Paolo A. Cherchi Tradition and Topoi in Medieval Literature It is embarrassing, to say the least, to admit in limine the impossibility of defining the key concepts of this paper, for I do not know either what tradition is or what topoi are. And what is even worse, I have no theoretical conclusions to present. But, after all, why define tradition? We all know what tradition is since it is one of the staples of our academic fare. Even the word itself is in great part an academic one. As a matter of fact, in classical Latin, what we mean by tradition was expressed by words like memoria or institutum or mos vetus, whereas traditio meant surrender or the handing over of a city or of an enemy, although the meaning of instruction, training,teaching is also attested. It was the latter meaning that prevailed in the humanistic period, though with the technical sense of transmission of a text; and in this special meaning the word traditio still survives in the discipline of textual criticism. Of course, the transmission of the text was understood not only in the material sense but also as a means of conveying ancient wisdom, as a witness to its institutions and mores. So the revival of ancient learning implied a reconstruction of a tradition which was thought to have been broken during the Middle Ages. Thus, the studia humanitatis were defined as study of the past, a very well circumscribed past. Even today when we talk about humanistic studies we understand in great part the study of the institutions, mentality, literary movements of the past.   Paolo A. Cherci, associate professor in the department of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Chicago, is the editor of Tommaso Garzoni's Works and the author of the forthcoming works, Capitoli di Critica Cervantina, Effemeridi Romaunze, and a collection of short stories, Erostratismo. Garrett Stewart Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of_Self-Reflection Charles Chaplin, like Charles Dickens, knew the deep allegiance between theme and visual symbol, and the greatest popular genius of our century, when he began a film called Modern Times with a nondescript clockface upon which the second hand inexorably spins, negotiated this alliance between satiric narrative and its props with the bold assurance of the nineteenth-century master. To have seen Modern Times again for the first time in nearly a decade, as I did recently, after in the interval having reread, taught, and written about Dickens' Hard Times, was to see Chaplin's masterpiece virtually for the first time and to wonder anew at the critics. I will shortly return to the symbolic devices by which the pervasive motif of modern time is propped and propelled in both Chaplin's film and Dickens' novel, but it is important to question first why the very thirst for overt social satire which draws a certain kind of reader to Hard Times, often one who has little converse with the other and greater Dickens novels, tends to go bafflingly unsatisfied where Modern Times is concerned. In the most recent book-length study of Chaplin, by noted film historian Roger Manvell, we hear that "Though highly entertaining, Modern Times had little social comment and no political party implications whatsoever."1 To grieve over this would be like dying of thirst in a rainstorm. Although Walter Kerr, in his far more searching treatment of Chaplin in The Silent Clowns, observes "at least two dazzling opportunities for the ironic social comment" in the opening factory sequence, on the whole he decides that "Chaplin's true theme lies elsewhere and is much more personal."2 Yes and no; more than any other artistic predecessor, Dickens can help us see the deeply-rooted grip of industrial satire on the apparent discrete, episodic comedy of Modern Times.   · 1. Roger Manvell, Chaplin (Boston, 1974), p. 143. · 2. Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York, 1975), p. 357.   Garrett Stewart, associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the Trials of Imagination,Film on Film, and a book on the symbolism of death in modern British fiction, Point of Departure: The Death Scene since Dickens, as well as essays on film. He has contributed "Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity" (Spring 1981) to . Fernando Lázaro Carreter The Literal Message The opposition prose/verse can only be established in the heart of literal language. The only way of producing nonliteral language is in conversation. . . . Enrique Anderson Imbert published a book in 1958 titled ¿Qué es la prosa? (What is prose?), in which he says: 'No, we do not speak in prose. Prose is not a projection of everyday speech, but rather artistic elaboration."1 But my adherence to his intelligent point of view is not total because he situates prose in the heart of written language, and I think that it should be ascribed to literal language. For Anderson Imbert such an idiomatic modality results in an artistic elaboration; but the intention of prose can be quite different. The reader, for instance, by virtue of his reading, can transform prose into literature; and unwritten prose does exist, as has been stated. In many cases it is impossible to compose the texts in verse; structurally, then, an opposition cannot be established, just as in the case of the student who takes notes following the explanations of the professor. These texts can only be what they are: a more or less truthful transcription, a "copy" of oral language, a mere change of substance, abbreviated in order to bring it closer, as a simple memento, to the elliptical articulations of inner language.   · 1. "No, no hablamos en prosa. La prosa no es proyección del habla corriente, sino elaboración artística." Enrique Anderson Imbert, ¿Que es la prosa? 4th ed. (Buenos Aires, 1971), p. 31.   Fernando Lázaro Carreter is the director of the department of Spanish at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a member of the Real Academia Española. The author of books on both linguistics and criticism, his published works include: Las ideas lingüísticas en España durante el siglo XVIII; Diccionario de términos filológicos; Estilo barroco y personalidad creadora; Ensayos de Poética (La obra en si);and Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca. This article is a preliminary statement of a problem he is currently investigating: literary language understood as "literal language." Leslie Hill Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity Flaubert himself, in an early and now famous letter, identifies in "bêtise" the effect of an inordinate desire to conclude: "Oui, la bêtise," he writes, "consiste à vouloir conclure. Nous sommes un fil et nous voulons savoir la trame" (2:239). This is to say stupidity, to Flaubert, is less a given content of discourse than a particular order of that discourse itself.1 It is the sign of an hasty and elliptical intervention into thought of a series of preconceived conclusions, the source of which may be situated in the doxa and in the rhetoric of verisimilitude that sustains the persuasive power of the doxa. Stupidity, as the project of the Dictionnaire demonstrates, is an endless fabric of maxims and probable syllogisms the function of which is to determine the particular and the specific, the singular and the different, as paradigmatic exempla of the larger discourse of encyclopaedic universality expressed in the verisimilitude of received ideas. It is in this sense that one can see in Flaubert's notion of "bêtise" the denunciation by the writer of an especially vulgarised form (founded upon scientific positivism and upon the self-confidence of the middle classes) of the Aristotelian concept of verisimilitude, which, built around the rhetorical figures of the probable syllogism the enthymeme and the exemplum (paradeigma), is directed towards winning adhesion to a particular thesis by appealing to generalities and probabilities, and which constructs its arguments from material drawn from the doxa.2 It is this rhetoric of persuasion by verisimilitude that Flaubert, in the various discourses of the lover, the dreamer, and the politician, will throw into ironic relief in Madame Bovary and L'Éducation sentimentale.   · 1. Cf. Valéry, Oeuvres, 1:1452. · 2. The concept of verisimilitude is a difficult one and one which had received much critical attention in recent years. I have taken the term here to refer to the complex network of constraints by which the mimetic novelist, like the rhetorician, is able to engage his audience in a contract of mutual recognition and to persuade them of the "sense of reality" of his narrative, that his is a plausible interpretation of reality, worthy of belief (compare Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a). It is here that Aristotle's elaboration of mimesis and of the art of rhetoric is decisive. Both in the Poetics (1461b) and in the Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes two concepts with regards to the manner in which the artist or the rhetorician solicits from his audience the belief in the justness of his reconstruction of reality. The first concept is that of pithanon, the plausible or the persuasive. This corresponds to the speculative consideration of what strategy will be most forceful in any given case. Rhetoric is indeed defined as "the faculty (dunamis) of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion (pithanon)" (1355b). As such, pithanon is the sign of a desire to convince, a decision on the part of an individual in a particular situation. For this desire to convince to become fully operative in the context of an audience, it needs to be recast not as a plausibility, but as a probability, as eikos. Aristotle defines eikos as "a thing that usually happens: not . . . anything whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class of the 'contingent' or 'variable.' It bears the same relation to that in respect of which it is probable as the universal bears to the particular" (1357a). Eikos is on one level a collection of contents, of topoi. But it is more than this. For otherwise this would mean that works deriving from different historical contexts would become unintelligible to the uninitiated reader. Eikos is a patterning of discourse, a rhetorical syntax, based upon the integration of the singular in the universal, and translated in the text by the enthymeme (and the maxim) and the exemplum. The homogeneity of the mimetic novel derives from the way in which the desire to convince (pithanon) is mediated and dissimulated by a totalising, "natural" eikos, when, in other words, the narrator is "objective." It is when these two dimensions are dissociated, as in Bouvard et Pécuchet, that all manner of disturbance is generated. (All quotations from the Rhetoric are from the translation by W. Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross, vol. 11 [Oxford, 1924]).   Leslie Hill, fellow in Clare College, Cambridge University, is presently doing research on Flaubert and on general aspects of the modern French novel. This is his first publication. Esther Jacobson-Leong Place and Passage in the Chinese Arts: Visual_Images_and_Poetic Analogues In a society which traditionally valued the moral and expressive forces of art, landscape painting became one of the most esteemed art forms. In China, "landscape" has always meant what its Chinese name shan shui (mountains, water) implies: paintings dominated by peaks and streams supplemented by trees, rocks, mists, and plunging waterfalls. Despite major changes in style, landscape painting in China between the eighth and eighteenth centuries was remarkably stable in subject matter. Chinese artists painted the natural settings which surrounded them in their home provinces or those which they discovered in their travels; and such settings were dominated by mountains and rivers. Moreover mountains and water were imbued with symbolic value. Traditionally the mountain has been considered the symbol of the emperor the son of Heaven and of virtue and masculine energy. The ridges and folds of the mountains display the veins of energy that course through the earth and the continuous process of change which characterizes the Universe. Water (in the form of river, stream, lake, or mist) represents the origin of life, the female principle, vitality itself. Trees, stones, bamboo, and many flowers were similarly endowed with cosmogonic and moral significance. Given the symbolic value with which elements of nature were traditionally endowed, Chinese landscape painting is properly considered the normative form through which artists (and society) reasserted correct social relationships, moral order among men, and moral order in nature.   Esther Jacobson-Leong, associate professor of art history at the University of Oregon, is currently working on problems in the significance in Steppe art and related traditions. Paul Hernadi Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between parole and langue has greatly helped linguists to clarify the relationship between particular speech events and the underlying reservoir of verbal signs and combinatory rules. The relationship emerges from Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale as one between concrete instances of employed language and a slowly but permanently changing virtual system.1 It seems to me that the more recent literary distinctions between the implied author of a work and its actual author and between the implied and the actual reader point to similar relationships along the rhetorical axis of communication.2 For example, the respective authors implied by The Comedy of Errors and by The Tempest are in a sense fixed, concrete manifestations of the actual author whose permanently shifting potential of manifesting himself in literary works or otherwise was only partially realized between 1564 and 1616; his full potential has thus forever remained virtual. The congenial readers implied by the respective plays are in turn two of many "roles" which an actual reader may attempt to slip into for the length of time it takes him to read one work or another. Even a book like Mein Kampf will be adequately understood only by men and women able and willing temporarily to become Adolf Hitler's implied readers. The price may be high, but having shed the mental mask and costume required for the proper "performance" of the text, a discerning person will emerge from the ordeal with a keener sense of the despicable part assigned to the book's actual readers. I hardly need to add that works of imaginative literature tend to imply readers whose intellectual, emotive, and moral response is far less predetermined than is the response of the reader implied by the typical work of assertive discourse.   · 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916), 4th ed. (Paris, 1949). Since this book was posthumously compiled from the notes of students attending three different sets of lectures, I am not overly troubled by the fact that the letter (if not the spirit) of at least two sentences seems to contradict my characterization of langue as a virtual and changing system: "La langue n'est pas moins que la parole un objet de nature concrète" (p. 32) and "tout ce qui est diachronique dans la langue ne l'est que par la parole" (p. 138). See also Wade Baskin's English trans., Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), pp. 15 and 98. · 2. See esp. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961) and Wolfgang Iser Der implizite Leser (Munich, 1972), trans. as The Implied Reader (Baltimore, 1974).   Paul Hernadi is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. His book, Beyond Genre: New Direction in Literary Classification, is soon to appear in Spanish translation. He has edited a collection of essays titled What is Literature? and written a book on modern historical tragicomedy. "On the How, What, and Why of Narrative" was contributed to in the Autumn 1980 issue. Wright Morris and Wayne C. Booth The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation MORRIS: But come back to that other kind of fiction, in which the author himself is involved with his works, not merely in writing something for other people but in writing what seems to be necessary to his conscious existence, to his sense of well-being. For such a writer, when he finished with something he finishes with it; he is not left with continuations that he can go on knitting until he runs out of yarn.   This conceit reflects my own experience as a writer, relying on the sap that keeps rising, the force that drives the flower, as Dylan Thomas put it. It is plantlike. We put it in the sun and when it doesn't grow, we take it and put it in another room. I don't think of repotting the plant. The plant must make its own way.   BOOTH: I like the organic metaphor, but I keep wanting to come back to particular cases to see how you actually work, in literal detail. Even the organic novelist obviously still has the matter of collecting notes, starting a novel, having it fail to go. Let me put a simple question, and move out from there. How many actual novels, whether they ever reach fruition or not, do you have "growing" at a given time?   MORRIS: You don't mean simultaneously?   BOOTH: I mean actual notes that exist in some kind of manuscript form, starts on a novel, something you are actually working on.   MORRIS: It is so unusual for me to have more than one or two things in mind at once that I don't find this a fruitful question.   Wright Morris's work as a novelist, essayist, and photographer is examined by prominent critics in Conversations with Wright Morris; the collection, edited by Robert E. Knoll, was published in the spring of 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. "The Writing of Organic Fiction" is a chapter in that book. Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974),"Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), and, with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979). vol3num3cov290x435.jpg] Wayne C. Booth "Preserving the Exemplar": or, How Not to Dig_Our_Own_Graves At first thought, our question of the day seems to be "about the text itself." Is there, in all texts, or at least in some texts, what Abrams calls "a core of determinate meanings," "the central core of what they [the authors] undertook to communicate"? Miller has seemed to find in the texts of Nietzsche a claim that there is not, that "the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations: There is no 'correct' interpretation. . . . reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which has no meaning 'in itself.'" Abrams claims that Miller cannot report on Nietzsche's deconstructionist claims without violating them: Miller seems to claim that he has found something that Nietzsche's text really says, not something that Miller himself merely brought to it. Is this objection a quibble or a clincher?1   · 1. See my "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," 2 (Spring 1976): 411-45, and Abrams' reply, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History," pp. 447- 64, esp. 456-58.   Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979). M. H. Abrams The Deconstructive Angel That brings me to the crux of my disagreement with Hillis Miller. The central contention is not simply that I am sometimes, or always, wrong in my interpretation, but instead that I like other traditional historians can never be right in my interpretation. For Miller assents to Nietzsche's challenge of "the concept of 'rightness' in interpretation," and to Nietzsche's assertion that "the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations (Auslegungen): there is no 'correct' interpretation."1 Nietzsche's views of interpretation, as Miller says, are relevant to the recent deconstructive theorists, including Jacques Derrida and himself, who have "reinterpreted Nietzsche" or have written "directly or indirectly under his aegis." He goes on to quote a number of statements from Nietzsche's The Will to Power to the effect, as Miller puts it, "that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which had no meaning 'in itself.'" For example: "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them." "In fact interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something."2 On the face of it, such sweeping deconstructive claims might suggest those of Lewis Carroll's linguistic philosopher, who asserted that meaning is imported into a text by the interpreter's will to power:   "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master that's all."   But of course I don't believe that such deconstructive claims are, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, simply dogmatic assertions. Instead, they are conclusions which are derived from particular linguistic premises. I want, in the time remaining, to present what I make out to be the elected linguistic premises, first of Jacques Derrida, then of Hillis Miller, in the confidence that if I misinterpret these theories, my errors will soon be challenged and corrected. Let me eliminate suspense by saying at the beginning that I don't think that their radically skeptical conclusions from these premises are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that their conclusions are right in fact, they are infallibly right, and that's where the trouble lies.   ·  1. "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics 2 (Winter 1972): 8, 12. ·  2. Ibid.   M. H. Abrams's contributions to include "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth" (Spring 1976) and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'" (Autumn 1977). J. Hillis Miller The Critic as Host At one point in "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History" M.H. Abrams cites Wayne Booth's assertion that the "deconstructionist" reading of a given work "is plainly and simply parasitical" on "the obvious or univocal reading."1 The latter is Abrams' phrase, the former Booth's. My citation of a citation is an example of a kind of chain which it will be part of my intention here to interrogate. What happens when a critical essay extracts a "passage" and "cites" it? Is this different from a citation, echo, or allusion within a poem? Is a citation an alien parasite within the body of its host, the main text, or is it the other way around, the interpretative text the parasite which surrounds and strangles the citation which is its host? The host feeds the parasite and makes its life possible, but at the same time is killed by it, as "criticism" is often said to kill "literature." Or can host and parasite live happily together, in the domicile of the same text, feeding each other or sharing the food?   · 1. 2, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 457-58. The first phrase is quoted from Wayne Booth, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," ibid., p. 441.   J. Hillis Miller's contributions to are "Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" (Autumn 1976) and "Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch" (Summer 1980). E. H. Gombrich The Museum: Past, Present, and Future I hope you will agree, however, that the purpose of the museum should ultimately be to teach the difference between pencils and works of art. What I have called the shrine was set up and visited by people who thought that they knew this difference. You approached the exhibits with an almost religious awe, an awe which certainly was sometimes misplaced but which secured concentration. Our egalitarian age wants to take the awe out of the museum. It should be a friendly place, welcoming to everyone. Of course it should be. Nobody should feel afraid to enter it or for that matter be kept away by his inability to pay. But as far as I can see the real psychological problem here is how to lift the burden of fear, which is the fear of the outsider who feels he does not belong, without also killing what for want of a better word I must still call respect. Such respect seems to me inseparable from the thrill of genuine admiration which belongs to our enjoyment of art. This admiration is a precious heritage which is in danger of being killed with kindness.   E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to include "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976). Seamus Heaney Now and in England It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England as a region or rather treat their region as England in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church- going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened all this is signified by their language.   Seamus Heaney, recognized today as one of Ireland's leading poets, has received numerous honors, among them the E. C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences E. M. Forster Award. His published poems have been collected in four volumes: Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door in the Dark(1969), Wintering Out(1972), and North (Oxford, 1976). In another form this essay was delivered as the Beckham Lecture at Berkeley in the spring of 1976. He has also contributed to the Summer 1981 issue on "Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry" for . Catharine R. Stimpson The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein However, Stein's self-images are more than appropriations of a male identity and masculine interests. Several of them are irrelevant to categories of sex and gender. In part, Stein is an obsessive psychologist, a Euclid of behavior, searching for "bottom natures," the substratum of individuality. She also tries to diagram psychic genotypes, patterns into which all individuals might fit. Although she plays with femaleness/maleness as categories, she also investigates an opposition of impetuousness and passivity, fire and phlegm; a variety of regional and national types; and the dualism of the "dependent independent," who tends to resist. In part, as she puzzles her way towards knowing and understanding, she presents herself as engaged in aural and oral acts, listening and hearing before speaking and telling. That sense of perception as physical also emerges in a passage in which she, as perceiver/describer, first incorporates and then linguistically discharges the world: "Mostly always when I am filled up with it I tell it, sometimes I have to tell it, sometimes I like to tell it, sometimes I keep on with telling it."1   · 1. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (Paris: Contact Editions, 1926), p. 325.   Catharine R. Stimpson, associate professor of English at Barnard College, is the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the author of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as other essays and fiction.   See also: "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Paul K. Alkon in Vol. 1, No. 4; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3 Susan Fox The Female as Metaphor in William Blake's Poetry In his prophetic poems Blake conceives a perfection of humanity defined in part by the complete mutuality of its interdependent genders. Yet throughout the same poems he represents one of those mutual, contrary, equal genders as inferior and dependent (or, in the case of Jerusalem, superior and dependent), or as unnaturally and disastrously dominant. Indeed, females are not only represented as weak or power-hungry, they come to represent weakness (that frailty best seen in the precariously limited "emanative" state Beulah) and power-hunger ("Female Will," the corrupting lust for dominance identified with women). Blake's philosophical principle of mutuality is thus undermined by stereotypical metaphors of femaleness which I believe he adopted automatically in his early poems and then tried to redress but found himself trapped by in his late works.   Susan Fox is currently working on a book of poems and has written articles on Spenser and Blake as well as Poetic Forms in Blake's Milton. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. Jean H. Hagstrum Eros and Psyche: Some Versions of Romantic Love_and_Delicacy The millennial interest in the fable told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass has produced periods of intense preoccupation. Of these uses of the legend none is more interesting, varied, and profound none possesses greater implications for contemporary life and manners than the obsessive concern of pre-Romantic and Romantic writers and artists. Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian culture had produced at least twenty surviving statues of Psyche alone, some seven Christian sarcophagi that used the legend, and a set of mosaics on a Christian ceiling in Rome from the early fourth century;1 and of course to late antiquity belongs the distinction of having produced the seminal telling of the tale by Apuleius in about A. D. 125. But what we possess from that remote time is thin and lacks the power to engage the modern spirit. The allegorizing and erotic responses made in the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque culture produced monuments of painting that the later period cannot rival; but the impregnation of literature by the legend was slight, and the intellectual or moral content was often only a perfunctory and dutiful addendum. The revival of the story in the aesthetic movement of the late Victorians and early moderns has its examples of beauty, particularly in Rodin and in the lush harmonies and occasionally piercing melodies of César Franck's Psyché, a tone poem for chorus and orchestra; but the long retellings by Morris, Bridges, and John Jay Chapman oppress with luxuriant sweetness and remain of interest only as period pieces.   ·  1. See Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Apuleius and His Influence (New York, 1963), p. 164, and Maxime Collignon, "Essai sur les monuments grecs et romains . . . ," in Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d'Athène et de Rome (Paris, 1877), fasc. 2, pp. 285-446, esp. pp. 364, 436-38.   Jean H. Hagstrum, John C. Shaffer Professor of English and Humanities at Northwestern University, is currently preparing a book on the theme of love in European literature and art from the mid-seventeenth century through the Romantic period. He is the author of books and articles on Blake and Samuel Johnson, and of The Sister Arts, a study of the relations of poetry and painting from antiquity through the eighteenth century. Leon Rosenstein On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama The first view I shall investigate holds that the art form of tragedy expresses or contains certain eternal, acultural, and ahistorical facts which are "tragic" and present as such in the real or extra-artistic worlds; these facts are merely composed in tragedy as its content such that tragedy may be said to embody some perennial statement or thought about the (nonaesthetic) things that are. The assumption here is that "tragedy" is a noun which can literally be applied to describe certain facts or events we encounter in the everyday world. This term has been more specifically understood to refer to the fact of death (or certain aspects of it, such as suicide, sacrifice, transcendence, destruction), to a way of existence or human existence generally, or to a relationship existing between man and the world, or man and other men, or man and himself (or certain aspects of these relationships, such as defeat, lack of communication or communion, contradiction, conflict, etc.). Though tragedy certainly has its preferred topics, and these have sources in a world outside any given world which the particular tragedy constructs, there is surely a distinction between the world in general, with its facts, relationships, significances, and interpretations, and the particular world created by a given tragedy. This purely aesthetical creation of its own facts, relationships, significances, and interpretations is what I shall henceforth call the worked world (the art form's world or the aesthetical world) of tragedy.   Leon Rosenstein is currently working on "Hegelian Sources of Freud's Social and Political Philosophy," a four-article series to appear during 1977. He is an associate professor of philosophy at San Diego State University. Richard Ellmann Joyce and Homer The broad outlines of Joyce's narrative are of course strongly Homeric: the three parts, with Telemachus' adventures at first separate from those of Ulysses, their eventual meeting, their homeward journey and return. Equally Homeric is the account of a heroic traveler picking his way among archetypal perils. That the Odyssey was an allegory of the wanderings of the soul had occurred to Joyce as to many before him, and he had long since designated the second part of a book of his poems as "the journey of the soul" (2:20). He had also construed Stephen's progress in A Portrait as a voyage from Scyllan promiscuity in chapter 4. Although in Ulysses he diverged sharply from Homer in the order of events, Joyce clearly adapted the Homeric settings and what he chose to consider the prevailing themes. He found the Odyssey beautifully all- embracing in its vision of human concerns. His own task must be to work out the implications of each incident like a Homer who had long ago outlived his time and had learned from all subsequent ages. Joyce once asked his friend Jacques Mercanton if God had not created the world in much the same ways as writers compose their works; but he then bethought himself and murmured, "Perhaps, in fact, he does give less thought to it than we do." Neither God nor Homer could compete with Joyce in self-consciousness.   Richard Ellmann, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, received the 1960 National Book Award for his definitive James Joyce: A Biography. He has written extensively on Joyce and other modern writers, edited work by and about them, and examined the theoretical implications of biography in Golden Codgers. "Joyce and Homer" is a selection from his book, The Consciousness of Joyce, published by the Oxford University Press. John Henry Raleigh Bloom as a Modern Epic Hero But Joyce did not want his hero to be either Greek or English: he wanted him to be Jewish. To that end, a third archetype, and an actual historical person, comes in: Baruch (or Benedictus) Spinoza. That Joyce himself was acquainted with Spinoza from fairly early in his career seems indubitable. In 1903 he mentioned him twice in a review of J. Lewis McIntyre's Giordano Bruno.1 Also in 1903 Joyce met Synge in Paris, and the two argued about art. Synge finally told Joyce, who was at this time forging his ironclad esthetic in Aristotelian or Thomistic terms, that he had a mind like Spinoza, a remark that Joyce passed on, presumably with some pride, to his mother and his brother. These are the only times in Joyce's life of which there is any published evidence of a connection between Spinoza and Joyce, and yet, as all readers of Ulysses know, Spinoza is Bloom's philosopher, and in Ulysses as a whole Spinoza plays a greater role than any other philosopher, including Aristotle and St. Thomas who appear, surprisingly, rarely and always, with one exception, in the Stephen Dedalus context. Spinoza ("spinooze") is also a presence in Finnegans Wake. The appeal of Spinoza to Joyce both as a man and as a mind must have been considerable.   ·  1. How well Joyce knew Spinoza at this time is problematical. His review of McIntyre's book, entitled "The Bruno Philosophy," published in the Dublin Daily Express, 30 Oct. 1903 (and republished in James Joyce: The Critical Writings, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann [New York, 1959], pp. 132-34), is done in English style, that is, the reviewer makes assertions as if they were his own when in fact they come from the author of the book under review. Thus when Joyce says, "in his attempt to reconcile the matter and form of the Scholastics . . . Bruno had hardily out forward an hypothesis, which is a curious anticipation of Spinoza" (p. 133), he is only saying what McIntyre himself had said, as the editors of The Critical Writings point out. In point of fact there is nothing "curious" about Bruno being a precursor of Spinoza. One of Spinoza's early mentors, Francis Van den Ende, introduced him early on to the philosophy of Bruno, who thus became one of the formative influences on Spinoza's thought.   John Henry Raleigh, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Matthew Arnold and American Culture; Time, Place, and Idea: Essays on the Novel; and a forthcoming book on Joyce, The Chronicle of the Blooms: "Ulysses" as Narrative. He is currently writing a book on Sir Walter Scott, "Ivanhoe" and Its Times. James E. Miller, Jr. Catcher in and out of History [The Catcher in the Rye's] catalogue of characters, incidents, expressions could be extended indefinitely, all of them suggesting that Holden's sickness of soul is something deeper than economic or political, that his revulsion at life is not limited to social and monetary inequities, but at something in the nature of life itself - the decrepitude of the aged, the physical repulsiveness of the pimpled, the disappearance and dissolution of the dead, the terrors (and enticements) of sex, the hauntedness of human aloneness, the panic of individual isolation. Headlines about Korea, Dean Acheson, and the cold war seem, if not irrelevant, essentially wide of the mark - if we define the mark as the heart and soul of Catcher.   James E. Miller, Jr., author of "Henry James in Reality" (Critical Inquiry, Spring 1976) and numerous books and articles on American literature, responds in this essay to Carol and Richard Ohmann's "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye (Autumn 1976). The Ohmann's answer will appear in our summer issue. Josephine Donovan Feminism and Aesthetics In response to the discussion between William W. Morgan and Annette Kolodny in the Summer 1976 issue of I would like to address the issue of separating judgments based on feminism as an ideology from purely aesthetic judgments. Peripherally this included the issue of "prescriptive criticism," so labeled by Cheri Register in Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory.1 In the same book, as Kolodny points out,2  I called for criticism that exists in the "prophetic mode." Kolodny indicates reservations about both concepts (prescriptive and prophetic criticism) without fully exploring the issue. I would like to explain my statement here and to explore further the issue of feminism and aesthetics.   When I called for criticism in the prophetic mode, I did not intend to promote an idea of the critic as ideological prophet. Rather, as I explain in the context from which the term is taken,3 I am speaking of the engaged scholar who is concerned to influence the future by her/his work today. S/he chooses her/his work with an eye to encourage political and social changes. Obviously, for a feminist this translates into a concern for a future in which women (and ultimately all human beings) will be free from many of the restrictions that have held them down in the past. Much feminist criticism is thus corrective criticism designed to redress the imbalance in current literary curricula, and more generally to reintroduce "the feminine" into the public culture.   ·  1. Cheri Register, "American Feminist Literary Criticism: A Bibliographical Introduction ," Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory, ed. Josephine Donovan (Lexington, Ky., 1975) pp. 11-24. ·  2. Annette Kolodny, "The Feminist as Literary Critic," Critical Inquiry 2 (Summer 1976): 828. ·  3. Josephine Donovan, "Critical Re-Vision," Feminist Literary Criticism, p. 81, n. 2.   Josephine Donovan, currently working on a literary biography of Sarah Orne Jewett, has written "Feminist Style Criticism," "Sexual Politics in the Short Stories of Sylvia Plath," and has edited Feminist Literary Criticism: Explorations in Theory. Although the occasion for this response was the exchange between Annette Kolodny and William W. Morgan (Summer 1976), the questions raised by Ms. Donovan have some bearing on other topics discussed in CriticalInquiry e.g., the nature of accepted canons in the arts (E. H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell [Spring 1976]). In addition the question of how we may interpret literary works from the past that contain currently unacceptable representations of women has implications as well for how we respond to "objectionable" representations of ethnic and religious groups and even of social classes. The editors expect to see these issues explored further in the future. vol3num4cov290x435.jpg] Lawrence Lipking The Marginal Gloss The difference between Poe's and [Paul] Valéry's theory of notes between a theory that emphasizes the nonsensical unpredictability of notes and a theory that discovers in notes the essential logic not only of all reading but of the mind itself cannot be resolved. To some extent, perhaps, it derives from a conflict between two genres: marginalia, and the marginal gloss. Marginalia traces left in a book are wayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around a text unaware of their presence. Nor could they have been considered publishable until the Romantic period had encouraged a taste for fragments and impulses, the suggestive part rather than the ordered whole. Significantly the term was introduced by Coleridge, that great master of the fragment; and Poe himself (so far as I can find) was the first author ever to publish his marginalia. The charm of such notes depends on their being on the edge: the borders of intelligibility (Poe) or consciousness (Valéry). The reader catches an author off his guard, intercepting a thought that may scarcely have risen to formulation. At their best, marginalia can haunt us like a few passing words overheard in the street; all the more precious because the context remains unknown.   Lawrence Lipking, professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. Some of the material in this article is drawn from a book currently in progress, The Poet-Critics, a study of the relations between poetry and criticism in the work of authors who have excelled in both. "Arguing with Shelly" appeared in the Winter 1979 issue of . Christian Metz Trucage and the Film Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike appearances. In the opposite case, the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it: here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained, the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total.   Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema, is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma, Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Editions Klincksieck, 1972). Francoise Meltzer [the translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is published in in the Winter 1978 issue. Mark Roskill On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in_Paintings There are certain ways in which the spectator's response to a work of art is liable to interference or a potentially deflecting kind of persuasion. What one is told is there in the work, or relevant in it, may play such a role; and so may what one supposes to be there, as opposed to what actually is. Since similar problems apply in the perception of the real world, including the people and the actions in it, to say this is not yet to say that there is, or should be, a pure and untrammeled kind of perception that one aims at or learns to use in front of works of art; that being already a form of critical theorizing which places some kinds of limits or ideal construction on what is permissible in the form of a response. But there are in fact two distinct realms in which perception and related cognitive processes occur, one artistic, the other nonartistic. For the present purposes, rather than any larger presupposition being entertained here, it is assumed simply that, differences of situation and context notwithstanding, there is no type of statement concerning the perception of a work of art which does not have a parallel or equivalent in the perception of the real world. Such is the philosophical basis for the line of inquiry to be followed here.   Mark Roskill is the author of a book-length interpretation of cubism, from which the present essay has been adapted. The author of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, What is Art History?, and a book on photography, he teaches courses in the history of modern art and in critical theory at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has contributed "A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish" to the Winter 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry. Richard Wollheim Representation: The Philosophical Contribution to Psychology Armed with a theory of representation, or with answers to the two questions, What is a representation? and What is it to represent?, we might imagine ourselves approaching a putative representation and asking of it, Is it a representation?, and then, on the assumption that the answer is yes, going on to ask of it, What does it represent? Now, the answers that such questions receive might be called the applied answers of the theory that we are armed with. It is in terms of this notion that of the applied answers of a theory that we may introduce the second way of classifying theories of representation. Theories of representation might be classified according to the degree of dependence or independence between the applied answers they provide in the case of any given representation.   Richard Wollheim is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic in the University of London and the author of F. H. Bradley, Socialism and Culture, Art and its Objects, Sigmund Freud, On Art and the Mind, and the novel, A Family Romance. He is currently working on a book dealing with pictorial style. In somewhat different form this paper was originally presented at the Annual Conference of the Developmental Section of the British Psychological Society, Surrey, 1976. The proceedings of that conference are published as The Child's Representation of the World, Plenum Press, 1977. Robert E. Streeter WASPs and Other Endangered Species After all, ever since the abandonment of the classical curriculum in the mid-nineteenth century, the courses of studies in American colleges have been characterized by ever-increasing diversity, responses to highly particular social and individual demands, spin- offs from traditional disciplines, specializations breeding subspecializations, and the like. Stringent counterrevolutions, such as the one undertaken in the College of the University of Chicago some thirty years ago, have been infrequent and brief. What, then, is so special about the present seductive disarray in literary studies. Chiefly, I think, the importance of this compartmentation lies in the way we are encouraged to think of literary works and to respond to them. If we persuade ourselves that novels and plays and poems are written by members of an identifiable subgroup whether that group be defined in national, ethnic, sexual, class, or special interest terms and can be properly understood, and appreciated only by those who know the code of the same subgroup, we should be prepared to accept the implications of the position we are espousing. If, to cite a specific example, what is called the Black Aesthetic points to a mode of artistic apprehension that is not available to non- Blacks, it casts the rest of us, however curious and interested, in the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Here, as so often, our best writers anticipate and dramatize notions which become solemn critical propositions later on. In Saul Bellow's second novel, The Victim, published thirty years ago, the protagonist, Leventhal, recalls a party at which two of his friends, both Jewish, were singing spirituals and old ballads. They were being needled by a drunken New England WASP named Kirby Albee.   "Why do you sing such songs?" he said. "You can't sing them." "Why not, I'd like to know?" said the girl. "Oh, you, too," said Albee with his one cornered smile. "it isn't right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no use trying to sing them."   Robert E. Streeter served for many years as Dean of the College and later as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where he is now Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He is one of the editors of . "WASPs and Other Endangered Species" was presented as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 5 April 1977. John Gardner Death by Art; or, "Some Men Kill You_with_a_Six-Gun,_Some_Men_with a Pen" My object here is to try to make the idea of moral criticism, and its foundation, moral art, sound at least a trifle less outrageous than it does at present. I'd like to explain why moral criticism is necessary and, in a democracy, essential; how it came about that the idea of moral criticism is generally hoo-hooed or spat upon by people who in other respects seem moderately intelligent and civil human beings; and that the right kind of moral criticism is, or should be. Partly this involves explaining why sophisticated modern free society tends to be embarrassed by the whole idea of morality and by all its antique, Platonic- or scholastic-sounding manifestations: Beauty, Goodness, Truth. In other words, it involves, partly, explaining how perverse and false philosophers, and educated but sequacious mind, obscuring truths once widely acknowledged; and partly it involves sketching out a way of thinking that might supplant the cowardly Laodicean habits into which American intellectuals (among others) have in recent times fallen.   John Gardner, novelist, poet, and essayist, has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for his latest novel, October Light. His other popular works of fiction include Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and the book-length poem, Jason and Medeia. He has, as well, prepared modern versions of the Gawain poems, an alliterative Morte Arthure and five other Middle English poems and written The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle, The Poetry of Chaucer, and the biography, The Life and Times of Chaucer. "Death by Art" is the first chapter of a book concerned with morality in literature. Carol and Richard Ohmann Universals and the Historically Particular To address, as Miller does, the text of Catcher particularly, we would argue that Holden's experiences of old age, physical repulsiveness, sex, aloneness and isolation, and even death are embedded in his full experience of society, and that his responses, moment by moment, bear the imprint of his total response to the competitive, dehumanizing world he is in the process of rebelling against and rejecting. He finds old Spencer pathetic (and very touching) not just because he is elderly and arthritic and snuffy with flu, but because he is relatively powerless, not very well off, and naïve (though uncomfortable) in urging upon Holden his teacherly prescriptions for life: be sensible, do your lessons, take care for your future as if with one's own efforts alone could guarantee one's worldly future. (Ours is, of course, a society where the worth of people is primarily defined by their ability to earn and/or exercise power; in the war of all against all, old age is a handicap and hence a cause for disrespect; it has always been so in our culture and is not everywhere so today.)   This essay is a reply to disagreements raised by James E. Miller, Jr. (Spring 1977) to the Ohmanns' "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye" (Autumn 1976). Carol Ohmann has also contributed "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" (December 1974) with Barbara Currier Bell. James R. Kincaid Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts The frontiers of pluralism, it appears, are fortified right at the deconstructionists' borders. Admitting freely the possibility of ambiguities, even radical ones, M. H. Abrams still insists on the text as a product of an intention, however complex. Writers write "in order to be understood," he says; there is a certain limited degree of interpretative freedom, but we must always respect the fact that "the sequence of sentences these authors wrote were designed to have a core of determinate meanings."1 Hillis Miller's deconstruction of the hybrid Booth/Abrams charge "every effort at original or 'free' interpretation is plainly and simply parasitical" on "the obvious or univocal reading"2 attempts to demonstrate that the "obvious or univocal reading" is an illusion. These are positions so extreme and so starkly clear that no one needs a comparative listing of the assumptions at work.   ·  1. M. H. Abrams, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth," 2, (1976): 457. ·  2. Wayne C. Booth, "M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist," 2, (1976): 441.   James R. Kincaid is the author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns, and a new book scheduled to appear this autumn, The Novels of Anthony Trollope. He is a professor of English at Ohio State University. His contributions to are "Pluralistic Monism" (Summer 1978), and "Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years Later" (Winter 1979). A response to the present article comes from Robert Denham's "The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns" in the Summer 1977 issue of . Morse Peckham The Infinitude of Pluralism It is idle of [J. Hillis] Miller and [Wayne C.] Booth, and [M. H.] Abrams too, to talk about the methodology of interpreting complex literary texts before they have determined what interpretational behavior is in ordinary, mundane, routine, verbal interaction. The explanation for this statement lies in the logical and historical subsumption of literary written texts by all written texts. In the subsumption of written texts by spoken verbal behavior, in the subsumption of spoken verbal behavior by semiotic behavior, and in the subsumption of semiotic behavior by whatever it is we are responding to when we use the word "meaning." If Professor Booth goes into his usual coffee shop to get his morning coffee, and says to the waiter, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please," and the waiter brings it to him, what has happened? What is the methodology of the waiter? It is not absurd to ask why the waiter does not bring the America Cup filled to the brim with unroasted coffee beans, nor why Professor Booth does not say, "I asked you for a cup of coffee, but you have brought me a cup of mostly hot water." Moreover, if Professor Booth searches the literature of linguistics and of psychology in order to locate those studies and experiments which will tell him about the methodology of the waiter, he will find very little. The original program of linguistics set forth a hierarchy of investigation, beginning with phonemics, and going on through morphemics, syntactics, semantics, to pragmatics. But as yet very little has been accomplished above syntactics. Psychologists, at least of the typical academic breed, seem to be unaware of the problem.   Morse Peckham, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, is the author of Beyond the Tragic Vision, Man's Rage for Chaos, Victorian Revolutionaries, Art and Pornography, Explanation and Power: An Inquiry into the Control of Human Behavior, and two volumes of collected essays, The Triumph of Romanticism and Romanticism and Behavior. vol4num1cov290x435.jpg] Alain Robbe-Grillet Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the "word" of a writer such as myself, has something strange and even contradictory about it, even within its own creator. At the moment when I write, let us say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du plaisir, what I propose is improbable and consequently unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or as a cinéaste in my novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, nonrecuperable for any correctly organized discourse. Nevertheless, you have noticed that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and this constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes to the very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to interact, to contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual recuperation. If, having written a novel of disorder, I don't find someone for example, Bruce Morrissette, about La Jalousie to prove that it has order, I'll do it myself. The principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But, as soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on I've destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within an organized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of Cartesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a machine of war against order. I often run into people who say to me after a film, "Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all of that before the film. We didn't understand a thing, and it is such a fine thing that you have explained it." And I reply, "Yes, but don't trust that too much," because what I've said is not at all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it is the way in which I show myself that there is in what I created a part which is in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a part increasingly large, because order progresses.   Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the author of Les Gommes (1953), Le Voyeur(1955), La Jalousie (1957), Dans le labyrinthe (1959), La Maison de rendez-vous (1965), Projet pour une révolution à New York (1970), and Topologie d'une cité fantôme (1976). His films include: L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), L'Immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-Express(1967), L'Homme qui ment (1968), L'Eden et après (1970), Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974), and Le Jeu avec le feu (1975). He has presented his views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, has translated "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." He is the author of "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film" (, Winter 1975). Siegmund Levarie Noise Noise has become an increasingly noticeable and significant symptom of our civilization. Fundamentally an acoustic phenomenon, noise has wider implications. It is the legitimate object of scientific investigations in the fields of psychology and physiology. It can be properly evaluated by its role in music and in general aesthetics. It leads to basic questions of sociology. We shall pursue the implications in these various fields one by one. In this process, as elsewhere, music provides the bridge from facts (acoustics, psychology, physiology) to commitments (aesthetics, sociology).   Siegmund Levarie is professor of music at the City University of New York. The author of books on Mozart, Guillaume de Machaut, harmony, and Italian music, he has also collaborated with Ernst Levy on Tone: A Study in Musical Acoustics and the forthcomingA Dictionary of Musical Morphology. Robert P. Morgan On the Analysis of Recent Music According to [Edward T.] Cone, then, there is a great deal of music written today that is simply no longer susceptible to analysis. If this is true, it can mean one of several things. First, it may indicate that, although there are new compositions that one finds interesting and representative of the period in which we live, the music simply does not lend itself to analysis. Thus, even if we enjoy and admire this music, there is not much that we can say about it beyond perhaps a mere description which I think most of us, along with Cone, would agree does not really constitute an analysis. I have the impression that many proponents of new music hold this view that is, they feel that new music is understandable only through a sort of mindless apprehension of its sensory surface. But if this is a fair account of the situation surrounding new music, it seems to me to represent a very serious and also depressing state of affairs. For what it means, I suspect, is that new music does not lend itself to being thought about in any serious way at all; and if so, then new music is missing a crucial dimension namely, an accompanying conceptual framework, erected through a body of critical and theoretical discourse, through which its meaning is defined and redefined as our thinking about music evolves. Indeed, this dimension forms and has always formed such an integral component of Western art music that its absence would seem to indicate that music, at least as we have known it, is in all likelihood dead.   Robert P. Morgan is professor of music theory and composition at Temple University. In addition to being a composer, he is active as a critic; his articles on contemporary music have appeared recently in several music journals and in An Ives Celebration. His contribution to , "Musical Time/Musical Space" appeared in the Spring 1980 issue. Stefan Morawski Contemporary Approaches to Aesthetic Inquiry: Absolute Demands and Limited Possibilities The generalizing methods of philosophies achieve a popularity for a period of time, which may be extended or brief, during which their proponents and even their opponents may regard them as the cognitive presuppositions for the epoch. The same effect is achieved by the more exact scientific methodologies as they find fame outside the scientific circle and are treated by some as omnipotent discoveries with powers to heal all other disciplines which may be ailing. The limping disciplines, generally classified among the humanities and discerned to be in trouble since the nineteenth century, are understandably envious of the seemingly invincible, favored scientific children of our time. For our era tends to worship quantifiable data and the principles and instruments for measuring and conceptualizing it. Thus semiotics and information theory, in hopes of acquiring the status of the sciences, have led aesthetic inquiry (to mention only one field) toward the currently popular scientism; but the limited cognitive scope of this methodology has not been recognized. Sociology of knowledge, however, forewarns us of the winds of fashion on cognitive paradigms. Where the inherent explanatory scope of a doctrine, system, or method is less than is believed according to the prevailing sociological patterns, a correction will eventually set in. And an important factor in overcoming the para-religious claims will be, precisely, the fundamental antinomical tendency of the human mind.   Stefan Morawski, Research Professor at the Institute of Arts of the Polish Academy of Sciences, has lectured throughout the United States and is currently teaching at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His works have appeared in a variety of languages: Marxism and Aesthetics: History of Ideas has been published in Spanish and Italian; Absolute and Form, in Polish, Italian, and French; and, in English, Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics. Frank Anderson Trapp The Emperor's Nightingale: Some Aspects of Mimesis One of Hans Christian Andersen's most beautiful tales is "The Emperor's Nightingale." Its message an exceptionally sobering one in the present context is that nature is altogether finer and more enduring than art. It tells how a Chinese emperor, beguiled by a precious imitation bird that had been given him, forsook a natural songster he had once favored. But when that glittering counterfeit broke down, its clockwork sound silenced, the now aged ruler found welcome solace in the real bird's return, in its more reliable and spiritually healing song. . . . Despite the artist's foregone defeat in any contest with nature (only in myth does a Pygmalion appear), over the ages artists have been irresistibly drawn to the challenge of imitating nature. The persistence of these claims upon their skills and the inventive flight that have been elicited in the process testify to the extraordinary hold that the desire to mirror nature, or better still, to capture something of its essence, can exert over artists and their public. Accounts of imitative prowess go back to the most ancient days, beyond the fabled skills of Zeuxis and Apelles. There is no need here to summarize the complicated but almost domestically familiar history of illusionism. Rather, it is my present intention to reflect upon some contradictions inherent in the conception of art as illusion and to review some of the more exaggerated forms in which efforts have been made to break down the boundaries between art and nature.   Frank Anderson Trapp, William Rutherford Mead Professor of Fine Arts, chairman of the department of art, and director of the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, is the author of The Attainment of Delacroix and a number of essays on the history of art. Robert Scholes Towards a Semiotics of Literature The most powerful assumption in French semiotic thought since Saussure has been the notion that a sign consists not of a name and the object it refers to, but of a sound-image and a concept, a signifier and a signified. Saussure, as amplified by Roland Barthes and others, has taught us to recognize an unbridgeable gap between words and things, signs and referents. The whole notion of "sign and referent" has been rejected by the French structuralists and their followers as too materialistic and simple minded. Signs do not refer to things, they signify concepts, and concepts are aspects of thought, not aspects of reality. This elegant and persuasive formulation has certainly provided a useful critique of naive realism, vulgar materialism, and various other-isms which can be qualified with crippling adjectives. But it hasn't exactly caused the world to turn into a concept. Even semioticians eat and perform their other bodily functions just as if the world existed solidly around them. The fact that the word "Boulangerie" has no referent does not prevent them from receiving their daily bread under that sign. As Borges put it: "The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am Borges." Obviously, the whole question of the relationship between words and things cannot be debated without any assistance from nonverbal experience seems to me highly unlikely. In my view, if language really were a closed system, it would be subject, like any other closed system, to increase in entropy. In fact, it is new input into language from nonverbal experience that keeps language from decaying.   Robert Scholes, professor of English and director of the program in semiotic studies at Brown University, is co-author (with Robert Kellogg) of The Nature of Narrative and author of Structuralism in Literature.A Guggenheim fellow for 1977-78, he is currently working on "A Semiotics of Fiction." He has also contributed "Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative" (Autumn 1980) to . Peter J. Rabinowitz Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences Questions about the status of literary truth are as old as literary criticism, but they have become both more intricate and more compelling as literature has grown progressively more self- conscious and labyrinthian in its dealings with "reality." One might perhaps read The Iliad or even David Copperfield without raising such issues. But authors like Gide (especially in The Counterfeiters), Nabokov, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet seem continually to remind their readers of the complex nature of literary truth. How, for instance, are we to deal with a passage like the following from William Demby's novel The Catacombs: "When I began this novel, I secretly decided that, though I would exercise a strict selection of the facts to write down, be they 'fictional' facts or 'true' facts taken from newspapers or directly observed events in my own life, once I had written something down I would neither edit not censor it (myself)."1 What does this sentence mean? When an apparently fictional narrator (who, to make matters more confusing, has the same name as his author and is also writing a novel entitled The Catacombs) distinguishes between "fictional" and "true" facts, what is the status of the word "true"? It clearly does not mean the same as "fictional," for he opposes it to that term. Yet it cannot mean "true" in the sense that historians would use, for he calls what he is writing a novel, and even if he quotes accurately from newspapers, the events of a narrator's life are not "historically" true.   · 1. William Demby, The Catacombs (New York, 1970), p.93.   Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor at Kirkland College, is currently working on articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner, and Dostoyevsky and is, as well, a music critic for the Syracuse Guide. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in comparative literature on the philosophical implications of Nabokov's use of humor and terror. "Truth in Fiction" is the first article he has had published in a scholarly journal. Dennis Porter The Perilous Quest: Baseball as Folk Drama If the morphology of baseball is similar to that of the fairy tale, it is obviously not because baseball is a form of narrative art. As my title suggests, insofar as baseball resembles literature at all in the way it manifests itself, it is clearly much closer to drama. Baseball takes place within a fixed, carefully delimited space that may be improvised but is reserved specifically for the purpose wherever the game is institutionalized. It is an ensemble performance carried out by specially trained "players" in front of an audience for whom the occasion is a festive event that occurs as a suspension of ordinary life. It possesses a plot that develops in a limited period of time from initial situation through complication to denouement and has a relatively large number of dramatis personae who are sent into the playing area at a given moment in order to perform specific roles.   Dennis Porter, associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English novels. He is currently an NEH fellow and is working on two books: one on plot and ideology in the novel, the other, The Alibi of Crime, on detective fiction. Elder Olson A Conspiracy of Poetry, Part I Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them? Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: (1) examination of the characteristics of individual poems, (2) discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and differences, (3) decision as to which of these likenesses and differences are relevant to poetic form, and (4) the statement of form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what constitutes excellence in a given form.   Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism. His previous contributions to are "The Poetic Process" (Autumn 1975) and "On Value Judgments in the Arts" (September 1974), the title essay on his most recent collection of criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of . M. H. Abrams Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's_"The Infinitude of Pluralism" Peckham claims that my "behavior" in dealing with the quotations in Natural Supernaturalism is the same, in methodology and validity, as the interpretative behavior of Booth's waiter. But the great bulk of the utterances in my quotations and no less, of the utterances constituting Peckham's own essay do not consist of orders, requests, or commands. Instead, they consist of assertions, descriptions, judgments, exclamations, approbations, condemnations, and many other kinds of speech-acts, the meanings of which are not related to my interpretative behavior, even in the indirect way in which the meaning of Booth's order is related to the future behavior of his waiter.   M. H. Abrams, author of Natural Supernaturalism and The Mirror and the Lampand Class of 1916 Professor of English at Cornell University, responds in this essay to Morse Peckham's "The Infinitude of Pluralism" (Summer 1977). Morse Peckham, in his Critical Response, was commenting on issues raised by the forum on "The Limits of Pluralism" (Spring 1977), to which M. H. Abrams contributed. Previous contributions to are "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth" (Spring 1976) and "The Deconstructive Angel" (Spring 1977). Robert Denham The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns The reductive nature of Kincaid's undertaking comes into sharper focus when we compare his kind of critical inquiry with that, say, of [Sheldon] Sacks or [Ralph] Rader. Kincaid concludes where they begin. For Sacks, the identification of some type, such as satire, is what initiates the critical process. What then remains is to move beyond type, which exists at the highest level of generality, to form and finally to those detailed analyses which will account for the peculiar powers of unique works. His types, as he says, are "only elementary distinctions," and he adds that "at some point in an adequate criticism of a single literary work, we will inevitably be discussing those variations which distinguish a particular literary work from all other literary works of its class, even if that class has been defined according to the most subtle and intricate combination of variables possible."1 Similarly for Rader, our intuitions about formal principles and intentions are but first steps in critical inquiry. "My theory, " he says, "attempts not to establish 'general laws' . . . but to render explicit the structural features of our tacit experiences of literature in a way that will allow us to bring all its implications to bear simultaneously upon our explanation of any particular literary work."2Such procedures as these, which are designed to give us particular knowledge, are ruled out by Kincaid's program, the most specific formal principle of which is something quite general: the competition among narrative patterns. There is finally, then, very little knowledge to be shared, for our inquiries will always arrive at the same conclusion. Although readers, in his view, can intend one thing rather than another, writers cannot, and this assumption that agents (who are, by the way, conspicuously absent from his title) are somehow set apart from the other members of the species means, I suspect, that Kincaid is right about one thing: his effort to mediate does indeed place him in a "no-man's land."   ·   1. Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley, 1967), pp. 25-26 n. ·   2. Rader, "Explaining Our Literary Understanding," Critical Inquiry 1 (June 1975): 905.   Robert Denham, editor of Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography and the forthcoming Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature(a collection of Professor Frye's essay-reviews), is associate professor and chairman of the department of English at Emory and Henry College. In this essay Robert Denham replies to James R. Kincaid's "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" Critical inquiry, Summer 1977. René Wellek, Wayne C. Booth, Joseph F. Ryan, Jean H. Hagstrum Notes and Exchanges In late April we received the following letter from René Wellek: May I comment on the remarks Wayne C. Booth made about some passages in Theory of Literature in his article "Preserving the Exemplar" (in CI, vol. 3, pp. 408-10)?   Mr. Booth is completely mistaken in referring to Wellek and Warren as "those Un-new Critics." The chapter in Theory of Literature is a revision of my paper "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art," published in the Southern Review (vol. 7, pp. 735-54) in 1942. This in turn rehearses some of the arguments of my older paper "The Theory of Literary History" in the Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague (vol. 6 [1936], pp. 173-91), written some four years before my emigration to the United States. The incriminated passages are, I believe, the very first attempt to define the ontological status of a literary work in English. The method is phenomenological and not neo-critical at all. The terms such as "structure of norms," "structure of determinism" (used also by Meyer Abrams) come from Husserl's Méditations cartésiennes (Paris, 1931) and from Roman Ingarden's Das literarische Kunstwerk (Halle, 1931), as I acknowledged in many contexts. I trust, however, that I supported and developed this position with new arguments, for instance, in rejecting the theories of I. A. Richards. This rejection follows logically from my acceptance of Husserl's arguments against psychologism. In many contexts, I have carefully discussed the theories of I. A. Richards, first in 1937, in a Czech article, on the Cambridge theorists of literature (Richards, Leavis, Empson), most elaborately in "On Rereading Richards" in The Southern Review (vol. 3 [N.S., Summer 1967], pp. 533-53), an account which will be included in the forthcoming fifth volume of my History of Modern Criticism.     Wayne Booth responded to Professor Wellek: I am greatly embarrassed by my mistake in writing "Robert Penn Warren" when I "know" very well that your collaborator was Austin Warren. Though it was a slip of the pen, and mind, it is the kind of mistake for which there is no real excuse. I knew, of course, about the distribution of different chapters to each of you, but assumed that because you published the book jointly it would be only fair to include both authors' names in my attribution.   The other matters are of course much less simple to deal with. My little joke about "Un-new Critics" was intended more as a dig at the new new critics than as a lumping of you together with all the others who have been called "New Critics." You must have been annoyed many times over the years at the careless way in which a School was inferred when no single grouping ever existed. If I were ever discussing the New Critics I would want to discriminate what you have stood for from a large variety of other theories that came into prominence at about the same time.     In a second letter, addressed directly to Wayne Booth, Professor Wellek further clarified his view of the issues in dispute as well as those points where he believes he and Professor Booth are in substantial agreement: You wrote me such a friendly and generous letter that I felt like withdrawing my letter to . But on second thought I let it stand as I wrote it. Your paper has been heard and read by many.   I agree with you completely about the abuse of the term "The New Criticism." In the fifth volume of my History of Modern Criticism which, I hope, will at last appear next year, I have made a determined effort to expound the American critics so labeled as distinct individuals often radically different in outlook, theories, tastes and conclusions.     In April we also received the following letter from Joseph F. Ryan about Jean H. Hagstrum's "Eros and Psyche: Some Versions of Romantic Love and Delicacy" (Spring 1977): Thank you for the Hagstrum essay on Eros and Psyche. It is the type of article exists to provide and perhaps too infrequently finds.   I do have one quarrel with Hagstrum over his interpretation of Flaubert's reaction to the kiss exchanged by Cupid and Psyche in Canova's representation.   Jean Hagstrum responded: Thank you for your kind remarks on my recent essay in Critical Inquiry.   We are in considerably less disagreement than your letter suggests, Flaubert's response must surely be "sensual," as he says it is, though I must say that there is something a little less than ultimately satisfying about kissing a statue that is not likely to become flesh.   Subsequently we received two more letters from Joseph Ryan. The first was directed to us and was an elaboration of comments made in his initial letter; the second was directed to Professor Hagstrum and forwarded to us. I should not like Professor Hagstrum to think my letter lacking in the critical seriousness that his excellent essay requires as an adequate response. I would like to state the grounds of my consent to his argument more fully, so that any reservations that I may maintain may not seem whimsical or coy. I think Professor Hagstrum's essay is seminal in every possible sense of the term. He calls our attention to the centrality of a myth that has been so often observed, noticed, even peeked at, that, like many lovely and regenerating things, it has been as much overlooked as looked at.   [The second letter reads:] Thank you for your kind reply to my first letter. Your reply has set me thinking about several questions concerning the relation of spiritual love to the flesh. You agree that there is nothing necessarily narcissistic and regressive about Flaubert's response, but you feel that his action must have been less than "ultimately satisfying." While it is quite true that many mystics are thwarted or crossed lovers and that this truth lends cogency to the hypothesis that mystical love is merely a displacement of an inhibited sexual aim, we cannot explain all forms of "Platonic" love in this fashion without recourse to a materialism more vindictive than disinterested.   Jean Hagstrum then answered: In your letter of 9 June you broaden the meaning of Flaubert's kiss to symbolize the fusion of body and spirit in all aesthetic response. It is an excellent statement, and I shall not try to improve on it.   In the longer response to my essay of 9 May, directed to Critical Inquiry, I do not find the suggested fusions nearly so persuasive.   Then, in July, we received the following from Joseph Ryan: I wish to state my hypothesis about two distinct kinds of Platonic tradition as clearly as possible. (This hypothesis owes more than I can say to de Rougemont, a little to Leslie Fiedler, but, as far as I can tell, nothing at all to Marcuse.) These two traditions interpenetrate and even wage a struggle in many authors but ideally and essentially they are distinguishable. vol4num2cov290x435.jpg] Kenneth Burke Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster Underlying these pages is the assumption that, since we begin life as speechless bodies, the radicality of religious and poetic utterance somehow retains its relation to these origins, though in maturing we develop far from the order of reality we began with. Such expression must be rooted in man's primal essence as a speechless body, albeit there develops the technical "grace" of language (and of symbolicity in general, that "perfects" nature and is not reducible to terms of such sheerly physiological grounding).   I take it that the body, as a physiological organism, is always behaving in the "specious present." Though we, as "persons," may anticipate or recall, the body as such is always behaving in a certain way now.   If a believer is praying, his body cannot lie. If he is offering a prayer of thanks and really means it, his body behaves in one way. If he doesn't really mean it, his body behaves in a different way, though the vocables uttered in the prayer may be the same in both cases, and they may sound much less sincere to us if we hear them uttered by a genuine believer than as uttered by an accomplished tartuffe. In that sense it is by the speechless body that the person communicates with the nature of things.   Kenneth Burke develops in this essay some behavioristic speculations that first exercised him in an early volume, Permanence and Change (1935). Those speculations are pursued further in an essay, "(Nonsymbolic) Motion / (Symbolic) Action," which appears in the Summer 1978 issue of . His other contributions are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (September 1974), "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" (Autumn 1978), and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" (Winter 1978). Jean Ricardou Birth of a Fiction Nothing, one day, seemed more imperative to me than the project of composing a book whose fiction would be constructed not as the representation of some preexistent entity, real or imaginary, but rather on the basis of certain specific mechanisms of generation and selection. The principle of selection may be called overdetermination. It requires that every element in the text have at least two justifications. In this perspective, each element is invested with a coefficient of overdetermination. If there is a choice to be made between two overdetermined elements, the one with the highest coefficient of overdetermination will always be chosen. This principle, as we might expect, was not elected at random: it corresponds to any text construed as nonlinear. Take, for example, the simplest element, with a coefficient of two. A double relation connects it with the text: the one due to its place in the written line (commonly called a horizontal relation), and the one linking it with some other element in the text (a vertical relation). By operating at a maximum level of multiple determinations, the text is elaborated by means of a maximum number of transversal relations, in a field diametrically opposed to the realm of the linear.   Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including L'Observatoire de Cannes (Les Editions de Minuit, 1961), La Prise de Constantinople(Minuit, 1965),Les Lieux-dits (Gallimard, 1969), and Les Révolutions Minuscules (Gallimard, 1971), and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1967), Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1971), and Le Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1973), LE PARADIGME d' Albert Ayme (Carmen Martinez, 1977), and a collection of essays, Nouveaux Problèmes du Roman. His "Composition Discomposed" appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue of . Erica Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva. Joseph Frank Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics My own contribution relates to twentieth-century literature, where "spatialization" enters so fundamentally into the very structure of language and the organization of narrative units that, as [Frank] Kermode is forced to concede, "Frank says quite rightly that a good deal of modern literature is designed to be apprehended thus." His deals with the literature of the past, where "spatialization" (or, as he calls it, plot-concordance) was still the tendency which had by no means yet emerged in as radical a manner as in modernity. Both may be seen, and should be seen, as part of a unified theory which has the inestimable advantage of linking experimental modernism with the past in an unbroken continuity, and in viewing the present, not as a break, but rather as a limit-case, an intensification and accentuation of potentialities present in literature almost from the start. One of Kermode's essential aims, in The Sense of an Ending, was precisely to argue in favor of continuity and to reject the schismatic notion that a clean break with the past was either desirable or possible. It seems to me that he succeeded better than he knew, and that in polemicizing with spatial form" he merely perpetuates a schism which the deeper thrust of his own ideas has done much to reveal as nugatory and obsolete.   Joseph Frank is professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University. His many important contributions include The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature and Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, for which he received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA. Eric S. Rabkin Spatial Form and Plot Novels in general use three different modes of reporting: narration, dialogue and description. Understanding that even with a given mode, such as the description of a stone, the relation between the diachronic flow of language and the synchronic focus of attention can be manipulated, we can still note that in general narration reports occurrences in a reading time considerably less than actual time. ("He ran all the way home"), dialogue reports occurrence in a reading time roughly congruent with actual time ("How are you?" "Fine"), and description reports occurrences in a reading time considerably greater than actual time ("The stone weighted heavily in his hand, clammy yet deeply textured, the solidity of its feel somehow incompatible with the delicacy of its silver veining"). Thus, in the interweaving of narration, dialogue and description a narrative not only defamiliarizes what it reports but guides the reader's consciousness through rhythms of correspondence between reading time and actual time. As long as we do not stay entirely in one mode and we never do these rhythms adjust the movement of our consciousness so that unconsciously at least we more or less approach synchronicity, depending on the particular techniques but we never achieve it. Spatial form may be thought of as a tendency, but in ordinary language it is never achieved.   Eric S. Rabkin is professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The author of Narrative Suspense, The Fantastic in Literature, and many articles on science fiction, he is also the coauthor of Form in Fiction and Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. He contributed "Metalinguistics and Science Fiction" to the Autumn 1979 issue of . William Holz Spatial Form in Modern Literature: A Reconsideration One measure of the validity of [Joseph] Frank's insight is the extent to which other versions of his ideas appear in other contexts: for if "spatial form" refers to something real, it cannot have escaped notice by other readers. One thinks, for example, of Northrop Frye's description of the critic viewing all the elements of the poem as a simultaneous array before him; or of Gaston Bachelard's evocative descriptions of The Poetics of Space. Or Pound's interest in ideographic script; or the frequent critical association of modern literature with impressionist painting. Or Eliot's poet synthesizing Spinoza, the sound of the typewriter, and the smell of cookery into a unified whole. Or at the root of it all, perhaps Poe's insistence on the unified effect of the story or poem.1 All of these instances reflect a more or less casual assumption of the basic premise of Frank's essay. More recently another critic, Frank Kermode, has offered an alternative description of this general problem. In The Romantic Image2 he assesses symbolist poetic theory; here the verbal image (or symbol), autonomous and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the "image" so hypostatized seems very close to a "spatial" form, and certainly the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from the disruption of syntax and narrative that results from the impulse toward "spatial" effects. Provisionally, we might say that Joseph Frank's essay is grounded in an essentially formalist conception of the literary work as artifact, and that the striking features of his argument result from an attempt to assimilate extended works (poetry as well as fiction) to a theory basically lyric in its orientation: as corollary, we must assume that the modern writers he cites had themselves operationally defined the concept in the course of their writing.   ·  1. Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe (New York, 1963), p.65. See also Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York, 1963), p. 21. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964). Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, 1969). T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays (New York, 1950), p. 247. Edgar Allan Poe, review of Twice-Told Tales, in Works, 17 vols., ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902) 11: 104-13. ·  2. Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (London, 1957).   William Holtz, professor of English at the University of Missouri- Columbia, is currently preparing an edition of an unpublished juvenile manuscript by Charlotte Brontë. Marcel Franciscono History, Textbooks, and Art: Reflections on a Half_Century_of_Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages Because of their basic level, textbooks show the assumptions and biases of art historians more clearly than does advanced, and therefore more restricted, scholarship. Textbooks are the rock, as it were, within which lie the strata of historical method. They bury, and so preserve for the good and ill of students (at least for a while), not so much individual historical data, which can be picked up or rejected rather easily, as those things which give the appearance of intellectual grasp to historical writing: its generalizations, its interpretations, its sweeping perspectives.   The successive editions of Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages can tell us much about the assumptions that have pervaded art historical education in America over the past century. The first edition, published fifty years ago last year, is worth looking at in some detail, because for all its seminal importance in the teaching of art history it is by now little more than a deposit in library stacks. A mere glance will show that it is not ours. Indeed, the distance we have gone since then is exactly measured by the gaucheries it displays. It is half the length of modern surveys, and it makes no pretense either to completeness or to objectivity. It is arranged by period and style until we reach the Renaissance (which extends from 1300 to 1600), at which point, in keeping with the interest of an earlier age in national characteristics, each country receives its due chapter. The Italian Renaissance, as befits the central position of the primitives in American taste then, has four chapters to itself. Thereafter, except for a final, brief section on contemporary art, each national school is taken to the period of its decline. This, of course, will vary. France is taken through Cézanne; England through the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris; Spain, thanks to Goya, into the early nineteenth century; and Dutch and Flemish art only through the seventeenth century, but without Bosch or Bruegel. As for Germany, though the chapter heading promises us "From the Gothic Age to the Nineteenth Century," in fact it is on Durer and Holbein. What fulfills the promise of the title appears in its entirety thus: "After the death of these two masters, largely on account of exhaustion from wars there was very little production, until the second great manifestation of the German people came in the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."1 No pretense here at dutiful compilation; high points, after all, are high points.   ·  1. Helen Gardner, Art through the Ages: An Introduction to Its History and Significance (New York, 1926), p. 345.   Marcel Franciscono is the author of Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar. He is associate professor of art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Albert William Levi Culture: A Guess at the Riddle It is necessary to realize first of all that the concept of culture is founded upon two closely related dichotomies: that between the natural and artificial and that between the chaotic and the orderly. In its most primitive signification, culture means simply the imposition of an exquisite order upon the raw givenness of experience. In this sense, nature represents the immediacy of need, culture its formalization. Man may be "a rational animal," as Aristotle said, but in possessing the rational potential which he intermittently actualizes, he never ceases to remain an animal grounded immediately in hunger, lust, and the multiple instances of natural desire. Plato waged a never-ending struggle against the lawless outbreak of the natural appetites, and his efforts to curb, discipline, and form them is a primitive paradigm of the activity of culture. Man's capacity for thought and reason, for sociality and humane consideration has made him a sculpture-building animal and has made it possible for him, as Cassirer said, to live in a symbolic universe which he has himself created. But while his basic reality is not physical but cultural and spiritual, his anchorage forever remains that of nature and of animal need. The measure of culture is, therefore, a measure of artistic transformation.   Albert William Levi is the author of The Idea of Culture, of which this essay is a part. The David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis, he is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and Philosophy as Social Expression. His "De interpretatione: Cognition and Context in the History of Ideas" appeared in , Autumn 1976. Walter Blair Americanized Comic Braggarts During nearly two centuries, American storytellers have celebrated comic figures, ebullient showoffs who turned up on one frontier after another in the old South, in Kentucky and Tennessee, along the great inland rivers, in the mountains and the mines and on the prairies. Often, the stories went, when these characters engaged in a favorite pastime playfully bragging about their strength, their skill and their exploits they used animal metaphors such as Opossum, Screamer, Half-Horse Half-Alligator, the Big Bear of Arkansas or Gamecock of the Wilderness to furnish nicknames. Often they were also identified as fictional or real frontiersmen Mike Fink, Nimrod Wildfire, Jim Doggett, Pecos Bill and tall tales clustered around them. Explaining a metaphor and a nickname, an Ohio newspaper in 1830 cited the most famous braggart of this sort: "Ring-tailed roarer A most vicious fellow a Crockett." . . . The stories did not have to have roots in reality and often were not new. The real Crockett was well built, handsome, ruddy-cheeked. But traditional jokes made ugliness a funny quality. Falstaff claimed Bardolph's crimson proboscis glowed with a flame that made torches inoperative. The Spectator in 1711 told about "Spectator's" election to England's Ugly Club. Joke 177 in Joe Miller's Jests (1739) was about the British kingdom's champion ugly man. When Gus Longstreet entered law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, in 1813, a student welcomed him: "Here, sir, is a knife always given to the ugliest student. . . . Until now it has been mine, but beyond doubt, sir, since you are here, I have now no right to it any longer." Andy Jackson "Old Hickory" won a like award. (So in time would Lincoln.) Lore had it that Davy was so repulsive looking that if he grinned at a raccoon, it tumbled from its tree. Once, worried because he grinned and grinned without bringing down his victim, he was relieved when a close look showed he had mistaken a knot for a beast. All the same, he had grinned all the bark off the branch.   Walter Blair is professor emeritus in the department of English at the University of Chicago. His many influential works include Native American Humor and Horse Sense in American Humor. "Americanized Comic Braggarts" appears in a slightly different version in the book (coauthored with Hamlin Hill) America's Humor from Poor Richard to Doonesbury. Tzvetan Todorov The Verbal Age What is The Awkward Age about? It is not easy to answer that apparently simple question. But the reader can take consolation from the fact that the characters themselves seem to have just as much trouble understanding as he does.   Actually, a large proportion of the words exchanged in this novel a novel made up, moreover, almost exclusively of conversations consists of requests for explanation. These questions may touch upon different aspects of discourse and reveal various reasons for obscurity. The first, the simplest and the rarest, is an uncertainty about the very meaning of words; it is like the uncertainty a foreigner would naturally feel whose knowledge of the language was imperfect: the questions here are matters of vocabulary. In The Awkward Age there are no foreigners who speak bad English, but one of the characters, Mr. Longdon, has for a long time lived far from London; now that he has come back, he has the feeling that he no longer understands the meaning of words, and, in the course of his first conversations at least, he often asks questions like: "What do you mean by early?" "What do you mean by the strain?"1 These questions, innocent as they appear, nevertheless require those to whom they are addressed both to explain and to take full responsibility for the meaning of the words that is why the questions sometimes provoke lively refusals. "What do you mean by fast?" Mr. Longdon asks again, but the response of the Duchess is cutting: "What should I mean but what I say?" (p. 194). We shall see, however, that the Duchess' own niece is a victim of the same disorder not understanding the meaning of words.   ·  1. P. 43. References are to the Penguin Modern Classics edition (London, 1975). All further references will appear in the text.   Tzvetan Todorov has written numerous books on literary theory, the last of which is Théories du symbole (1977), and has translated the works of the Russian Formalists into French. Two of his books have been translated into English, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre and Poetics of Prose. He is editor (with Gérard Genette) of the journal Poétique and works as Maître de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. "The Last Barthes" appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Critical Inquiry. Elder Olson A Conspectus of Poetry, Part II When the activity depicted in a poem involves a succession of moments, it may take one of two possible forms: simple or complex. A simple activity is like a straight line; that is, it involves progression in a single direction, then in another. This changing of course, so to speak, is called a turning point or reversal. Every complex activity contains at least one such turning point; and it is possible to have a good many turning points if the action is long enough, as in an epic like the Odyssey, which in fact is full of reversals, for Odysseus or his men or those whom they encounter are always getting into danger and then out of it, or else doing something and having to produce an opposite effect to the one intended; and of course all such things are reversals. . . . Generally speaking, we feel emotions more powerfully when they come upon us unexpectedly. Unexpected good fortune seems even better than it is, unexpected misfortune even worse, by comparison with what we had expected: consequently we respond with greater emotion. Since reversals always involve something of the unexpected, the complex form of activity offers more possibility of emotional power than the simple. The reversal must be unexpected if it is to be effective, and also...it must be probable; the complex activity must therefore always contain an apparent or on-the- surface probability, which founds our expectation, and the real probability, which defeats it. The real probability must be more probable than the apparent, for otherwise we should not accept it; and it must be hidden (that is, concealed by the poet), for otherwise we should expect it as the more probable.   Part I of a "Conspectus of Poetry" appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue of . Elder Olson's contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" (Autumn 1975) and "On Value Judgments in the Arts" (September 1974). Wallace Martin Literary Critics and Their Discontents: A Response to_Geoffrey Hartman In view of Hartman's article, the canny critic might with some justice claim that the dispute is actually one between Anglo- American and Continental traditions and arm himself with all the historical and philosophical resources that the former can provide. Occam's razor and the armed vision might in the end prove equal to Nietzsche's hammer and the broken hammer that haunts the pages of Heidegger. However, the canny critic will realize that no matter how armed, he would still lose the argument because of his refusal to relinquish one resource that in the end constitutes his irreducible commitment to his tradition: his assumption that the debate should be conducted in accordance with rules he knows and understands. Through a Hegelian Aufhebung in critical controversy, it is now precisely those rules that are in question. What is at stake is not something that can be decided by rational arguments, but our shopworn conception of rationality itself; not logic, but the question of whether or not our logic is an a posteriori construction of a more primal rhetoric; not truth, but the devious ways in which this concept is used to mask the will to power. And finally, given that these are serious questions, they will be misunderstood if there is no room for play in discussing them.   Wallace Martin, professor of English at the University of Toledo in Ohio, is the author of The New Age under Orage and is preparing a book on the theory of criticism. He responds in this essay to Geoffrey Hartman's "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents" (Winter 1976). Geoffrey Hartman The Recognition Scene of Criticism Wallace Martin's response to "Literary Criticism and Its Discontents" is anything but naive. Its most sophisticated device is to posit my invention of a "naive reader" and to suggest that I would place the New Critics and their heirs in that category. But when I see the movement of criticism after Arnold as exhibiting an anti-self-consciousness principle or being so worried about a hypertrophy of the critical spirit that the spirit is acknowledged only by refusing its seminal or creative force, I am not alleging naiveté but "organized innocence," or the privileged assignment of some given, intuitive (in that sense naïve) power of creation to the area of art which excludes the area of philosophy or philosophically-minded commentary. This defensive partition of the critical and the creative spirit, which recognizes the intelligence of the creative writer but refuses the obverse proposition that there may be creative force in the critical writer, I have elsewhere named the Arnoldian concordat.   Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of Criticism in the Wilderness. vol4num3cov290x435.jpg] Erich Heller The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology_and_the Misinterpretation of Literature The force of [Heinrich von] Kleist's story "On the Marionette Theatre" . . . derives from roots deeply sunk into the soil of the past. It is a novel variation on a theme the first author of which may well be Plato. For according to Plato the human mind has been in the dark ever since it lost its place in the community of Truth, in the realm, that is, of the Ideas, the eternal and eternally perfect forms, those now unattainable models which man in his exile is able to see and recognize only as shadows or imperfect copies. And this Platonic parable of the damage suffered by man's soul and consciousness is not unlike the Fall as it is narrated in Genesis. The Fall was the consequence and punishment of man's free will that for the first time had asserted itself against the universal God and rejoiced in a consciousness and pleasure entirely its own tragically its own; for man had to forsake the indwelling in the supreme Intelligence and thus the harmony between himself and Being as such. The reward for this betrayal was the embarrassment and shame of self-consciousness, the hard labor of maintaining himself in his state of separation, and, soon to follow, the murderous misdeeds of the self-will named Cain. Better to have no mind than a mind thus deprived and impoverished and cruel.   Erich Heller, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought; The Ironic Gentleman: Thomas Mann; The Artist's Journey into the Interior; and Franz Kafka. These books have also appeared in Germany in the author's own translations, and his Dir Wiederkehr der Unschuld[The return of innocence] was recently published there.   See also: "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality" by Murray Krieger in Vol. 1, No. 2; "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1 Heinz Kohut Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A Correspondence with Erich Heller Dear Professor Heller . . . Your paper had started out superbly. It was a great aesthetic and cognitive pleasure to follow you as you guided us through the intellectual history of the main idea of Kleist's essay, from Plato through the biblical Fall of Man, to Schiller, and Kierkegaard, and Kafka. Indeed the perceptive listener's experience was so satisfying that his disappointment was doubled when he came to realize that all this erudition and beauty had been displayed only in order to serve as a contrast-providing background for the sharp delineation of a reductionistic explanation which you consider to be characteristic of psychoanalysis: the interpretation of the disturbance of man's naive, unselfconscious pre-Fall state as nothing more than a portrayal of sexual impotence the reduction of a deep existential preoccupation to a case of phimosis.   I am certain that the relief I felt when you then took up Freud's demonological-neurosis paper was not an idiosyncratic response on my part but an experience shared by many open-minded listeners in your psychoanalytic audience. Let us, therefore, disregard the "text" of your sermon and consider the substantial questions that you raised after you turned to Freud; these are to my mind the most central ones that you undertook to examine in your despite its disappointing aspects splendid address to us. Put into my own words, your most important question was this: What is the purpose of the psychoanalyst's efforts outside the clinical setting, in particular when his contributions take the form of a pathography? That is, To what end do analysts study the psychopathology of the creators of great works? I, too, have asked myself this question, and since you read my old essay "Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule" (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 [July 1960]: 567-86), you know some of my answers. But important basic questions are hardly ever answered once and for all; and I will, therefore, under the impact of your lecture, respond as if I had heard the question for the first time.   Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations , The Restoration of the Self and collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "A Reply to Margret Schaefer"" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of .   See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1 Norman H. Holland Human Identity Holistic reasoning brings out the sustained and sustaining integrity of a system, be it a person, a poem, a neighborhood, a corporation, a culture, a crime to be solved by Sherlock Holmes, or an act of dreaming. Identity theory thus extends Freud's method of dream interpretation, explicating free associations, to the whole life of a person. We can talk rigorously about unique individuals.   Yet that very talking is a human act, part of someone's identity, Freud's or mine. One has to distinguish (more sharply than Lichtenstein does, I think) between "primary identity," the hypothesis of a persistent sameness established "in" a person in infancy, and "identity theme," a second person's hypothesis for searching out a persistent style in what the first has done. In a strict sense, I can never know your "primary identity," for it is deeply and unconsciously inside you. Formed before speech, it can never be put into words. It is entirely possible, however, for me to formulate a constancy in your personal style from outside you but through empathy. Any such formulation of an "identity theme" will, of course, be a function both of the you I see and of my way of seeing my identity as well as yours. Another reason one can never know a "primary identity" is, then, that it is inextricable from one's own primary identity if there is such a thing. But there are definitely identity themes because I can formulate them.   Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Two of his books, Poems in Persons (1973) and Five Readers Reading (1975), apply the concept of identity here developed to literary response. His contributions to are "Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" (Winter 1976) and "Why Ellen Laughed" (Winter 1980). Arthur F. Marotti Countertransference, the Communication Process, and the Dimensions of Psychoanalytic Criticism To stress the subjectivity of the analyst is to accept the centrality of countertransference in the analytic relationship. Psychoanalysts have long recognized the importance of transference in the analytic setting that is, the analysand's way of relating to the analyst in terms of his strong, ambivalent unconscious feelings for earlier figures (usually parents), a process whose successful resolution constitutes the psychoanalystic "cure." But, since the patient's transference is only experienced by the analyst through his countertransference responses, recent theorists have come to emphasize the importance of countertransference in psychoanalysis. In what Otto Kernberg calls its "totalistic" definition, countertransference refers to "the total emotional reaction of the psychoanalyst to the patient in the treatment situation."1 It is, therefore, a source of both empathic understanding and defensive misunderstanding, of distortion and insight. Hans Loewald remarks: "Since a psychoanalytic investigation can be carried out only by a human mind, we cannot conceive of one in which the analyst's [counter] transference and resistance are not the warp and woof of his activity."2   · 1. Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York, 1975), p. 49.   · 2. Hans Loewald, "Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psychoanalytic Process," The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 25 (1970): 56. Cf. Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1959): 459-83. For a clear discussion of the background of the countertransference concept in Freud, see Humberto Nagera, et. al., Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and Other Subjects (New York, 1970), pp. 200-206. Two surveys of the literature on the topic are particularly useful: Douglas Orr, "Transference and Countertransference: A Historical Survey," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 (1954): 621- 70, and Kernberg, pp. 49-66.   Arthur F. Marotti, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, has written a number of essays on Ben Jonson, John Donne, Thomas Middleton, and Edmund Spenser. He is completing a book-length social-historical and psychoanalytic study of Donne's poetry and a book on Jonson; some of the theoretical assumptions behind both projects are discussed in this article.   See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" in Vol. 5, No. 1 Peter Szondi Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin It is no accident that the book Benjamin wrote as a reader of himself, A Berlin Childhood, also begins with the description of a park, that of the Tiergarten zoo. However great the difference may seem between this collection of short prose pieces and Proust's three-thousand-page novel when viewed from the outside, Benjamin's book illustrates [his] fascination... A sentence in his book points to the central experience of Proust's work: that almost everything childhood was can be withheld from a person for years, suddenly to be offered him anew as if by chance. "Like a mother who holds the new-born infant to her breast without waking it, life proceeds for a long time with the still tender memory of childhood" (p. 152). Also reminiscent of Proust is the description of the mother who, on evenings when guests are in the house, comes in to see her child only fleetingly to say good night; so, too, is that of the boy attentively listening to the noises which penetrate into his room from the courtyard below and thus from a foreign world. The studied elevation of the newly invented telephone to the level of a mythical object is anticipated in Proust as well. And the relationship to and influence of the earlier work can be demonstrated even in the use of metaphor. But little is gained by this approach, and it would not be easy to refute the objection that such similarities lie in the authors' common raw material: childhood, the fin de siècle epoch, and the attempt to bring them both into the present.   Peter Szondi was professor of comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin at the time of his death in 1971. His many influential works include Theorie des modernen Dramas (1956), Versuch über das Tragische (1961), and a five-volume collection of his lectures. Harvey Mendelsohn is the principle translator of the fourteen-volume Dictionary of Scientific Biography; he is currently working on translations of a French commentary on Heraclitus and a selection of Szondi's essays to be published by Yale University Press. Fredric R. Jameson The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis However this may be, it is clear that the rhetoric of the self in American criticism will no longer do, any more than its accompanying interpretative codes of identity crises and mythic reintegration, and that a post-individualistic age needs new and post-individualistic categories for grasping both the production and the evolution of literary form as well as the semantic content of the literary text and the latter's relationship to collective experience and to ideological contradiction. What is paradoxical about Burke's own critical practice in this respect is that he has anticipated many of the fundamental objections to such a rhetoric of self and identity at the same time that he may be counted among its founding fathers: this last and most important of what we have called his "strategies of containment" provides insights which testify against his own official practice. Witness, for example, the following exchange, in which Burke attributes this imaginary objection to his Marxist critics: "Identity is itself a 'mystification.' Hence, resenting its many labyrinthine aspects, we tend to call even the study of it a 'mystification.'" To this proposition, which is something of a caricature of the point of view of the present essay, Burke gives himself a reply which we may also endorse: "The response would be analogous to the response of those who, suffering from an illness, get 'relief' by quarreling with their doctors. Unless Marxists are ready to deny Marx by attacking his term 'alienation' itself, they must permit of research into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to combat alienation."1   · 1. Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 308. In fact, certain contemporary Marxisms most notably those of Althusser and of Lucio Coletti explicitly repudiate the concept of alienation as a Hegelian survival in Marx's early writings.   Fredric R. Jameson is the author of The Political Unconscious: Studies in the Ideology of Form. He is also the editor, with Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkman, of the Social Text.   See also: "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" by Kenneth Burke in Vol. 5, No. 2 Cesare Segre Culture and Modeling Systems Despite the persistent affirmations of the ill-informed, the great promise of semiotics is the possibility it represents of welding together both language and text analysis and the analysis of pragmatic and ideological context. It is merely a matter of judicious planning if attention has so far been directed primarily to distinctive aspects of techniques and texts rather than to the general character of the frames of reference within which they operate. And yet, as we know, investigations of the total functioning of culture have been carried out with far-reaching results. This has been so particularly when the areas examined have been those, like the mass media, in which the weight of individual contribution is small.   For culture in the widest sense of the term., the most highly elaborated hypotheses are those put forward by the Soviet semioticians, Lotman first among them. It is with these that I mean to deal here in an act of criticism which may also prove to be one of integration. Lotman's thought is clearly still in the making, and rather than follow out its likely developments, or, it may be, contradictions, it seems more helpful to get into its seams in an attempt to perceive alternative interlacings.   Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the University of Pavia and the president of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals Strumenti Critici and Medioevo Romanzo and the series Critica e Filologia. "Culture and Modeling Systems" originally appeared in his Semiotica, storia e cultura (Padova, 1977); his previous contribution to , "Narrative Structures and Literary History," appeared in Winter 1976. John Meddemmen teaches the history of the English language at the University of Pavia. He has worked on predominantly linguistic aspects of contemporary Italian authors such as Montale and Fenglio. Tom Samet The Modulated Vision: Lionel Trilling's "Larger Naturalism" Trilling's "larger naturalism," acknowledging as it does the value of mystery and the power of fact, aligns him with Arnold and Freud and Forster in an effort to synthesize the legacies of the Enlightenment and of the Romantic movement: conscious of the authority of the imagination, he "never deceives himself into believing that the power of the imagination is sovereign, that it can make the power of circumstance of no account" (OS, p. 41); committed to reason and to an ideal of rational order, he is yet continuously aware of the limits of reason, of the rational intellect's potential tyranny over the emotions, of those forces within men and without which frustrate the mind's will to organize and control experience.1 And this "larger naturalism," with its emphasis upon  "a social tradition," implicates Trilling in a particular view of the novel - a view which may be said to inform all of his thinking but which achieves its fullest and clearest expression in such well-known essays as "Manners, Morals and the Novel" and "Art and Fortune."  "The novel," he remarks in the first of these polemics, "...is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man's soul" (LI, p. 205).   ·  1. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., makes substantially the same point in his superb and very nearly definitive account of Trilling's "Anxious Humanism" (Three American Moralists [Notre Dame, Ind., 1973], p. 170).  Readers familiar with Professor Scott's study will recognize at once the deep and general indebtedness which I am pleased to acknowledge here.   Tom Samet is an instructor in literature at Douglass College, Rutgers University.  He is currently preparing essays on Henry James and on Conrad and Hemingway.  "The Modulated Vision" is part of a study, in progress, of Lionel Trilling and the Anxieties of the Modern. Joyce Carol Oates Lawrence's Götterdåmmerung: The Tragic Vision of Women in Love   In his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. . . . And he proceeded to put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word organisation.1   Harmony becomes organization. And Gerald dedicates himself to work, to feverish, totally absorbing work, inspired with an almost religious exaltation in his fight with matter. The world is split in two: on one side matter (the mines, the miners), on the other side his own isolated will. He wants to create on earth a perfect machine, "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition"; a man of the twentieth century with no nostalgia for the superannuated ideals of Christianity or democracy, he wishes to found his eternity, his infinity, in the machine. So inchoate and mysterious is the imaginative world Lawrence creates for Women in Love that we find no difficulty in reading Gerald Crich as an allegorical figure in certain chapters and as a quite human, even fluid personality in others. As Gudrun's frenzied lover, as Birkin's elusive beloved, he seems a substantially different person from the Gerald Crich who is a ruthless god of the machine; yet as his cultural role demands extinction (for Lawrence had little doubt that civilization was breaking down rapidly, and Gerald is the very personification of a "civilized" man), so does his private emotional life, his confusion of the individual will with that of the cosmos, demand death death by perfect cold. He is Lawrence's only tragic figure, a remarkable creation on a remarkable novel, and though it is a commonplace thing to say that Birkin represents Lawrence, it seems equally likely that Gerald Crich represents Lawrence in his deepest, most aggrieved, most nihilist soul.   ·  1. All quotations from Women in Love are taken from the Modern Library edition.   Joyce Carol Oates' works include the novels Childhood, Son of the Morning, and a collection of short stories, Night-Side. "Lawrence's Götterdåmmerung" is part of a larger work exploring tragedy and comedy. Her contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Jocoserious Joyce" (Summer 1976), and "The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable about the Fall" (Winter 1980). Frank Kermode A Reply to Joseph Frank I'm pleased to have been offered the chance of replying to Joseph Frank's criticisms ("Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical Inquiry 4 [Winter 1977]: 231-52). He is a courteous opponent, though capable of a certain asperity. . . . Frank complains that his critics appear incapable of attending to what he really said in his original essay. It is the blight critics are born for; and it is undoubtedly sometimes caused by the venal haste of reviewers, and sometimes by native dullness, and sometimes by malice. But there are other reasons why an author may sometimes feel himself to be misrepresented. One is that a genuinely patient and intelligent reader may be more interested in what the piece under consideration does not quite say than in what is expressly stated. Another is the consequence of fame. Frank's original article is over thirty years old; it crystallised what had been for the most part vague notions, ideas that were in the air, and gave them a memorable name. "Spatial form" entered the jargon of the graduate school and began an almost independent existence. The term might well be used by people who had never read the essay at all; or they might casually attribute to him loose inferences made by others from the general proposition inferences he had already disallowed and now once more contests. It must be difficult, particularly for an exasperated author, to distinguish between these causes of apparent misrepresentation. But sometimes it can be done; and then it will appear that the effect of the first is far more interesting than that of the second cause. For the suggestion then must be that the author has repressed a desire to take a position which, in his manifest argument, he differentiates from his own. This, as it happens, is what he advances as an explanation of certain ambiguities in my Sense of an Ending; the least one can say is that it is perfectly possible.   Frank Kermode is the author of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, Continuities, and Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays; his works also include The Classicand The Genesis of Secrecy. His contributions to are "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Autumn 1974), "A Reply to Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), and "Secrets and Narrative Sequence" (Autumn 1980). James E. Ford On Thinking about Aristotle's "Thought" An adequate approach to any of Aristotle's qualitative parts of tragedy must be grounded in an understanding of their hierarchical ranking within the Poetics. Any "whole" must present "a certain order in its arrangement of parts" (1450b35-36),1 and in a drama each part is "for the sake of" the one "above" it. Contrary to Rosenstein's formulation, for instance, the Aristotelian view is that character as a form "concretizes" and individualizes thought as matter. Rosenstein's question as to whether "these . . . indeed form a genuine disjunction" (p. 552) should not even arise. By ignoring the hierarchy, and therefore collapsing it, Rosenstein weakens his otherwise sound assertion that tragedy is not philosophy. Such is the result, whether intended or not, of holding that "thought must also be some form or concretization of action, just as plot and character are" (p. 554). This vocabulary seems to suggest in the end that a tragic work is organized by philosophical "themes." "To understand spoken thought as an object of imitation in this manner is to understand it not merely as a content or object being imitated . . . but as the supposedly valid expression of an interpretation of the doings of the aesthetically worked world generally. . . . Thought in this sense becomes theme" (p. 558).   ·  1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations of Aristotle are from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941).   James E. Ford responds in this essay to Leon Rosenstein's "On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama" (Spring 1977). An assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University Hawaii Campus, he is currently writing on interpretative theory.   See also: "Metaphor and Transcendence" by Karsten Harries in Vol. 5, No. 1 Leon Rosenstein Rethinking Aristotle's "Thought": A Response to James E._Ford Let me repeat one of my main points of my article: that "all three subjects of tragedy plot, character, and thought are reciprocal and correlative concretizations of a particular action and that thought bears this relation and makes its appearance with respect to each . . . in a definite way."1 This would be "understanding the interdependence or reciprocity of the three objects of imitation as functioning dynamically within an organic unity" (p. 554n.). Thus, in one of the instances to which Ford refers, the question I raise as to disjunction of the three subjects of tragedy is not a question for me at all, except rhetorically, since it is based upon the suggestionof Jones, a view which I reject, but the mention of which allowed me to consider its possibilities first. (One sometimes reads anticipators who raise interesting possibilities which, on reflection, one is forced to discard but not forced not to mention.) In the other instance, and again with respect to Jones, the "double awkwardness" to which Jones originally refers is alleviated through clarification and interpretation by Jones himself, whose position in this matter I expand upon and interpret more widely. Thus, there is no "disjunction," and there is no "doubleness" of plot and action, nor, as I myself went on to show, any tripleness and quadrupleness either in relation of action, plot, character, and thought. Really, what we have here are different ontological orders of the subject of tragedy, a relation between the general and specific, the abstract and concrete, the concept and its instance, a relation like that of energy to the incandescent light (such that "energy" can be said to be "concretized" in "incandescent light").   ·  1. "On Aristotle and Thought in the Drama," 3 (Spring 1977): 561.   Leon Rosenstein is an associate professor of philosophy at San Diego State University.   vol4num4cov290x435.jpg] René Wellek The New Criticism: Pro and Contra The new methods, the tone, and new taste are clearly discernible first in the early articles and books of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Yvor Winters, and somewhat later in Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and William K. Wimsatt. . . . Still, something tells us that there is some sense in grouping these critics together. Most obviously they are held together by their reaction against the preceding or contemporary critical schools and views mentioned before. They all reject the kind of metaphorical, evocative criticism practiced by the impressionists. Tate, Blackmur, Burke, and Winters contributed to a symposium highly critical of the neo-Humanists, and others voiced their rejection elsewhere. They all had no use for Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks, particularly after Brooks became a violent enemy of all modernism. Furthermore, they were almost unanimous in their rejection of Marxism, with the single exception of Kenneth Burke, who in the thirties passed through a Marxist phase and, anyhow, after his first book moved away from his neo-critical beginnings. What, however, in the American situation mattered most was that they were united in their opposition to the prevailing methods, doctrines, and views of academic English literary scholarship. There, in a way the younger generation may find it difficult to realize, a purely philological and historical scholarship dominated all instruction, publication, and promotion. I remember that when I first came to study English literature in the Princeton graduate school in 1927, fifty years ago, no course in American literature, none in modern literature, and none in criticism was offered. Of all my learned teachers only Morris W. Croll had any interest in aesthetics or even ideas. Most of the New Critics were college teachers and had to make their way in an environment hostile to any and all criticism. Only Kenneth Burke was and remained a freelance man of letters, though he taught in later years occasionally at Bennington College and briefly at the University of Chicago. But he very early deserted the New Criticism. It took Blackmur, Tate, and Winters years to get academic recognition, often against stiff opposition, and even Ransom, R. P. Warren, and Cleanth Brooks, established in quieter places, had their troubles. Ransom's paper "Criticism, Inc." (1937) pleaded for the academic establishment of criticism, and thanks to him and others criticism is now taught in most American colleges and universities. But it was an uphill fight. I still remember vividly the acrimony of the conflict between criticism and literary history at the University of Iowa, where I was a member of the English Department from 1939 to 1946.   René Wellek, Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of Theory of Literature (with Austin Warren) and of A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. He has contributed "Notes and Exchanges Between René Wellek and Wayne C. Booth" (Autumn 1977) and "A Rejoinder to Gerald Graff" (Spring 1979) to . Stanley E. Fish Normal Circumstances, Literary Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without_Saying,_and Other Special Cases A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is taken as an order, a warning, a promise, a proposal, a request, etc. and the theory's strongest assertion is that no utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act. Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force (the way it is taken), and if illocutionary force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a sentence will always have an illocutionary force (because otherwise it would have no meaning), the illocutionary force it has will not always be the same.   Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. His contributions to include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and "One More Time" (Summer 1980). Rudolf Arnheim A Stricture on Space and Time The clearest instances of Time experience in music can be observed when the melodic and harmonic structure of a work announces the approach to a climax, for example, the finale. A goal is established in the awareness of the listener and acts as an independent system toward which music is striving. Most other examples that come to mind are extra-musical, that is, they refer to music in relation to something outside of it. A listener who instead of moving with the flow of the musical happening remains outside of it and watches the arriving and passing of phrase after phrase as though he were watching a parade from a viewing stand places himself in a separate temporal system whose relation to that of the music itself is governed by Time. Compare also the radio performance scheduled to finish on the hour or the state of mind of a concertgoer anxious to make the 11:20 suburban train home.   A literary narrative, like music, tends to be perceived as an ongoing flow. No reference to time is relevant for a description of the sequential action. The work sprouts and grows. But whenever the continuity is broken (for example, when one of the characters of the story reappears a while later), the appearances may form separate systems. The only medium that can bridge the gap may be Time, in which both are embedded. This is generally considered a compositional flaw. A skillful narrator avoids such a break by providing a filament that connects past and present appearances "amodally," as psychologists call it, that is, the way a train's progress is seen as remaining uninterrupted even when it is hidden for a moment by a tunnel. But when Time is embodied as an authentic literary character, such as the "devouring Time" of Shakespeare's nineteenth sonnet, which blunts the lion's paws and plucks the tiger's teeth, it becomes an active system of its own and thus deserves the capitalization.   Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, and The Dynamics of Architectural Form. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "On the Nature of Photography" (September 1974) and "A Plea for Visual Thinking" (Spring 1980). John Hope Franklin George Washington Williams and the Beginnings of Afro-American Historiography But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian- Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart and encouragement to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro- American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography.   ·  1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8. ·  2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915.   John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americansand A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. Edward W. Said The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's attack on Derrida that Derrida is concerned only with "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces" found there by the reader would be the appropriate one to begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (Derrida says in "La double séance") criticism so far has been unable really to deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits an element of power (pouvoir) with a decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it.   ·  1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la folie à l'âge classique (Paris, 1972), pp. 583-602; the earlier edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965). ·  2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 297.   Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award. "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different form in his Criticism between Culture and System. Berel Lang Style as Instrumental, Style as Person The question, How is style possible? assumes the existence of style and sufficient evidence for this assertion, as well as for determining what it means, appears in the talk about style, in the deployment of stylistic categories. That talk extends in common usage to such attenuated references as styles in dress, styles of social exchange, life-styles. To limit the discussion, I speak here primarily of artistic style, but it will be clear that the ramifications of the argument extend beyond the arts, indeed beyond style as well.   When we pursue this line of inference, the practical question of what the use or function of stylistic analysis is plays a controlling role and in effect sets a dialectic in motion. For if, as I suggest, there is a stopping short in the first adverbial or instrumental model of style and an amending completeness in the first verbial or transitive model, that difference starts from their respective conceptions of the function which stylistic analysis and finally style itself serve. It is important, then, to keep the question of function in mind, to allow it to spend its own force; that question serves, in fact, as a mediating link between the appearance of style and the discourse about it, on the one hand, and the final question of how style is possible, on the other. The two models of style to be described differ explicitly on the last of these points, and they differ at least tacitly in their conception of the mediating link, the question of the function or use of style. Those differences in turn make a practical difference even in the immediate description of particular styles.   Berel Lang, whose "Space, Time, and Philosophical Style" appeared in the Winter 1975 issue of , is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, the author of Art and Inquiry, co-editor of Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and Criticism, and the editor of The Concept of Style. "Style as Instrument, Style as Person" is part of Person and Representation: The Intentions of Style. Rose Rosengard Subotnik The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts_on_Music, Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise particularly strong reservations about any critical method as preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media within which the same techniques for verifying competence (in Chomsky's sense) and correctness of usage (related to Chomsky's "performance") can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is, through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a more general and a more particularized level of a system (such as the levels of sound and of meaning, or the underlying level of a code as opposed to the surface level of the message) and observing each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris (pp. 231-33) and of Noam Chomsky (pp. 392-92); interestingly these methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments by single individuals, especially by individual "experts."   · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation in Raw and Cooked (p. 24) differs from standard accounts such as André Martinet's (summarized by Nattiez, p. 421) and John Lyons' in Noam Chomsky (New York, 1970), pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of meaning which is both semantic and morphemic.   Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music" (Autumn 1979) to . Richard Shiff Seeing Cézanne While different groups of viewers may have sought different values in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete" artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities of his materialistic, industrialized (and, some commentators added, atheistic) society.1 He was seen as an isolated man who lived apart from other painters and found human relationship and communication difficult.   Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of 1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial, and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real. For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany; they were refined painters of nature who could not see the expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence, qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a primitive artist.   · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 (1 December 1895), p. 496; and Gustave Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" (16 November 1895), in La Vie artistique (Paris, 1900), p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g., Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste (Paris, 1892), pp. 30-31; and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" (9 September 1907), in Théories, 1890- 1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique, 2d ed. (Paris, 1912), p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the earlier stages of development of various Western styles (such as the Archaic Greeks and the pre-Raphaelite Italians), provincial or uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. (Paris, 1870), pp. 483-88; and Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" (1892), "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" (9 February 1891), and "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" (January 1890), in Oeuvres posthumes (Paris, 1893), pp. 202, 216, 262-63. · 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" (23 May 1891), in Oeuvres plus que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1970), 1:192. · 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice Malingue (Paris, 1946), p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism.   Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article, "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic Expression". His contributions to are "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" (Autumn 1978) and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation" (Spring 1981). Kenneth Burke (Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action Cicero could both orate and write a treatise on oratory. A dog can bark but he can't write a tract on barking.   If all typically symbol-using animals (that is, humans) were suddenly obliterated, their realm of symbolic action would be correspondingly obliterated.   The earth would be but a realm of planetary, geologic, meteorological motion, including the motions of whatever nonhuman biological organisms happened to survive.   The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action; but there could be no symbolic action unless grounded in the realm of motion, the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when motions go on after all our breed will have vanished.   Kenneth Burke is now developing the implications of the position stated in the present essay. He is also editing his Symbolic of Motives, a work designed to complement his Grammar of Motives and Rhetoric of Motives. His contributions to are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (September 1974), "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter 1977), "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" (Autumn 1978), and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" (Winter 1978). The first section of "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/ (Symbolic) Action" was presented at a symposium at New York University in May 1976 and will appear in a slightly altered version in the report of those proceedings, Psychoanalysis, Criticism, and Creativity: A French-American Dialogue. James R. Kincaid Pluralistic Monism I admire Robert Denham's enlightening and often very amusing response ("The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns," Critical Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]: 194-202) to my "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts" 3 [Summer 1977]:781-802). Not surprisingly, however, I remain unconvinced by its arguments, large or small. This may sound defensive, partly because it is, but I do wonder if his use of pluralistic sound sense is quite so fresh or so formidable as he takes it to be. . . . I think Denham understands quite accurately my use of "genre" as representing a traditional structure for organizing plot, character, images, tones, and the like. I think it is true, also, that I use the word to refer both to narrative pattern and to what he calls "intention," that I use both Frye and Sacks as examples of convincing distinctions among ordering patterns. Of course Denham is right in saying that these systems are not necessarily coordinate, that they cover species and subspecies alike, and that the generic patterns are not of the same order. One might have a represented action that is comic, tragic, or even "serious." I wonder if all this really makes my argument "sometimes difficult to follow" (p. 196). I had thought that I was signaling clearly the switch from Frye to Sacks, that neither was using "genre" in an unfamiliar or restrictive sense, and that both presented useful systems that were comprehensive and thus adaptable as time has surely shown for the labeling and pigeonholing needs of those seeking coherence at all costs. Since Frye sees narrative patterns as "pre-generic," it would not be difficult to work out coordination simply by saying that Sacks' three general categories of fiction could each exist in any of Frye's twenty-four phases. But things are not that simple, and more important, such devices would surely distract a reader I wanted to be in search of other game. Most of us switch freely from system to system, understanding "genre" to refer to a class that includes epic-drama-lyric-novel, a class that includes comedy-tragedy-romance-irony, a class that includes apologue-satire-represented action. As I see it, the only danger lies in mixing incompatible systems.   James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His works include Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns, and The Novels of Anthony Trollope. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Text" (Summer 1977), and "Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years Later" (Winter 1979). vol5num1cov290x435.jpg] Ted Cohen Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy I want to suggest a point in metaphor which is independent of the question of its cognitivity and which has nothing to do with its aesthetical character. I think of this point as the achievement of intimacy. There is a unique way in which the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another. Three aspects are involved: (1) the speaker issues a kind of concealed invitation; (2) the hearer expends a special effort to accept the invitation; and (3) this transaction constitutes the acknowledgement of a community. All three are involved in any communication, but in ordinary literal discourse their involvement is so persuasive and routine that they go unremarked. The use of metaphor throws them into relief, and there is a point in that.   An appreciator of a metaphor must do two things: he must realize that the expression is a metaphor, and he must figure out the point of the expression. His former accomplishment induces him to undertake the latter. Realizing the metaphorical character of an expression is often easy enough; it requires only the assumption that the speaker is not simply speaking absurdly or uttering a patent falsehood. But it can be a more formidable task: not every figurative expression which can survive a literal reading is a mere play on words. (You will not find more artful changes rung on this theme than those in the first sentence of Joyce's "The Dead": "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet.")   Ted Cohen is chairman of the department of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He has written on language, aesthetics, and taste and has coedited a collection entitled Essays on Kant's Aesthetics. His contribution to , "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", was written with Joel Snyder in the Winter 1980 issue. Paul de Man The Epistemology of Metephor Finally, our argument suggests that the relationship and the distinction between literature and philosophy cannot be made in terms of a distinction between aesthetic and epistemological categories. All philosophy is condemned, to the extent that it is dependent upon figuration, to be literary and, as the depository of this very problem, all literature is to some extent philosophical. The apparent symmetry of these statements is not as reassuring as it sounds since what seems to bring literature and philosophy together is, as in Condillac's argument about mind and object, a shared lack of identity or specificity.   Contrary to common belief, literature is not the place where the unstable epistemology of metaphor is suspended by aesthetic pleasure, although this attempt is a constitutive moment of its system. It is rather the place where the possible convergence of rigor and pleasure is shown to be a delusion. The consequences of this lead to the difficult question whether the entire semantic, semiological, and performative field of language can be said to be covered by tropological models, a question which can only be raised after the proliferating and disruptive power of figural language has been fully recognized.   Paul de Man, Tripp Professor in the humanities and chairman of the comparative literature department of Yale University, is the author of Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. His previous contribution to , "Political Allegory in Rousseau," appeared in the Summer 1976 issue and appears in his book Allegories in Reading. Donald Davidson What Metaphors Mean The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it another way. But if I am right, a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor, beyond the literal). This is not, of course, to deny that a metaphor has a point, nor that that point can be brought out by using further words. . . . My disagreement is with the explanation of how metaphor works its wonders. To anticipate: I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. It is something brought off by the imaginative employment of words and sentences and depends entirely on the ordinary meanings of those words and hence on the ordinary meanings of the sentences they comprise.   Donald Davidson is University Professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many important essays, including "Actions, Reasons and Causes," "Causal Relations," and "Truth and Meaning," coauthor of Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, and coeditor of Words and Objections, Semantics of Natural Language, and The Logic of Grammar. Wayne C. Booth Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation What I am calling for is not as radically new as it may sound to ears that are still tuned to positivist frequencies. A very large part of what we value as our cultural monuments can be thought of as metaphoric criticism of metaphor and the characters who make them. The point is perhaps most easily made about the major philosophies. Stephen Pepper has argued, in World Hypotheses,1 that the great philosophies all depend on one of the four "root metaphors," formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, and they are great precisely because they have so far survived the criticism of rival metaphors. Each view of the totality of things claims supremacy, but none has been able to annihilate the others. They all thus survive as still plausible, pending further criticism through further philosophical inquiry. In this view, even the great would-be literalists like Hobbes and Locke are finally metaphorists simply committed to another kind of metaphor, one that to them seems literal. Without grossly oversimplifying we could say that the whole work of each philosopher amounts to an elaborate critique of the inadequacy of all other philosophers' metaphors. What is more, the very existence of a tradition of a small group of great philosophies is a sign that hundreds of lesser metaphors for the life of mankind have been tested in the great philosophical that is, critical wars and found wanting.   ·  1. World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley, 1942). In Concept and Quality: A World Hypothesis (Lasalle, Ill., 1966), Pepper suggests that "the purposive act" is a fifth root metaphor.   Wayne C. Booth's is the author of, among other works, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. His contributions to include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W. J. T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979). Karsten Harries Metaphor and Transcendence Ever since Aristotle, metaphor has been placed in the context of a mimetic theory of language and of art. Metaphors are in some sense about reality. The poet uses metaphor to help reveal what is. He, too, serves the truth, even if his service is essentially lacking in that "Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else."1 Thus it is an improper naming. This impropriety invites a movement of interpretation that can come to rest only when metaphorical has been replaced with a more proper speech. This is not to say, however, that such replacement is possible nor that interpretation can ever come to rest. What metaphor names may transcend human understanding so that our language cannot capture it. In that case, proper speech would be denied to man. But regardless of whether we seek proper speech with man, for example, with the philosopher, or locate it beyond man with God, or think it only an idea that cannot find adequate realization, as long as we understand metaphor as an improper naming, we place its telos beyond poetry.   ·  1. Aristotle Poetics 21. 1457b. 6-7.   Karsten Harries, chairman of the department of philosophy at Yale University, is the author of several works on aesthetics, including The Meaning of Modern Art: A Philosophical Interpretation. He is currently writing a book on the Bavarian rococo church.   See also: "On Thinking about Aristotle's 'Thought'" by James E. Ford in Vol. 4, No. 3 David Tracy Metaphor and Religion: The Test Case of Christian_Texts The Christian religion shares with all major religions a vision (more exactly, a redescription) of reality informed by a specific cluster of metaphors. The Christian religion also shares with its parent religion, Judaism, and with the other major Western religion, Islam, the peculiarity that it is a religion of the book. The latter statement demands further elaboration. To speak of Western religions as religions of the book does not mean that they are only religions of a text; indeed, specific historical persons and events are central to all Western religions, and one need not insist upon a "theology of word" as distinct from either a "theology of events" or a "theology of sacrament" to admit scriptural normativity. In fact, not only Reformed Christianity insists that certain texts (which Christians name the Old and New Testaments) be taken as normative for interpreting Christianity's root metaphors. Whatever their hesitation over the sixteenth- century Reformer's formulation of Sola Scripturaand however strong their insistence upon uniting Sacrament (or manifestation) to Word (or proclamation) for a full understanding of the root metaphors of Christianity, Catholic and Orthodox Christians have joined their Protestant colleagues in insisting upon the priority of the Scriptures. Indeed, to interpret the root metaphors of the Christian religion, the Scriptures must function, in the words of the Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner as the norma normans non normata for all Christian theologies.   David Tracy, author of Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology and The Analogical Imagination in Contemporary Theology, is professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Richard Shiff Art and Life: A Metaphorical Relationship When the modern artist is seen as moving about in a nebulous area between two opposing worlds, that of life or immediate experience and that of art or established truth, I think it is appropriate to discuss this activity in terms of metaphor. Indeed the present concern for metaphor in the academic and artistic communities is but one of many reflections of our sense that life is a process of the gradual attainment of knowledge through experience, whether sensuous or intellectual. Like our artists, we strive to create a picture of our world, yet that picture is never complete; for we continually pass on to new experiences and new images of reality. Not only do we grow and change but our world seems to change with us. Although the truths revealed through our art are founded in our experience, they seem more permanent and public than the acts of discovery leading to them. A principle once established and integrated with a body of other established truths enters into recorded history perhaps to be revered, disputed, or reinterpreted, but nevertheless to remain. The individual experience or discovery, however, passes; with the individual, only the sense of the continuing search yields personal identity. In a changing world, metaphor renders the truth of experience as the truth of knowledge, for it is the means of passing from individual immediacy to an established public world; the new must be linked to the old, and the experience of any individual must be connected with that of his society. Excluding the possibility of the creation of entirely new worlds and the resultant transformation of all personal identities, acts of genius or dramatic breakthroughs in fields of study can affect our present world order only if they are joined to it by means of a powerful metaphor. Indeed establishing the metaphoric bridge itself may be considered the act of genius, and the entry into new areas of knowledge is its consequence.   Richard Shiff is associate professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Seeing Cézanne" (Summer 1978) and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation" (Spring 1981). Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner The Development of Metaphoric Competence: Implications for Humanistic Disciplines In lieu of hand-waving, let us begin our treatment of psychological research on metaphor by considering some common interests shared by psychologists, on the one hand, and by philosophically oriented humanists, on the other. At least four areas have proved sufficiently central to both groups to merit extensive discussion in the respective literatures. At first issue centers on the specificity of the processes involved in metaphor: Is metaphoric skill a capacity especially intertwined with linguistic skills, or is it a much broader human capacity, one identified with general perceptual and conceptual processes? A related question has arisen within the area of language: Is metaphor a special kind of trope, with its own rules, properties, and applications, or should it be closely allied (or even collapsed) with such other tropes as similes, analogies, or hyperbole? The third issue moves yet further within the circle of metaphor to treat the question of whether all metaphors are of a piece, or whether various types of metaphor (cross-sensory, perceptual, psychological-physical, predicative, etc.) each require their own analysis. And a final issue of concern to both groups is the question of whether metaphoric usage (for instance, the semantic features of the topic and vehicle) or by considering its pragmatic aspects the various speech acts employed within a community.1 One could go on to state other issues, but this tetrad should suffice to indicate the common body of concern addressed by experimental and humanistic researchers.   ·  1. Cf. Cohen, "The Semantics of Metaphor" and John Searle, "Presentation on Metaphor and Pragmatics" (Conference on Metaphor and Thought).   Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist, is codirector of Harvard Project Zero and a clinical investigator at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. His books include The Quest for Mind, The Arts and Human Development, and, most recently, Developmental Psychology: An Introduction. Ellen Winner teaches in the psychology department of Boston College and is a research associate at Harvard Project Zero. A developmental psychologist, she has conducted research on the development and breakdown of metaphoric language capacities and has examined the emergence of metaphoric capacities in very young children. Paul Ricoeur The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling But is not the word "metaphor" itself a metaphor, the metaphor of a displacement and therefore of a transfer in a kind of space? What is at stake is precisely the necessity of these spatialmetaphors about metaphor included in our talk about "figures" of speech. . . . But in order to understand correctly the work of resemblance in metaphor and to introduce the pictorial or ironic moment at the right place, it is necessary briefly to recall the mutation undergone by the theory of metaphor at the level of semantics by contrast with the tradition of classical rhetoric. In this tradition, metaphor was correctly described in terms of deviance, but this deviance was mistakenly ascribed to denomination only. Instead of giving a thing its usual common name, one designates it by means of a borrowed name, a "foreign" name in Aristotle's terminology. The rationale of this transfer of name was understood as the objective similarity between the things themselves or the subjective similarity between the attitudes linked to the grasping of these things. As concerns the goal of this transfer, it was supposed either to fill up a lexical lacuna, and therefore to serve the principle of economy which rules the endeavor of giving appropriate names to new things, new ideas, or new experiences, or to decorate discourse, and therefore to serve the main purpose of rhetorical discourse, which is to persuade and to please.   Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris (Nanterre) and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago. He is editor of Revue de métaphysique et de morale and the author of many influential works on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. His most recent work to appear in English is The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. He has also contributed "Narrative Time" (Autumn 1980) to . W. V. Quine A Postscript on Metaphor Besides serving us at the growing edge of science and beyond, metaphor figures even in our first learning of language; or, if not quite metaphor, something akin to it. We hear a word or phrase on some occasion, or by chance we babble a fair approximate ourselves on what happens to be a pat occasion and are applauded for it. On a later occasion, then, one that resembles the first occasion by our lights, we repeat the expression. Resemblance of occasions is what matters, here as in metaphor. We generalize our application of the expression by degrees of subjective resemblance of occasions, until we discover from other people's behavior that we have pushed analogy too far and exceeded the established usage. If the crux of metaphor is creative extension through analogy, then we have forged a metaphor at each succeeding application of that early word of phrase. These primitive metaphors differ from the deliberate and sophisticated ones, however, in that they accrete directly to our growing store of standard usage. They are metaphors stillborn.   It is a mistake, then, to think of linguistic usage as literalistic in its main body and metaphorical in its trimming. Metaphor, or something like it, governs both the growth of language and our acquisition of it. What comes as a subsequent refinement is rather cognitive discourse itself, at its most dryly literal. The neatly worked inner stretches of science are an open space in the tropical jungle, created by clearing tropes away.   W. V. Quine is the Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University. His many influential works include Methods of Logic, Word and Object, and The Roots of Reference. "On the Nature of Moral Values," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Spring 1979 issue. Don R. Swanson Toward a Psychology of Metaphor How and why does a metaphor work? What happens to us when we hear or read one? My guess is that a metaphor, because it is an erroneous statement, conflicts with our expectations. It releases, triggers, and stimulates our predisposition to detect error and to take corrective action. We do not dismiss or reject a metaphor as simply a false statement for we recognize it as a metaphor and know as [Donald] Davidson suggests that it alludes to something else that we might wish to notice. It preempts our attention and propels us on a quest for the underlying truth. We are launched into a creative, inventive, pleasurable act. To turn Piaget around, to invent is to understand. For the hearer or reader of a metaphor to detect, by himself, the nature of the error and to invent his own (conjectural) version of the truth entails understanding and achievement and thus pleasure. Such pleasure perhaps owes its origin to, and is enhanced by an echo from, the metaphoric playfulness of childhood.   A metaphor is a peremptory invitation to discovery. What is discoverable are the various allusive ties, or common attributes, between the metaphor and the underlying truth to which it points. It is plausible to guess that the pleasure, and hence power, of the metaphor depends on two factors. It is the more powerful and effective the greater the number of allusive ties discovered and the greater the speed or suddenness with which the discoveries are made. A metaphor that packs all of its allusions into one or a few words should be more effective than a metaphor on which the same allusions are scattered throughout a long chain of words or sentences. The number of allusive ties in some sense reflects how close the metaphor approaches the truth how near it is to being on target. Perhaps the closer it is, the more compelling the urge to correct the error like the pull of a magnet.   Don R. Swanson is professor and dean of the graduate library school at the University of Chicago. Karsten Harries The Many Uses of Metaphor Even when we confine ourselves to poetry, we have to agree with Ortega y Gasset's observation that "the instrument of metaphoric expression can be used for many diverse purposes." It can be used to embellish or ennoble things or persons Campion's poem offers a good example. Such embellishment need not involve semantic innovation. Metaphors can also function as weapons turned against reality. There are metaphors that negate the referential function of language so successfully that talk about truth or, for that matter, about lattices or lenses seems inappropriate. Yet as poetry pushes towards this extreme, it may acquire a revelatory power all its own: from the ruins of literal sense emerges not a new semantic congruence but a silence that is heard as the language of transcendence. This is not to deny that metaphors can effect semantic change or help to establish a new world. As David Tracy's contribution to this symposium shows, Scripture furnished the most obvious example. Heidegger's claim that poetry establishes the world can indeed be shown to rest on this paradigm. It is a claim that tends to ascribe something of the prophetic power of Scripture to all great poetry. But, although we may long to rediscover the prophet in the poet, to what extent does the scriptural paradigm help to illuminate poetry in general and, more especially, the poetry of this godless age? Most modern poetry has an aesthetic character that is incompatible with a religious world view. Theories of poetic metaphor cannot afford to neglect the history of poetry, just as general theories of metaphor cannot afford to neglect the many uses of metaphor. Wayne C. Booth Ten Literal "Theses" Because my paper was often metaphorical, some participants on the symposium expressed puzzlement about my literal meaning, especially about the passage from Mailer. Here are ten literal "theses" that the paper either argues for, implies, or depends on. 1. What metaphor is can never be determined with a single answer. Because the word has now become subject to all of the ambiguities of our notions about similarity and difference, the irreducible plurality of philosophical views of how similarities and differences relate will always produce conflicting definitions that will in turn produce different borderlines between what is metaphor and what is not. We thus need taxonomies, not frozen single definitions, of this "essentially contested  concept." Margret Schaefer Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation Is Not Depreciation At the end of his attack on my use of the psychoanalytic model for the interpretation of literature, Heller raises the question concerning what the task of the literary critic is or ought to be. His own "sketch of the Kleistean theme's historical ancestry and its later development," he says, seeks to deepen and enrich the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents, the conclusiveness of his examples." By implication he suggests that my method does not have this end that is, appreciation for its goal. In this he is partially right. "Appreciation" in Heller's sense is not as directly a goal for me. But does Heller's method of intellectual history and literary relation meet his own criteria of deepening and enriching the reader's appreciation of Kleist? In his capsule treatment of Great Thinkers of the Western World from Plato to Marx, we learn that many writers besides Kleist treated Kleist's theme of man's fall from unconscious grace. What exactly does this tell us about Kleist's treatment of it? How does it deepen the reader's appreciation of Kleist's literary art, the artistry of his phrasing, the persuasiveness of his incidents? It doesn't. It isn't even about Kleist. Although Heller tells us that it is the "thought" and "imagery" which "make for the great distinction of the essay" (p. 419), his evidence for this consists, in the case of the former, in his tracing the history of the essay's thought and, in the case of the latter, in his statements that Kleist's use of the puppet as the exemplar of the unselfconscious graceful being is "unusual" and "novel" and that his bear story, though it may lack "in immediate plausibility," "gains in making Kleist's point" and is "a memorable exemplar" of the "art of grotesque inventions that are capable of floating for quite a while above and between the comic and the serious before landing with scintillating effect in one domain or the other" (p. 421).   Margret Schaefer is a lecturer in the department of psychiatry at Northwestern University Medical School. She responds here to Erich Heller's "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology and the Misinterpretation of Literature" (Spring 1978), in which he discussed her article, "Kleist's 'About the Puppet Theater," (American Imago 32 [Winter 1975]). Heinz Kohut A Reply to Margret Schaefer I will return to the second point in a different context later; at this moment I will discuss only the issue raised by my pointing up the fact that the essay in question was written by someone in Professor Heller's field. What motivated me to make the statement was not my belief that the use of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of art should be restricted to certified psychoanalysts indeed, I have always been a staunch advocate of the opposite view. My motive for this, I assumed harmless, and not, of course, irrelevant, indiscretion was that I wanted to show that Professor Heller's critique of psychoanalysis was not broadly based, that his representative example was a piece that happened to have crossed his way, that he was not using the work of an established writer in the field that he was condemning. My statement that your essay is an unacceptable text in a sermon preaching against applied analysis is unrelated to the value of your article. Even if in the future it should turn out that your essay as far as I know your first contribution to applied psychoanalysis was the forerunner of a significant oeuvre that would put you into the class of the great contributors of psychoanalytic interpretations of literature, it is at this point not an acceptable text for a sermon against our field.   Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and author of many influential works on the psychology of the self. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders - which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations - and a collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A Correspondence with Erich Heller" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of . Kenneth Burke A Critical Load, Beyond That Door; or, Before_the_Ultimate Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy Dedicated to the humanisticissimus and/or humanisticissima Editoreality of, an enterprise that is doing all possible to restore forCriticism its rightful home, namely: a state of perpetualCrisis.   How now? You say "The man walks down the street."   Then tell me how (in the name of whatever) your words make sense.   Kenneth Burke's contributions to are "In Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (September 1974), " Post- Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter 1977), " (Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action" (Summer 1978),and "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment" (Winter 1978). vol5num2cov290x435.jpg] Peter Viereck Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with_a_Flabby_Angel? Poetry doesn't write about what it writes about. Critics may now agree that this tends to be so, but why? Is it, as here argued, inherently so because of poetry's two or more rhythm-levels? Or is it, as many "explicating" critics imply, noninherently and only recently so because of the two or more diction-levels of the symbolist heritage? If the answer to the latter question is no, then the explicators have brought us to a blind alley by being oversubtle about the ambiguities and ambivalences of diction and undersubtle about those of rhythm. The fact that good prose (not to mention purple "poetic" prose) also has two rhythm-levels is not to the point. The tension between two irregular rhythms, as in prose, is simply not the same as that between one irregularity and one formal, traditionally shared regularity in poetry.   The half-conscious uncovering of rhythm's hidden language helps explain an ancient truth: unlike a prose essay, a tragic poem or a tragic verse-play may leave the reader feeling exalted while an exalting love poem may leave him mournful. The explanation is not some miraculous "transcending" of tragedy and of the human condition (as if the presumptuous poet were doing God's work for Him better) but the uncovering of a palimpsest layer. What will be needed, from now on, are not generalizations (like this one) but precise trochee-by-iamb-by-spondee analyses (which are exactly what I have begun) of why the relevant passages in King Lear, for example, achieve tragic joy by means of the joy-connoting rhythms beneath the somber words. While translating certain German and Russian poets of our century, I am also making a parallel analysis in parallel languages. My conclusion: the future translator should consult his dictionary less and his ear more (searching not for lilt duplications by metronome but for lilt equivalents by connotation). Poets, then, are not our Shelleyan "unacknowledged legislators" (no more delusions of grandeur on that score) but our unacknowledged kinaesthesia.   Peter Viereck, professor of European and Russian history at Mount Holyoke College, received the Pulitzer Prize for his book of poems, Terror and Decorum (1948); this and his Conservatism Revisitedand The Unadjusted Man have recently been reprinted by Greenwood Press. In a slightly revised version, "Strict Form in Poetry" appears as the appendix in his book of poems, Applewood, for which he has been awarded a fellowship by the Artists Foundation.   See also: "On the Measure of Poetry" by Howard Nemerov in Vol. 6, No. 2 Sharon Cameron Naming as History: Dickinson's Poems of Definition For Emily Dickinson, perhaps no more so than for the rest of us, there was a powerful discrepancy between what was "inner than the Bone"1 and what could be acknowledged. To the extent that her poems are a response to that discrepancy are, on one hand, a defiant attempt to deny that the discrepancy poses a problem and, on the other, an admission of defeat at the problem's enormity they have much to teach us about the way in which language articulates our life. There is indeed a sense in which these poems test the limits of what we might reveal if we tried and also of what, despite our exertions, will not give itself over to utterance. The question of the visibility of interior experience is one that will concern me in this essay, for it lies at the heart of what Dickinson makes present to us. In "The Dream of Communication," Geoffrey Hartman writes: "Art represents a self which is either insufficiently present or feels itself as not presentable."2 On both counts one thinks of Dickinson, for her poems disassemble the body in order to penetrate to the places where the feelings lie as if hidden, and they tell us that bodies are not barriers the way we sometimes think they are. Despite the staggering sophistication with which we discuss complex issues, like Dickinson we have few words, if any, for what happens inside us. Perhaps this is because we have been taught to conceive of ourselves as perfectly inexplicable or, if explicable, then requiring the aid of someone else to scrutinize what we are explicating to validate it. We have been taught that we cannot see for ourselves this despite the current emphasis on our proprioceptive functions. But Dickinson tells us that we can see. More important, she tells us how to name what we see.   ·  1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), n. 321. ·  2. Geoffrey Hartman, "The Dream of Communication," in I. A. Richards: Essays in His Honor, ed. Reuben Brower et al. (New York, 1973), p. 173.   Sharon Cameron, associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is currently preparing a theoretical study of the lyric and is examining the relationship between obsession and lyrical structures. The present essay is part of her Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Françoise Meltzer Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse The prominence and peculiarity of color in French symbolist verse have often been noted. Yet the dominance of color in symbolism is not the result of aesthetic preference or mere poetic technique, as has been previously argued; rather, color functions, with the synaesthetic poetic context of which it is an integral part, as the direct manifestation of a particular metaphysical stance. Color leads to the heart of what symbolism is, for it is the paradigmatic literary expression of a general spiritual crisis a crisis in epistemology.   The nineteenth century extended seventeenth-century empiricism an empiricism which had invented mathematical measurement as the gauge of reality and which resulted in a predilection to see most authentic knowledge as quantifiable. The logical corollary of such a predilection is that all sensory experience is regarded as suspect. Newtonian physics had rationalized the laws of the universe in reducing its properties to atomical structures and laws of motion. Nothing, it seemed, was left unexplained. Those areas of perception which remained unquantifiable were dispelled as illusion or attributed to the necessary limitations of the human mind. The theories of John Locke act as a kind of historical watershed in this regard: they are the classic philosophic expression of the disjunction between sensory experience and knowledge which, in its nineteenth-century versions, would lead to the symbolist revolt.   Françoise Meltzer is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to is the translation of Christian Metz's "Trucageand the Film" (Summer 1977). She is the author of The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Joseph Frank Spatial Form: Some Further Reflections It is obvious that the closer the structure of a narrative conforms to causal-chronological sequence, the closer it corresponds to the linear-temporal order of language. It is now equally obvious, however, that such correspondence is contrary to the nature of narrative as an art form. Indeed, it is clear that all through the history of the novel a tension has existed between the linear- temporal nature of its medium (language) and the spatial elements required by its nature as a work of art. Most of what are known as the "formal conventions" of the novel are an implicit agreement between writer and reader not to pay attention to this disjunction and to overlook the extent to which it exists. Shklovsky provocatively called Tristram Shandy the most "typical" novel in world literature (of course, it is one of the most untypical) because it "laid bare" all the conventions, whose nature as conventions had become imperceptible through long familiarity, employed by the form.   Joseph Frank, professor of comparative literature and director of the Christian Gauss seminars in criticism at Princeton University, received the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA for Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849, the first volume of his four-volume biography. Frank's original article on spatial form in modern literature appeared in Sewanee Review (Spring, Summer, Autumn 1945); the essay was later revised and incorporated in his The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. Stephen J. Greenblatt Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism Nevertheless, Marx's essay ["On the Jewish Question"] has a profound bearing upon The Jew of Malta; their conjunction enriches our understanding of the authors; relation to ideology and, more generally, raises fruitful questions about a Marxist reading of literature. The fact that both works use the figure of the perfidious Jew provides a powerful link between Renaissance and modern thought, for despite the great differences to which I have just pointed, this shared reference is not an accident or a mirage. "On the Jewish Question" represents the nineteenth-century development of a late sixteenth-century idea or, more accurately, a late sixteenth-century trope. Marlowe and Marx seize upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshalling deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but, in less "pure" form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally incidental in these works, Marx's as well as Marlowe's, except insofar as they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-century polemicist.1   ·  1. Anti-Semitism, it should be emphasized, is never merely a trope to be adopted or discarded by an author as he might choose to employ zeugma or eschew personification. It is charged from the start with irrationality and bad faith and only partly rationalized as a rhetorical strategy. Marlowe depicts his Jew with the compulsive cruelty that characterizes virtually all his work, while Marx's essay obviously has elements of a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background. It is particularly tempting to reduce the latter work to a dark chapter in its author's personal history. The links I am attempting to establish with Marlowe or the more direct link with Feuerbach, however, locate the essay in a far wider context. Still, the extreme violence of the latter half of Marx's work and his utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates undoubtedly owe much to his personal situation. It is interesting that the tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the Jews.   Stephen J. Greenblatt is the Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare,Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and the editor of a collection of essays, New World Encounters. Carolyn G. Heilbrun Marriage and Contemporary Fiction Marriage, in fiction even more than in life, has been the woman's adventure, the object of her quest, her journey's end. Contemporary fiction modulates the formula in one respect: the abandonment of marriage replaces the achievement of it. While it is obvious what these fictional women detest in marriage, it is not always clear what they desire. How, indeed, might clarity be expected about an institution whose success depends so much upon woman's failure at autonomy?   So the women split: Kinflicks, Small Changes, The Women's Room, Loose Ends, The Oracle these are merely representative of a long list. What is new in these books is that we are seeing marriage at all seeing it, moreover, from a woman's point of view. "What about Norm?" the narrator asks in The Women's Room; "Who is he, this shadow man, this figurehead husband?"1 In fact, who Norm is, who all the husbands are, is clear: those who need someone to take care of their domestic, cooking, cleaning, sexual, breeding needs while they are out attending to civilization and their own appreciation of life. Even the least intelligent husbands realize (and some of the most intelligent believe) that a change in marriage profound enough to satisfy the fleeing wives would profoundly alter the foundation of that conservative community, the family. Freud had urged women not to interfere with man in his pursuit of civilization; and this is the way it is, the way men want it to be.   ·  1. Marilyn French, The Women's Room (New York, 1977), p. 193.   Carolyn G. Heilbrun, professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. Her book, Reinventing Womanhood, includes parts of this present essay. Ross Chambers Commentary in Literary Texts Let us hypothesize that there are three main "registers" of writing: narrative, description and commentary. "Narrative" and "description" are by definition concerned with diachronic and synchronic relationships (independently of whether these are regarded as purely linguistic or as relationships in the "real world"); and it may be said that taken together, they therefore exhaust the inventory of all relationships constituting the "world" our language regards as possible. It is often remarked that there is such an affinity between narration and description that on occasion they are hard to distinguish: narration is the descriptionof an action or change, and description mimes the action of relating items one to the other, and hence may have a narrative function. This solidarity of narration and description justifies their being grouped together as constituting the "topic" of literary discourse. But the function of "commentary," which correlates the (narrative and/or descriptive) text with a context, is to create a different type of relationship, in which makes the narrative/descriptive topic "meaningful." We are thus distinguishing "meaning" and "meaningfulness" on the grounds that "meaning" (le sens) can be understood as the object of semantic analysis (in this case, the diachronic and synchronic relationships of the "topic"), whereas "meaningfulness" (la signification) is the meaning bestowed on a set of relationships by an act of interpretation (i.e., it is distinguishable from the nuclear meaning inherent in the words of a specific language). This type of meaningfulness is what the moral of a La Fontaine fable most characteristically seeks to create. Thus, the two-line commentary segment in Le Chat, la Belette et le petit Lapin:   Ceci ressemble fort aux débats qu'ont parfois Les petits souverains se rapportants aux rois1   (a) designates the narrative/descriptive relationships established on the fable proper ("ceci"), (b) designates the pragmatic context ("les débats qu'ont parfois . . ."), but also (c) specifies the analogy/homology between the two which makes the text meaningful ("Ceci ressemble fort aux débats"). Meaningfulness in this sense is thus definable as the perception of a text/context relationship.   ·  1. "This greatly resembles the debates which petty sovereigns have when they refer to kings." [My translation]   Ross Chambers, Marvin Felheim Distinguished University Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is the author of Gérard de Nerval et la poétique du voyage, La Comédie au château, L'Ange et l'automate, "Spirite" de Théophile Gautier, and Room for Maneuver: Reading Oppositional Narrative. Earl Miner On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems,_Part_I By a "literary system" we must mean (as with "history") two distinct yet related matters: a discrete and continuous literary history of "occurrences" such as that we designate as English literature; and a continuous set of ideas about what that first system is. To be sure, the first consists in our thought of it, which is to say of literary creations in temporal series. But the literary creations themselves represent a development or, at a minimum, a sequence of examples of literary knowledge or what may be generally termed poems. That temporally serial set of creations of knowledge had individual knowers in its creators, its poets. Our historical knowledge of the poems consists of ideas about their serial, differentiated character, about their relation to each other, and about their relationship to their creators and the times in which they were created. The second sense of a literary system involves what we call criticism, knowledge about that knowledge is synchronic, as we consider such things as epics, tragedies, lyrics, or novels as categories possessing some validity. But this second kind of literary system has also an historical, diachronic character by virtue of the fact that (for example) there were generations before which the novel did not exist or generations during which the novel evolved as a kind of literature whose possibilities were exploited and altered. Without the novel in its history, there can be no history of criticism about the novel. These two varieties of literary system can be designated, then, as literary systems proper and as critical systems. The second does require the existence of the first, in spite of seeming exceptions. We might imagine a new nation wishing to have a literature it does not presently possess. The literature envisioned would imply a poetics prior to the emergent literary system, but the poetics would be borrowed from another literature in which the literary system had predated its critical system.   Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present (of which he is editor and a contributor) and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part II of the present essay appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of . Robert Alter Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention One of the chief difficulties we encounter as modern readers in perceiving the artistry of biblical narrative is precisely that we have lost most of the keys to the conventions out of which it was shaped. The professional Bible scholars have not offered much help in this regard, for their closest approximation to the study of convention is form criticism, which is set on finding recurrent regularities of pattern rather than the manifold variations upon a pattern that any system of literary convention elicits; moreover, form criticism uses these patterns for excavative ends to support hypotheses about the social functions of the text, its historical evolution, and so forth. . . . The most crucial case in point is the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances. Three times a patriarch is driven by famine to a southern region where he pretends that his wife is his sister, narrowly avoids a violation of the conjugal bond by the local ruler, and is sent away with gifts. Twice Hagar flees into the wilderness from Sarah's hostility and discovers a miraculous well, and that story itself seems only a special variation of the recurrent story of bitter rivalry between a barren, favored wife and a fertile co-wife or concubine. That situation, in turn, suggests another oft-told tale in the Bible, of a woman long barren who is vouchsafed a divine promise of progeny, whether by God himself or through a divine messenger or oracle, and who then gives birth to a hero.   Robert Alter, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of, among other works, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre and Defenses of the Imagination. He has written a general literary study of biblical narrative, of which this essay forms a chapter. Robert L. Carringer The Scripts of Citizen Kane The best-known controversy in film criticism of recent years has been over the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. Pauline Kael first raised the issue in a flamboyant piece in The New Yorker in 1971. Contrary to what Orson Welles would like us to believe, Kael charged, the script for the film was actually not his work but almost wholly the work of an all-but-forgotten figure, one of Hollywood's veteran screenwriters, Herman J. Mankiewicz. . . . The first two drafts of the Citizen Kane script were written by Herman Mankiewicz and John Houseman in seclusion in the desert at Victorville, California, during March, April, and May 1940. Officially, Houseman was there as an editor. But part of his job was to ride herd on Mankiewicz, whose drinking habits were legendary and whose screenwriting credentials unfortunately did not include a reputation for seeing things through. Detailed accounts of the Victorville interlude have been given by Houseman in his autobiography and by Kael in "Raising Kane." There was constant interchange between Victorville and Hollywood, with Houseman going in to confer on the script and Welles sending up emissaries (and going up on occasion himself) and regularly receiving copies of the work in progress. Welles in turn was working over the draft pages with the assistance of his own secretary, Katherine Trosper, and handing the revised screenplay copy in its rough state over to Amalia Kent, a script supervisor at RKO noted for her skills at breaking this kind of material down into script continuity form, who was readying it for the stenographic and various production departments.1   ·  1. John Houseman, Run-Through: A Memoir (New York, 1972), pp. 445-61. "Raising Kane," pp. 29-39. Amalia Kent had impressed Welles with her work on the problematic first-person script for his unproduced Heart of Darkness film, and she worked directly with him on various script supervision capacities on other of his RKO projects, including The Magnificent Ambersonsand the unproduced Smiler with the Knife. She also continued as the script supervisor throughout the shooting of Citizen Kane and prepared the cutting reports for the film's editor, Robert Wise. Kael gives the impression that Rita Alexander, Herman Mankiewicz's private secretary, was performing all these specialized studio functions herself.   Robert L. Carringer is associate professor of English and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author (with Barry Sabath) of Ernst Lubitsch. His forthcoming edition of The Jazz Singer will begin the Warner Brothers script series. "Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby,and Some Conventions of American Narrative," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1975 issue. Kenneth Burke Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment Fredric Jameson's exacting essay, "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) moves me to comment. I shall apply one of my charges of my title to him, he applies the other to me. The matter is further complicated by the fact that there is a distance at which they are hard to tell apart. For any expression of something implies a repression of something else, and any statement that goes only so far is analyzable as serving to forestall a statement that goes farther. And I can't go as far as I think if I share with Jameson what I take to be his over-investment in the term "ideology." . . . the line between the implicit and the explicit being so wavering, there are many cases where the distinctions between conscious and unconscious become correspondingly blurred. But the kind of methodological repression (or variant of the Quietus) that is implicit in Jameson's hermeneutic model can be wasteful beyond necessity. For it encourages him to be so precociously prompt in his "rereading" of a text that he doesn't allow his readers to read a single sentence of it. He doesn't tell them what Sinn, in its own terms, my text has on the subject of "ideology," "mystification," and the "unconscious." Instead, he cuts corners and settles for a report of the Bedeutung (see Jameson, p. 516) that it has for him. In this case the procedure is particularly wasteful because Jameson is highly intelligent, and if it weren't for the bad leads of his models he's the last man in the world who would have to be so bluntly inaccurate as he is on this occasion. I believe that he could put me through quite a trying ordeal if he could have but kept on the subject and pursued me accordingly.   Kenneth Burke's previous contributions to are "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes" (September 1974), "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter 1977), "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action" (Summer 1978), and a hermeneutic fantasy, "A Critical Load . . ." (Autumn 1978). He would like us to mention that William Willeford, the interlocutor of a section in " (Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action," is a professor of English at the University of Washington. Fredric R. Jameson Ideology and Symbolic Action I don't conceive of this as a debate with Burke, but if I did, I would be tempted to use the old debater's formula: there are many ways in which the word ideology can be used, most of them defensible, but there are two ways in which the word ought never be used, and that is to designate "value systems" on one hand or "false consciousness" on the other. The first meaning folds us back into the perspective of the history of ideas, which it was the aim of the concept of ideology to spring us out of in the first place. The second betrays a vulgar Marxist approach to culture which it is the task of any genuinely contemporary Marxism to liquidate: indeed, from the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness to the Frankfurt School, from Sartre to Althusser and Macherey, there are a number of very different Marxian conceptions of ideology available today which have nothing in common with the old notion of ideology as a "false consciousness." And since I have gone this far, I will add something I didn't mention in my essay, that when Burke documents his own use of the Marxian category of ideology, unfortunately he turns out most often to have meant our old friend "false consciousness," so unavoidable a part of the baggage of thirties Marxism.   Fredric R. Jameson is the editor, with Stanley Aronowitz and John Brenkmam, of Social Text and the author of Marxism and Form, The Prison House of Language, and, forthcoming, The Political Unconscious: Studies in the Ideology of Form. "The Symbolic Interference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis" Critical Inquiry 4 [Spring 1978]: 507-23) was presented in an earlier version at the English Institute in September 1977 as one of a group of studies in reevaluation of the work of Kenneth Burke. Lowry Nelson, Jr. Notes and Exchanges Early in February 1978, we received the following letter from Lowry Nelson, Jr., professor of comparative literature at Yale University:   Regarding the exchange between Professors Martin ("Literary Critics and Their Discontents: A Response to Geoffrey Hartman") and Hartman ("The Recognition Scene of Criticism") in 4 (Winter 1977): 397-416, I would like to comment on the use of the institutional adjective "Yale." Labels are naturally sticky and attaching them is a habit and for a time a convenience. It would be unfortunate if the label that reads "the Yale group" or "the Yale critics" were to gain unchallenged currency. So far as I can see, there is nothing that could be called a "school" of criticism here and certainly there is no indoctrination of students of some touted orthodoxy. In literary criticism there is still, and I am confident there will continue to be, a great range of views and interests discussed generally with amicable forthrightness. Versions of Hegel and Freud, revivals of rhetoric, criticism as "literature," and etymological dabbling are not so very new or so very local. This still enlightened academic grove has not and will not become a lucus a non lucendo. vol5num3cov290x435.jpg] 1. -3 Robert E. Streeter, Wayne C. Booth, W. J. T. Mitchell Sheldon Sacks 1930 1979 It is strange to write for the pages of this journal a statement which will not come under the eye of its founding editor, Sheldon Sacks. For nearly five years everything that appeared in Critical Inquiry articles, critical responses, editorial comments was a matter of painstaking and passionate concern to Shelly Sacks. With a flow of questions and suggestions and a talent for unabashed cajolery, he generated articles and rejoinders to those articles. He worked tirelessly in editorial consultation and correspondence with contributors, especially young writers, helping them to discover the best way of giving form to their ideas. Among the essays submitted to this journal he searched eagerly, even anxiously, for those which seemed, in his words, "right for C.I."   What was right for C. I.was never, for Shelly Sacks, a cut-and- dried choice. In his own intellectual life, in his teaching and writing, he delighted in arguing important general questions: theories of representation in the arts, points of possible intersection between linguistic science and literary criticism, the interplay of social forces and cultural expressions. Not surprisingly, in reconnoitering for , he found special satisfaction in identifying writers who shared his passion for reexamining fundamental topics in the intellectual disciplines. If such writers made their case forcefully, so much the better: in choosing an essay for publication he assessed its capacity to stimulate interesting counterargument.   At no time, however, did Shelly Sacks confuse his own beliefs with the nature of intellectual discourse. As an editor he was hospitable to writers whose premises he questioned and whose conclusions he deplored. Nor did Shelly attempt to achieve a spurious catholicity by following a quiet quota system designed to give each major line of interpretation deconstructionist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, what have you an occasional airing in . For Shelly each article stood on its own ground: if its author dealt responsibly and freshly with an interesting problem, that was enough. And, along with his commitment to theoretical inquiry, he responded warmly to the personal, the offbeat, the idiosyncratic. He regarded the feature Artists on Art, for example, as a central element in our design.   As an editor Sheldon Sacks was above all a shaper. He labored to find and suggest connections in the phenomena of intellectual life. Even the construction of a table of contents for a typical Critical Inquiryissue became for him an opportunity to influence the reader's experience of what we offered. The eminence of an author or the allure of a title were put to one side as Shelly sought to orchestrate, through placement, a kind of intellectual counterpoint from one essay to another. Unheard melodies, doubtless, for many of us, but for Shelly real and sustaining.   In this valedictory note we have spoken of Sheldon Sacks' editorial accomplishment in our friendly view, a very distinguished one rather than of the personal qualities which made working alongside him an exhilarating experience. We should report, however, that for more than half the life of this journal Shelly was ill and knew that the time available to him was likely to be relatively brief. Faced with this diminishing perspective, he did not indeed it is more accurate to say he could not moderate his involvement with the life of this journal. At his death, as at the launching of this enterprise, he held to the high ambition that encourage comeliness, vigor, and continuity in the discourse of our time.   The appropriate "critical response" to this great loss is that Sheldon Sacks' editorial colleagues, and our publisher, the University of Chicago Press, pledge whatever talents and energies we possess to the continuing life of the journal he imagined and brought into being. Arnold Hauser The l'art pour l'art Problem EDITORIAL NOTE. Arnold Hauser died in February 1978 shortly after returning to his native Hungary; he had lived nearly half of his 85 years in a kind of self-imposed exile. He is considered, by those who know his work, to be perhaps the greatest sociologist of art, though his last years were spent in comparative neglect and obscurity. We present here as a testament to the importance of both the critic and the discipline he helped shape a section from the translation of hisSociology of Art(1974).   Hauser's work draws on the influences of his teachers, Simmel, Bergson, Lukács, Mannheim, Sombart, and Troeltsch. He developed in his immenseSocial History of Art (1951)the groundwork for a sociological analysis of art ranging from prehistoric cave painting to film. In his later works The Philosophy of Art History (1958), Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origins of Modern Art(1964), andThe Sociology of Art he continued to redefine his brilliant defense of art for society's sake.   The theory of l'art pour l'art wants nothing to do with this contradiction and denies not only the moral and social usefulness of art but its every possible practical function as well. "Nobody would write poetry," says Eugenio Montale, "if the problem of literature consisted in making oneself understood." It has been doubted whether the capacity of making oneself understood, the unambiguous communication of feelings and experiences, even lies within the power of art. What Eduardo Hanslick asserts about music in Von musikalischen Schönen, namely, that its relation to everything which is nonmusical, everything which has emotional content, is vague and noncommittal, is to some extent true for all arts. Just as music expresses something which cannot be translated into any other form, so literature expresses something which is eminently literary, linguistic, something locked into words and syntactic structures. In the same way the untranslatable content of a painting, a pictorial idea, a vision, can only be seized and held onto in optical forms. The composer thinks in tones, the painter in lines and colors, the poet in words, tropes, and rhythms. Indubitable as this is, it is not the whole truth; side by side with the content which can only be expressed adequately in a particular form, there is an intrinsic value which can be translated into any form.   Kenneth Northcott, translator of this essay, is professor of older German literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. He is currently engaged in the translation of The Sociology of Art and in the study of late medieval satire in Germany and the works of Harold Pinter, in whose plays he also delights to act. James S. Ackerman On Judging Art without Absolutes That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes. Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to creep out from under the rug. If a student asks me why I think Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists which most students are too well trained to do and if I answer that judgments of value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of, for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn to make value discriminations of his own even ones different from mine and from the so-called consensus of history and ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding."   James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America. "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. W. V. Quine On the Nature of Moral Values The distinction between moral values and others is not an easy one. There are easy extremes: the value that one places on his neighbor's welfare is moral, and the value of peanut brittle is not. The value of decency in speech and dress is moral or ethical in the etymological sense, resting as it does on social custom; and similarly for observance of the Jewish dietary laws. On the other hand the eschewing of unrefrigerated oysters in the summer, though it is likewise a renunciation of immediate fleshly pleasure, is a case rather of prudence than morality. But presumably the Jewish taboos themselves began prudentially. Again a Christian fundamentalist who observes the proprieties and helps his neighbor only from fear of hellfire is manifesting prudence rather than moral values.1 Similarly for the man with felony in his heart who behaves himself for fear of the law. Similarly for the child who behaves himself in the course of moral training; his behavior counts as moral only after these means get transmuted into ends. On the other hand the value that the child attaches to the parent's approval is a moral value. It had been a mere harbinger of a sensually gratifying caress, if my recent suggestion is right, but has been transmuted into an end in itself.   ·  1. Bernard Williams, Morality (New York, 1972), pp. 75-78, questions the disjointedness of these alternatives. I am construing them disjointedly.   W.V. Quine, Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many influential works, including The Roots of Reference. "A Postscript on Metaphor," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. The present essay is being published in a festschrift, Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankenna, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt. P. D. Juhl Do Computer Poems Show That an Author's Intention_Is_Irrelevant_to the Meaning of a Literary Work? Suppose a computer prints out the following little "poem":   The shooting of the hunters she heard But to pity it moved her not.   What can we say about the meaning of this "poem"? We can say that it is ambiguous. It could mean: (1) She heard the hunters shooting at animals, people, etc., but she had no pity for the victims. . . . (2) She heard the hunters being shot but did not pity them. . . . (3) She heard the hunters shooting at someone or something and she heard the hunters being shot (at) but did not pity either.   An author could use the above word sequence (the text of the "poem") to convey either (1), (2), or (3). But since (by hypothesis) we cannot treat the text produced by the computer as anyone's use of the words in question, it would not make sense to decide among its linguistically possible readings, just as it would not make sense to choose among the linguistically possible readings of an ambiguous sentence if it is considered in abstraction from its use by a speaker on a particular occasion. For example, it would not make sense to say of the sentence "He saw the man carrying the suitcase" that it just means "He saw the man who is carrying the suitcase" if we know that and in which what ways the sentence is ambiguous. If someone did say this, we would be inclined to think either that he does not know that the sentence is ambiguous or that he is talking not about the sentence but about an utterance (i.e., a use) of that sentence by a speaker on some occasion.   Hence all we can do in interpreting the computer "poem" is to specify the set of its linguistically possible readings, namely, { (1), (2), (3)}. But it would not make sense to select (1), for example, and say, "That is what the computer poem means, not (2), nor (3)."   P. D. Juhl is an assistant professor of German at Princeton University. The present essay, in a different form, will appear in his forthcoming book, The Nature of Literary Interpretation.   See also: "Against Theory" by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Vol. 8, No. 4 Charles Altieri Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The_Example_of_Williams' "This Is Just to Say" If Milton is the grand expositor of human culture as a middle realm, Williams can be seen as in many respects his secular heir, an heir careful to work out how the poetic imagination serves to make man's expulsion from Edenic origins bearable and even invigorating. Williams' poetics begins, as Riddel makes clear, in the awareness that there is no inherent or even recoverable correspondence between words and facts in the world, but Williams then devotes most of his energies to denying the metaphysical alternative to that position the claim that all language can do is reflect on and play with the emptiness or fictiveness of its signifiers. If words do not copy but produce meanings, then they can be used significantly to focus our attention on the activities of the artist and his constructed characters as they engage in that process of production. The act of producing meanings can be the process by which to achieve another kind of reference, for the act of expression can itself become the focus generating a poem's significance by calling attention to the various ways authors and characters station themselves in relation to specific situations. Fiction then is not so much a term describing the ontological status of certain kinds of language (since many utterances in ordinary behavior also do not have referents) but a term characterizing a particular way of using language to reflect upon forms of behavior in which we are not fully conscious of the quality of our activities. Williams' position on the artist's language is clearest in his frequent metaphor of the artist as farmer. The initial activity of both men is a kind of violence, an assertion of the difference between human desires and indifferent "blank fields." But what begins as antagonism does not result in the creation of self-referential fictive structures or the gay wisdom of maintaining and disseminating differences. Rather antagonism is the precondition for what Williams richly labels "composition": the farmer-poet organizes the blank field into a fertile, life-sustaining set of relationships which are not simply linguistic.1   ·  1. Williams, Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York, 1970), pp. 98-99. Williams' image of arts as antagonistic composing has important parallels with the Russian Formalist concept of "defamiliarization," but for Williams it is not simply a scene but a total human act that is revealed by this process.   Charles Altieri teaches modern literature and literary theory in the English department at the University of Washington. The author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s, he has just completed a study of literary meaning. "Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer" was contributed to in the Winter 1979 issue. Richard McKeon Pride and Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot Justification for reading Pride and Prejudiceas a philosophical novel may be found in its much cited and variously interpreted opening sentence: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." This universal law is the first principle of a philosophical novel, although I shall also interpret it as the statement of a scientific law of human nature, a characterization of the civility of English society, and as a pronouncement on the manners of an economic class. Pride and Prejudice is a philosophical novel both in the sense of presenting a philosophy in exposition and of embodying a philosophy in action, and literary criticism exercises its proper function by expounding that philosophy and by explicating and clarifying the thought and action of the novel by means of it. The thought of Pride and Prejudice may be uncovered by interpreting it in accordance with any of a variety of philosophies, but it is peculiarly appropriate, and enlightening, to recognize its Platonizing echoes since the dialogues of Plato have gone through a history of interpretation that has evolved distinctions which are useful in interpreting Pride and Prejudice. Many interpreters of Plato's dialogues, in antiquity and later, argue that they are not statements of thoughts or opinions but are simply exhibitions of how philosophers talk; others, beginning with the Old Academy, interpret them as the expression of the truth not of the doctrines of one philosopher, but of all philosophers; some, beginning with the skepticism of the Middle or New Academy, hold that the method of Socrates was to demonstrate that all doctrines are false and therefore, by the same token, true; and some, following the Neoplatonists, sought in them the adumbration of a truth transcending human thought and expression. Neoplatonic truths are suited to tragedy and epic; skeptical Academic opinions provide a place and expectation proper to comedy. All Platonisms share hierarchical structures of being, thought, and aspiration. Plato himself describes three ladders of being, knowledge, and love in the Republic and the Symposium. The New Academic skepticism chooses a low place on those ladders, which is excellently named in the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: knowledge is based on self-evident truths, opinion can rise no higher than "a truth universally accepted," "possession of a good fortune" is a dubious degradation of vision of the ideal God to possession of material goods, and "want of a wife" is a transformation of charity or agape or love of the good in itself to concupiscence or eros or matrimony.   Richard McKeon is the editor of The Basic Works of Aristotle and coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical Edition. He delivered an earlier version of this paper at the 1977 Modern Language Association's session of the Division on Philosophical Approaches to Literature. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Arts of Invention and Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" (Summer 1975) and "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976). Victor E. Vogt Narrative and Drama in the Lyric: Robert Frost's_Strategic Withdrawal Part of Frost's continuing appeal to the "popular imagination" stems from his pronunciamentos on diverse topics: the metaphoric "pleasure of ulteriority," "the sound of sense," poems beginning in wisdom and ending in delight "a momentary stay against confusion." These phrases along with favorite one-liners ("earth's the right place for love" and "good fences make good neighbors") have made their way into our lexicon as memorable formulations both of Frost's ars poetica and of quotidian reality. Even schoolboys allegedly know the poet in these or similar terms. And why not? Yet the supposed "commonness" of Frost is precisely what must be brought under radical scrutiny including his formulaic statements of intent. Though these statements have been used effectively for critical purposes, the fact remains that they themselves are often problematic and tend toward the disconcertingly devious.1 That Frost's recourse to the rhetoric of irony and indirection is by no means confined to his poetry should not deter us from using his statements of intent to understand his poetry more fully. A cautionary "go slow," however, is in order.   ·  1. This is one reason I have difficulty accepting Elaine Barry's claims for Frost as a theorist. Having distinguished between Frost as "critical theorist" and as "practical critic," Barry concludes: "Robert Frost has left us a body of critical theory that is probably larger than that of any American poet. It has scope and depth, wit and subtlety and a great sanity. In its significance, it bears favorable comparison with the formalized criticism of Eliot or Pound . . ." (Robert Frost: On Writing [New Brunswick, N.J., 1973], p.33). Frost makes some most suggestive statements often requiring de-metaphorization about poetry, especially his own. But taken as a whole, those statements constitute, at best, only an approximation of "theory." That this is not merely semantic haggling over the definition of theory should be evident from Barry's favorable comparison of Frost to Pound and especially Eliot.   Victor E. Vogt has recently completed a study on love, death, and the quotidian in modern American drama and is currently working on the moral and sociological aspects of dramatism. Earl Miner On the Genesis and Development of Literary Systems,_Part_II The account in Part I of this essay posited two related but distinct sequences of development: of literary systems proper and of critical systems. Or, more simply, we must recognize that literary practices and systematic ideas about them develop in different ways. Today we can see in retrospect that lyric, narrative, and lyric-narrative or narrative-lyric begin literary cultures. Systematic ideas about literature develop, however, more by accident, what seems to be the result of conditions producing important critical minds at times propitious for reflection. Any full account would have to consider such things as bipropertied conceptions. This has been mentioned before, but a specific example can be given here. Chinese wen designated not merely poetry but also prose historical writing: the fu (usually called "prose-poem") established a kind of middle ground between them. In any event, such combinations, such bipropertied conceptions, do exist in very sophisticated times. Another matter of crucial importance involves the difference between the actual or descriptive existence of a literary variety and normative or valued critical consideration of a given kind. Various evidence shows that ancient Greece had lyrics as well as narrative, and preliterary Japan, narrative as well as lyrics. In the case of Greece, we tend today to think of narrative normatively as the early literature, although Plato and Aristotle lumped it with lyric and concerned themselves almost entirely with their crucial genre, drama. As for early Japan, the narrative was largely a possession of reciters, and so few heroic cycles are left from the nondominant peoples that narrative poetry is more a supposition that a presence. But there is in what remains from early times a mixture of lyric poetry with narrative prose. That combination did not prove crucial for a systematic poetics, although it is of utmost significance for later developments. It can hardly be said emphatically enough that the literary system comes first and the critical system after some interval. But the various complexities in different cultures are such that to get our bearings we may well consider the course of literary development in a single culture.   Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present (of which he is editor and a contributor) and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part I of the present essay appeared in the Winter 1978 issue of . Gerald Graff New Criticism Once More Wellek is surely right in arguing that the New Critics did not intend to behave as formalists, but I think he needs to explain why they came so close to doing so in spite of themselves. One explanation may lie in a sphere Wellek mentions but might have probed even more fully, the long-standing Romantic and modernist revolt against the culture of science, positivism, and utilitarianism. In Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (London, 1958), Raymond Williams argues that the Romantic reaction against industrial-utilitarian society led to a specialization of literature that attenuated literature's claims in a self-defeating way. Instead of contesting the realm of objective knowledge, the defenders of literature conceded this territory to science and commerce, either celebrating literature for its very freedom from such knowledge or claiming for it some alternate form of knowledge (not "about" anything) that could not be made rationally respectable. One could argue that the same pattern of misplaced reaction is seen in the New Criticism, that its revolt against the utilitarian, "Platonic" drives of science and positivism took the form of an attempt to divest literature of objective "truth of correspondence." Having equated this kind of truth with the most reductive forms of scientism, moralism, and propagandizing, the New Critics made it difficult to justify their own ambitious claims for the humanistic knowledge embodied in literature. Their way of reacting against the depravities of technological culture continues to be a common one today and can even be found in such adversaries of the New Critics as the cultural revolutionaries, the phenomenologists, and the deconstructionists all of whom express the paradigms of our modern "adversary culture." It is an understandable and even perhaps an admirable reaction, but it has led to distortions in our conception of the humanities one of which is the aggravation of that very dissociation of sensibility into scientific and poetic components that we all say we want to have done with.   Gerald Graff, chairman of the English department at Northwestern University, is the author of Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma and, most recently, Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. He responds in this article to René Wellek's "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra," published in Summer 1978 in . René Wellek A Rejoinder to Gerald Graff Graff's second point about formalism does not refute my argument that the New Critics upheld the coherence or organicity of a work of art and yet did not ignore its relation to reality. I argued this to be a defensible view also from a parallel with painting. The individual New Critics emphasized one or the other side, in different contexts, and I am not prepared to defend the clarity and consistency of every one of their pronouncements. But even the loosely phrased quotation from Allen Tate's essay "Narcissus as Narcissus" (1938) can be defended. In saying that "it [Tate is discussing his own "Ode to the Confederate Dead"] is not knowledge 'about' something else," he means that the poem does not make statements about the solipsism and narcissism that he discusses later. "The poem is rather the fullness of that knowledge"; that is, it is a creation, a new thing which has its meaning as a totality, and that meaning surely refers to the outside world: the cemetery, the dead, the Civil War, and so on. . . . To judge from Graff's book, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, we are not so far apart in our estimate of the New Criticism. I also have my troubles (as my writings on I. A. Richards, Ransom, Blackmur, and Burke show), mainly with their psychologism and the dichotomy between emotional and propositional language, but on the points that I discussed in the article the supposed lack of historical outlook, aestheticism, formalism, and scientism the New Criticism, has often been misunderstood and misrepresented. It needs and deserves the rehabilitation I have attempted.   Rene Wellek, Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature at Yale University, is the author of Theory of Literature (with Austin Warren) and of A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. He has contributed "Notes and Exchanges Between Rene Wellek and Wayne C. Booth" (Autumn 1977) and "The New Criticism: Pro and Contra" (Summer 1978) to . William C. Dowling Invisible Audience: Peter J. Rabinowitz's "Truth in Fiction" The problem of internal audience is thus that no such audience exists, that the X or abstract boundary of intentionality to which we want to give the name audience cannot be described in the terms of a world in which audiences listen to utterance. For that is the world that is annihilated in our objective comprehension of the work, and the X becomes the sole reality. Yet the only terms available to us to describe the reality that is the work must be taken from the only world we know, and the only escape from theoretical confusion is to see that such terms have, in their new use, a purely analogous function, that they draw on the world only as an unreal analogy of the X (and its world) that is real.   I'm not certain that Rabinowitz's discussion of Pale Fire is in any way central to his "four audience" theory, but I'd like to end by saying that it misses an essential point.   William C. Dowling is an associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico and the author of The Boswellian Hero. Peter J. Rabinowitza Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method To be sure, I agree that Nabokov creates a "sense of dizzying complexity," but I don't see how Dowling accounts for it at all. First of all, the passage he cites from Pnin is not an instance of the Liar's Paradox. The Liar's Paradox occurs when a single person claims that he or she always lies for in that case, there is no logically consistentway to call the claim either true or false. In Pnin,however, we have something quite different: a person, whom we suspect of often filtering the truth to serve his own ends, claims that someone else has called him a liar. That's confusing, perhaps, but not logically inconsistent; for instance, it would be logically inconsistent to say that Pnin is wrong, or is at least exaggerating, when he says that you shouldn't believe anything that the narrator says. Indeed, Pnin is wrong, and the careful reader can sort out the narrator's claims with a fair degree of accuracy, at least on the second reading. The odd sensation that Pnin inspires comes not because there's no logically consistent way to determine the truth or falsity if the narrative but rather because we can figure out when and how the narrator has slanted his statements only once we have finished the book, for only the last chapter gives us the evidence we need to interpret the earlier chapters properly.   Peter J. Rabinowitz, assistant professor of comparative literature at Hamilton College, is the author of articles on Raymond Chandler, Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, and literary borrowing and is, as well, a music critic for Fanfare. vol5num4cov290x435.jpg] Murray Krieger Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the_Duplicity of Metaphor Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly, poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so long as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it presumably signifies. This rather simple if not simplistic semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1   ·  1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago, 1947).   Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. Peter Schwenger The Masculine Mode Is there really such a thing as a masculine style of writing? What are its characteristics and why just these characteristics? Can we distinguish the masculine style from the explicit masculine content? The writers I will examine in this context are necessarily a selection from the number of those who might be included. They are all twentieth-century authors. Perhaps, as Woolf suggests in A Room of One's Own, it is because of the beginnings of the women's movement in the preceding century that "virility has now become self-conscious."1 At any rate there seems to be little explicit questioning of the male role, in literature or outside it, until our own century. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these writers only question the received images of maleness; often they set out to validate those images or, through such images, to validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. As a result, it is difficult to extract didactic points from their works. Always knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness of experience.   ·  1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928; New York, 1963), p. 105.   Peter Schwenger, assistant professor of English at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, has written Phallic Critiques, which examines the relation between masculinity and literary styles.   See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2 Moody E. Prior Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom The character of Tom has the proportions of a mythic figure. His story has little of the melodrama of the secondary plot for his heroism in meeting the trials of slavery is manifested not in outward risks and adventures but in inner strength. In Simon Legree, Tom's final adversary, Stowe provides a perfect antithesis, an ultimate image of what slavery must do to the master who takes advantage of his position and uses his power without restraint; for Legree is an ambitious Vermonter, not a Southern, an owner, not an overseer, and a product of the raw, final phase of slavery in the cotton plantations of the deep South. Legree bends every effort to brutalize Tom as though of necessity to prove that he and the South are right about Negroes and slavery, and Tom remains firm in his humanity and so disproves the sordid myth of his oppressor. It is Legree who is dehumanized by the institution of slavery. Tom emerges from the struggle as an example not simply of a black Christian slave, but of a heroic man in the face of intimidating and humiliating power.   Moody E. Prior, emeritus professor of English and former dean of the graduate school of Northwestern University, is the author of The Language of Tragedy, Science and the Humanities, and The Drama of Power-Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays.   See also: "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children" by Tommie Shelby in Vol. 38, No. 3 Strother Purdy Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation In serious art, where the best talents of each generation work, we have seen the elimination of didacticism, moral lessons, and the sentimentality so characteristic of the preceding century; in their place we find the celebration of dryness, acerbity, irony, withdrawal from emotion, balance in tension, the reduction of the authorial and, finally, the human presence: "empty words, corresponding to the void in things."1 Literature as practiced and as taught in the schools has tended toward the allusive and the elusive, intellectual games, the pastiche, the echo, the comment on the comment. Brought into relation with twentieth-century political extremism, it has given a large allowance to the grotesque subject and mirrored that subject in an undermining of human consciousness, that naïvely assumed constant that enables moral judgment. While few regret the death of Emmeline Grangerford, it may be that she died only to bequeath us Oskar Mazerath. The corrective swing taken by our literature has given us harpsichord exercises in response to megalithic politics, and "tragedy," the name of our highest inherited literary form, a form we no longer pursue, becomes a devalued label to paste in traffic accidents and on My Lai. Like the Germans who found it "poor form" to talk about certain kinds of killing,2 we may be in a position where our aesthetics works to block our morality.   ·  1. Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), p. 259. ·  2. Raul Hilberg cites in relation to this point the 4 October 1943 speech of Heinrich Himmler on the extermination of the Jews: "It was with us, thank God, an inborn gift of tactfulness, that we have never conversed about this matter, never spoken about it. Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one of us knew that we could do it again if it were ordered and if it were necessary" (The Destruction of the European Jews [Chicago, 1961], p. 652.   Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary Literature, and Henry James and articles of literary and film criticism. He has contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman" (Summer 1980) to . Mark Spilka The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief_of_Love:_A_Woolfian Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs Whether in her life or in her work, however, this difficulty with grieving recurs too often, and too insistently, to be passed off as a matter of artistic temperament. Its presence in her experimental fiction elegies for her dead brother in To the Lighthouse, the taboo on grieving in Mrs. Dalloway suggests rather a compulsive need to cope with death. Indeed, while writing To the Lighthouse she had even thought of supplanting "novel" as the name for her books with something like "elegy." Perhaps "abortive elegies for our times" would be more appropriate since she refuses in these books to deal with death and grieving in any direct or open way, and her elegiac impulse by which writer and reader alike may normally work out grief through formal measures is delayed, disguised, or thwarted, at best only partially appeased. Her refusal seems to me characteristic of our times, or of that struggle against Victorian odds which helped to make our times.   Mark Spilka, professor of English at Brown University and editor of Novel, is the author of works on Lawrence, Dickens, and Kafka. The present essay will be a chapter in his Virginia Woolf's Quarrel with Grieving.   See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2 John Paul Russo A Study in Influence: The Moore-Richards Paradigm "Hard task to analyze a soul. . . ." We would do well to let Wordsworth's comment guide our questioning. Have we avoided "a mystical and idle sense" of an influence? Have we lost our way tracking the "most obvious and particular thought?" Have our conclusions been "in the words of reason deeply weighed?" We might well wonder with such a supreme influence on a life that is firmly stamped by independence and originality, a source of an immense influence in itself. [G. E.] Moore's philosophy provided the young [I. A.] Richards with terms and concepts for his psychological aesthetics and criticism, though Richards was not long in reacting to and passing beyond this influence. More enduring was the influence on the nature of meaning, on modes of comprehending through language analysis more enduring and pervasive, though less traceable. Then, there is Moore's example of employing multiple hypotheses to which, in his application, Richards would give the name of complementarity. Lastly, Moore's personal influence reached deeply into the student's character, and if the influence did not initiate, it fortified and still fortifies a quest for sincerity, a Socratic quest for which we can scarcely find a "beginning."   John Paul Russo is associate professor of English at Camden College, Rutgers University, the editor of I. A. Richards' Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, and the author of Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity. Robert McGregor "Art" Again So far my examples have illustrated purely descriptive and evaluative uses of "work of art," but my main claim is that most uses are not pure. Take a controversial example. Christo recently hung a huge, bright orange curtain between the sides of a canyon in Rifle Gap, Colorado. The curtain stretched all the way across the canyon, filled the canyon from top to bottom, and had a hole cut out for the road at the base of the canyon to pass through. There was a good deal of controversy in Colorado at the time about whether the curtain was a work of art. . . . First, the curtain was not in a traditional medium, and this alone was enough to disqualify it as a work of art for some people. Still, it was an artifact, it was intended for public observation and contemplation, and it had no essential utilitarian function. That it met these criteria there could be no doubt, and this was enough for some to consider it a work of art. Others, however, required more before deciding. Of those, some said that a great deal of skill was required to produce it; that it definitely had significant formal qualities especially the dramatic contrast in line and color between it and the completely natural surroundings; that it was certainly a creative endeavor; and that it was most conducive to aesthetic experience comparable to certain natural phenomena. For these people it was, without a doubt, a work of art for both descriptive and evaluative reasons. Others, however, were much less charitable. They thought that if the production required skill at all, it was engineering not artistic skill; that not only did it not have significant formal qualities, it was formally trivial and sterile; that perhaps it was novel, but to call it creative was beyond the pale; that far from being conducive to aesthetic experience, it was a blight upon the landscape. Therefore, it was not a work of art. Finally, there were those people who were not sure which characteristics to attribute to the Christo production and were therefore uncertain whether it was a work of art.   Robert McGregor is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Denver and is the author of several articles on aesthetics.   See also: "Christo's Gates and Gilo's Wall" by W. J. T. Mitchell in Vol. 32, No. 4 Rawdon Wilson The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term It is not possible to face a text and announce "I shall now talk about character" in the same way that one might say "I shall now talk about plot" or "metaphor." For several reasons not least of which is the absence of a thoughtful critical tradition character is much more difficult to talk about than most other literary concepts. Most of what has been written on the subject of character, whether in recent years or in the distant past, can be seen to come under one of four possible headings. I do not think of these classifications as being mutually exclusive, although the emphasis upon one aspect of the problem of character probably tends to pull one towards a definite position.   Briefly, these positions are: (1) that characters are products of the author's mind memories, encapsulations of his experience or else (one might say) split-off slivers of his mind or self; (2) that characters are functions of the text in which they appear embodiments of theme and idea to be considered much as tokens, pieces, or counters in a game; (3) that characters are entirely artificial, constructs to be analyzed in terms of the compositional techniques that have gone into their making; (4) that characters are, for the purposes of critical reading, to be considered as if they were actual persons, and the emphasis in criticism its sole business, in fact to discuss the response they engender in an intelligent reader.   Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, has written widely on English and Spanish literature. His previous contribution to , "On Character: A Reply to Martin Price," appeared in the Autumn 1975 issue. The present essay was originally presented in an earlier form at the University of Melbourne and at the University of Alberta. Reuven Tsur Levels of Information Processing in Reading Poetry I have based my psychological hypotheses on studies in perception and in personality. Research in these two areas began independently, but by the late forties the supposedly unconnected processes came to be seen as different aspects of one process. For instance, a low tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with lack of emotional responsiveness, dogmatism, and authoritarianism; conversely, a high tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with tolerance of emotional ambivalence, openness to new experience, and a liberal world view.1 Later studies, primarily those conducted in the sixties, then established strong correlations between these findings and information-processing styles.   Information processing involves three stages: first, stimuli are selected from the environment (in our case, the "environment" will be that of poems); these stimuli are then arranged into "dimensions"; finally, if two or more dimensions result, they are compared and/or combined according to certain rules. H. M. Schroder and his colleagues (upon whose work I have drawn liberally) have established correlations between personality styles and styles of information processing.2 For example, an intolerant personality that is, one with a low integration index "identifies and organizes stimuli in a fixed way, and the rules derived from existing schemata are explicit in defining this one way" (p. 177). What psychologists call an "abstract personality" and identify in terms of "flexibility" or "tolerance of ambiguity" what in literary studies is most conveniently called "negative capability" is not necessarily characterized as lacking rules but rather as possessing a greater number of conflicting rules on a lower level which may be accommodated by rules on a higher level.   ·  1. See Jerome S. Bruner and David Krech, eds., Perception and Personality,2nd ed. (New York, 1968) and Robert R. Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey, eds., Perception: An Approach to Personality (New York, 1951). Although, as Else Frenkel-Brunswick says, "rigidity in one respect may go with flexibility in another," she also adds: "There is some indication that in the case of distinct intolerance of emotional ambivalence one may as a rule be able to locate at least some aspects of intolerance of cognitive ambiguity although these may often be more apparent on a higher level than that of perception proper" ("Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and Perceptual Personality Variable," in Perception and Personality, pp. 139 and 140.) The present essay, since it is one section of a projected larger study, deals with the issues inherent in this approach in only a limited fashion. (For a related essay, see my "Two Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative Capability," College English 36 [March 1975]: 776-88.) One could, for instance, quote whole essays in this branch of psychology dealing with ambiguity and point to their relevance for some aspects of literary study and the teaching of literature. Ambiguity, of course, is also a central term in New Criticism. See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1930) and Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan, "Aesthetic Ambiguity," in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art, ed. Kris (New York, 1951), pp. 243-64. ·  2. H. M. Schroder, M. J. Driver, and S. Streufert, "Levels of Information Processing," in Thought and Personality, ed. Peter B. Warr (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 174-91. All citations to this work will appear in the text.   Reuven Tsur, senior lecturer in Hebrew literature at Tel-Aviv University, is the author of several books in Hebrew on medieval and modern Hebrew poetry and, in English, A Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre. Philipp P. Fehl Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni_Domenico_Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting Capricci are nonsense drawings that delineate an elusive but inevitable sense behind or, better, within the palpable nonsense of the elementary proposition of a drawing; they are capers on a tightrope stretched between the poles of pathos and the ridiculous. We shall succeed in not falling only if we step forward boldly and know not only what we are doing but also what we are up against in the making of a picture as well as in living in the world. For the world, in its yawning impudence of death and the dance of blind eagerness, ambition, and noisy speechlessness, makes us look to art not, or not necessarily, to escape from the world (even if escaping is a birthright) but rather to learn how to take its measure. . . . There is a painting ["St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching"] joined to the Passion cycle in S. Polo which demonstrates as well as any paradox ever will how Giandomenico joined piety and irony in his religious art without curtailing the glory of either. He arrives, as it were, at a God-fearing irony. We see St. Vincent Ferrer preaching. He speaks so eloquently, so convincingly in praise of the divine truth, that light shines forth from him and angel's wings grow on his shoulders. Fascinated by the miracle but even more so by the saint's words, his audience sits spellbound at his feet; in the foreground, however, sits a youth, a fop perhaps, gorgeously dressed, with a singular smile on his face, his hand musingly poised to his cheek, who looks at us quizzically. He is the link between us and the miracle. "Can you believe it?" says the smile, and perhaps "I did not and yes how can you now not believe it, you need but look - as I did - for there it is!" It is, I think, the face of one who knows about the truth of the absurd and its inner logic. Credo quia absurdum: if it were not so, we could prove the existence of God by feeding data into a computer, and there would be many believers, whose faith, in turn, deserved but little credit. Needless to say, perhaps, the face that so speaks to us in laughter joined to wonder is a self-portrait.1   ·  1. In S. Polo the painting of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching hangs opposite a matching picture of The Finding of the True Cross. There is a beautiful young woman on the right who looks at us beseechingly and with her right hand points at the cross. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo who looks out of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching cannot help but see this lady (who may be a portrait figure) and be affected by her earnest gesture. For a reproduction of the painting, see Maruz, G. D. Tiepolo, plate 22.   Philipp P. Fehl is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has edited (with Raina Fehl and Keith Aldrich) Franciscus Junius: The Literature of Classical Art. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in the History of Art," appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue; the present essay was delivered in an earlier version at Stanford University in 1976 and is included in his collection of essays, Art and Mortality. His capricci, Birds with Titles, were exhibited in a one-man show at Kenyon College. vol6num1cov290x435.jpg] Stephen Toulmin The Inwardness of Mental Life As a model for explaining the inwardness of mental life, a computer in the cortex is no improvement on an immaterial mind trapped wherever Descartes or Newton originally located it. For both models distract our attention from certain crucial differences between inwardness and interiority - that is, from certain crucial respects in which these two inherited ways of thinking about the inner mind diverge from one another. Clearly, interiority is an inescapable feature of our brains and of all the physiological processes that go on in the central nervous system. There is no doubt at all that those processes are permanently located inside our bodies. So, if our mental lives were, properly speaking, trapped within our brains, they must be trapped there from birth. In this view, our minds must indeed operate permanently (as Jean-Paul Sartre puts it) à huis clos: like prisoners who are born, live, and die in permanent deadlock. Yet the inwardness of mental life, as we know it and speak of it in everyday experience, is not like that at all. The things that mark so many of our thoughts, wishes, and feelings as inner or inward are not permanent, inescapable, lifelong characteristics. On the contrary, inwardness is in many respects an acquired feature of our experience, a product, in part, of cultural history but in part also of individual development. So understood, our mental lives are not essentially inner lives. Rather, they become inner because we make them so. And we do develop inner lives, in this direct, experiential sense, because we have reasons for doing so.   Stephen Toulmin presented an earlier version of this essay as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago on 30 April 1979. He is the author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, Knowing and Acting,and (with Allan Janik) Wittgenstein's Vienna. Michael Holroyd George Bernard Shaw: Women and the Body Politic It was difficult to avoid the amiability of [Shaw's] impersonal embrace. Everything he seemed to say was what it was and another thing. Women were the same as men: but different. But of the two, he calculated, women were fractionally less idiotic than men. "The only decent government is government by a body of men and women," he said in 1906; "but if only one sex must govern, then I should say, let it be women put the men out! Such an enormous amount of work is done of the nature of national housekeeping, that obviously women should have a hand in it." Shaw favored women over men in much of the same spirit as he advertised Roman Catholics being a trifle superior to Protestants. Both preferences were the product of a Protestant gentleman who delighted in perverse exhibitions of fairness.   Certain consequences followed from the fact that only women became pregnant. Had Shaw had the making of the world in the first place, and not merely the remaking of it, things might have been ordered more sensibly. However, the rules had been laid down and the worst thing you could do was to complain of them. Every grievance was an asset in the womb of time. The advantage to women came in the form of greater natural wisdom about sex. They could hardly help themselves. Shaw maintained that the instinct of women acted as a sophisticated compass in steering our course for the future. His disenchantment with the human experiment expanded during and after the First World War. In Heartbreak House "my Lear" he called it he shows us what he supposed to be a "Bloomsburgian" culture where the feminine instinct has been trivialized in such a way that it no longer gives us our true bearings, and we drift towards the rocks. We had defaulted in our contract with the Life Force and would probably be superseded by another partner.   Michael Holroyd is the author of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John and the authorized biography of George Bernard Shaw. The present essay appears in The Genius of Shaw, edited by Holroyd, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Lee R. Edwards The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of_Female_Heroism I have taken such pains to indicate the scope, terms, and foci of Neumann's analysis because he provides one of the main pillars on which any further systematic study of the woman hero must rest. By showing Psyche's relation to the mythic or archetypal structure of heroism, by demonstrating the particular ways in which the hero is a figure distinguished primarily by involvement in particular patterns of action and psychological development, Neumann provides an invaluable service to further studies of literature, heroism, and women. Without belaboring the distinction between the hero and the heroine, Neumann validates the claim that a woman can be a hero and eliminates the awkward distinction between the heroine as heroic figure and the heroine as conventional woman that has perplexed so much recent literary, especially feminist, analysis.1He is also very good at locating the details in Psyche's dilemma that constitute significant associative images within a narrative representing heroism by means of a female character. Specifically, he indicates how Psyche's beauty is as much a burden as a boon, shows the importance of her relationship to other female characters, and points out the ways in which the apparent hostility of other women acts as a necessary goad to Psyche's own developing independence. Neumann's analysis is also suggestive in showing the appropriateness of archetypal criticism to material which is not myth in the narrow sense. To be sure, Apuleius' Amor and Psyche results from the distillation of narratives whose origins are clearly to be found in the folklore and functioning mythologies of Greek and Roman culture; just as clearly, however, Apuleius is telling his tale as part of a highly self-conscious, complexly structured narrative2 analogous, in some ways, to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Milton's great religious epics, and even that seemingly least mythic set of narrative structures, the novel.   ·  1. See, e.g., Ellen Moers' long discussion of "heroinism" in Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York, 1976), pp. 113-242. Moers' use of this awkward term, the female version of the presumably masculine heroism, perpetuates the idea that only men can be true heroes, while extraordinary women remain "special cases" necessitating special terminology. ·  2. See P. G. Walsh, The Roman Novel: The 'Satyricon' of Petronius and the 'Metamorphoses' of Apuleius (London, 1970), pp. 141-223.   Lee R. Edwards is an editor of The Massachusetts Review and an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is presently completing The Labors of Psyche: Female Heroism and Fictional Form. David D. Cooper The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a_Critical Paradigm Perhaps the best way to understand Harold Bloom's enigmatic theory of "poetic misprision" is to avoid the immanent critique altogether. It is best described, rather (at least as far as the theory's role in the evolution of our attempt to assign some "meaning" to the poetic response), as a synthesis. Bloom seems to have taken Aristotle's mimesis and linked it to Freud's concept of sublimation,1 with particular emphasis on the role that sublimation plays in "the family romance." Even if one were to hedge a bit and take into account the fact that neo-Freudian re-evaluations of orthodox psychoanalysis have succeeded in extracting the purely sexual component out of the psychodynamics of sublimation, one is still left with the notion of sublimation as anxiety producing. Thus it is that, according to Bloom, the modern poet, in particular, sublimates his imitation of a strong precursor poet. Since the emphasis today is on desexualizing libido, Freud's original sexual vocabulary seems to have survived for its metaphorical value alone; the "unconscious fear of castration," for example, is simply a metaphor for "the poet's fear of ceasing to be a poet," a man's fear of ceasing to be a man. No matter how much we "modernize" Freud, the fact will always remain that the psychoanalytic context is the context of psychopathology: "a variety of the uncanny."   ·  1. See Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex,in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), pp. 625-26.   David D. Cooper is an associate in the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Using the critical paradigm developed in the present essay, he has written a book on Thomas Merton's poetry.   See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol. 2, No. 2; "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3 Samuel Jay Keyser and Alan Prince Folk Etymology in Sigmund Freud, Christian Morgenstern, and_Wallace Stevens We began with the observation that language is often held to enact the world. We have examined several instances of this notion, beginning with a discussion of the folk etymology of certain words, moving through an example of Freud, to Morgenstern, Lettvin, and Stevens. The method shared by these examples assumes that words are literally saturated with meaning; that what appears arbitrary or senseless in them can be made to render up its sense and its motivation through a kind of inspired analysis. Our intent has been to show how this principle of folk etymology lies behind some sophisticated creative thinking. In Freud, it is hypothesized to be a psychological mechanism of some depth. In Morgenstern and Lettvin, it forms the basis for a resonant poetic joke, while in Stevens it appears to have the same major status as the mythic principle of creation-through-language illustrated in our first examples from Egyptian mythology and from Genesis. Stevens, of course, uses the principle to create poetry, not religion; for as he says in section 5 of "The Man with the Blue Guitar":                                                               Poetry   Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns . . .   Samuel Jay Keyser, head of the department of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of Linguistic Inquiry, is the coauthor of English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth and Its Role in Verseand of Beginning English Grammar. Alan Prince, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has written on stress and linguistic rhythm and is currently working, with Keyser, on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Eric S. Rabkin Metalinguistics and Science Fiction The dictionary tells us that metalinguistics is simply "the study of the interrelationship between language and other cultural behavioral phenomena."1 However, because most studies are in fact expressed in language, the study itself becomes a candidate for metalinguistic inquiry. In other words, language is not only capable of interrelationships with kinship systems or economic systems or rituals but it is capable of intrarelationships. . . . Language often becomes a subject in science fiction because science fiction writers realize that they must account for the communication between characters from different planets or different epochs. Wells' Time Traveller, when he first encounters the effete and childlike Eloi, notices that they speak "a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue" (The Time Machine, 1895, chap. 4) which he never does come to understand. This failure of understanding is realistic and leads to some lovely pathos as the Time Traveller tries to apprehend a world solely by means of observation and exchanges of facial expression and gesture. Although language conveniently drops from consideration once it is established that there won't be any significant talking, that it is considered at all adds plausibility to this fantastic tale.   ·  1. American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition, 1976.   Eric S. Rabkin, professor of English and director of the Collegiate Institute for Values and Science at the University of Michigan, is the author of Narrative Suspense, The Fantastic in Literature, Arthur C. Clarke and the editor of Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories. His previous contribution to , "Spatial Form and Plot," appeared in the Winter 1977 issue.   See also: "The Shape of the Signifier" by Walter Benn Michaels in Vol. 27, No. 2 Eugene Eoyang Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of_Flavor_in Chinese Literary Criticism "The essence of literature may be compared to the various plants and trees," Liu Hseih writes, "alike in the fact that they are rooted in the soil, yet different in their flavor and their fragrance, their exposure to the sun."1 The character of each work is manifest in its unique savor and in its scent. In other works, the uniqueness of a work can be savored: texts may echo other works, but the personality of any work is instantaneously verified by what Liu Hseih calls wei, flavor, and hsiu, fragrance. It is this uniqueness that persists and survives innumerable bad imitations, shifts in circumstances, lost phonetics, and changing styles. It is what remains fresh in the classics and enables the contemporary reader to feel a sense of discovery and newness. Liu Hseih says that of these lasting works that their "roots are deep, their foliage luxuriant, their expression succinct yet rich; the things described were familiar, but their ramifications are far- reaching: so, although they were written in the past, they have a lasting savor that remains fresh."2   ·  1. Liu Hseih, Wen-hsin tiao-lung chu, ed. Fan Wen-lan (Peking, 1958), p. 519; Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of the Dragons (Taipei, 1970), p. 232. ·  2. Liu Hseih, p. 22; Shih, p. 24. Although the same Chinese word wei is used in this passage, I have translated it as "savor" to stress the combination of qualities inherent in a work rather than restrict these qualities to a single "flavor."   Eugene Eoyang is an associate professor of comparative literature and of East Asian languages and literatures at Indiana State University. He has contributed over fifty translations to Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry and is the author of an anthology of Chinese fiction, Links in the Chain. Stephen Orgel Shakespeare  and the Kinds of Drama If we think about comedy in terms of stock characters, Shakespeare provides some startling examples. Here, for instance, are two hypothetical casts: (1) A jealous husband, a chaste wife, an irascible father, a clever malicious servant, a gullible friend, a bawdy witty maid; (2) A pair of lovers, their irascible fathers, a bawdy serving woman, a witty friend, a malicious friend, a kindly foolish priest. Both of these groups represent recognizable comic configurations, though in fact they are also the casts of Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Being able to see them in this light, I think, reveals something important about how both these tragedies work. Much of their dramatic force derives from the way they continually tempt us with comic possibilities. We are told in a prologue that Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed, but if inevitability is a requisite of tragedy, neither play will qualify for the genre: they are the most iffy dramas in the Shakespearean canon. At innumerable points in both plays, had anything happened differently, the tragic catastrophe would have been averted. Othello particularly teases the audience in this way as the famous story about the man who leapt from his seat, furious at the impending murder of Desdemona, and shouted "You fool, can't you see she's innocent?" reveals. The story is no doubt apocryphal (I have even heard it told about Verdi's opera), but the point is that it is unique to this play: there are no similar tales of spectators leaping up to rescue Cordelia, to save Gloucester from blinding, to dash the asp from Cleopatra's hand.   Stephen Orgel, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of The Jonsonian Masque, The Illusion of Power, and the coauthor of Inigo Jones. The editor of Jonson's Complete Masques and of Jonson's Selected Masques (in the Yale Ben Jonson series), he is currently writing a book on the idea of theatrical genres in the Renaissance. Nelson Goodman Metaphor as Moonlighting The acknowledged difficulty and even impossibility of finding a literal paraphrase for most metaphors is offered by [Donald] Davidson1 as evidence that there is nothing to be paraphrased - that a sentence says nothing metaphorically that it does not say literally, but rather functions differently, inviting comparisons and stimulating thought. But paraphrase of many literal sentences also is exceedingly difficult, and indeed we may seriously question whether any sentence can be translated exactly into other words in the same or any other language. Let's agree, though, that literal paraphrase of metaphor is on the whole especially hard. That is easily understood since the metaphorical application of terms has the effect, and usually the purpose, of drawing significant boundaries that cut across ruts worn by habit, of picking out new relevant kinds for which we have no simple and familiar literal descriptions. We must note in passing, though, that the metaphorical application may nevertheless be quite clear. For just as inability to define "desk" is compatible with knowing which articles are desks, so inability to paraphrase a metaphorical term is compatible with knowing what it applies to, And as I have remarked elsewhere,2 whether a man is metaphorically a Don Quixote or a Don Juan is perhaps easier to decide than whether he is literally a schizoid or a paranoiac.   ·  1. In "What Metaphors Mean," 5 (Autumn 1978): 31-47. ·  2. In "Stories upon Stories; or, Reality on Tiers," delivered at the conference Levels of Reality, in Florence, Italy, September 1978.   Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard, has written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and Forecast; Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and Projects;and, most recently, Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to include "The Status of Style" (Summer 1975), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981). Max Black How Metaphors Work: A Reply to Donald Davidson To be able to produce and understand metaphorical statements is nothing much to boast about: these familiar skills, which children seem to acquire as they learn to talk, are perhaps no more remarkable than our ability to tell and to understand jokes. How odd then that it remains difficult to explain what we do (and should do) in grasping metaphorical statements. In a provocative paper, "What Metaphors Mean," 1 Donald Davidson has recently charged many students of metaphor, ancient and modern, with having committed a "central mistake." According to him, there is "error and confusion" in claiming "that a metaphor has, in addition to its literal sense or meaning, another sense or meaning." The guilty include "literary critics like Richards, Empson, and Winters; philosophers from Aristotle to Max Black; psychologists from Freud and earlier to Skinner and later; and linguists from Plato to Uriel Weinreich and George Lakoff." Good company, if somewhat mixed. The error to be extirpated is the "idea that a metaphor has a special meaning" (p. 32).   If Davidson is right, much that has been written about metaphor might well be consigned to the flames. Even if he proves to be wrong, his animadversions should provoke further consideration of the still problematic modus operandi of metaphor.   ·  1. In "What Metaphors Mean," 5 (Autumn 1978): 31-47. All further references in text.   Max Black is Susan Linn Sage professor of philosophy and humane letters emeritus at Cornell University and senior member of the Cornell program on science, technology, and society. His many influential works include Models and Metaphors, A Companion to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and, most recently, Caveats and Critiques. During the fall of 1978 he was Tarner Lecturer at Cambridge University and is currently preparing a book on rationality based on those lectures. Lawrence Kramer The Shape of Post-Classical Music Very few nineteenth-century works are unintelligible in terms of a dual structure. Consider a Chopin Ballade or Etude as an example. Such pieces, with their continuous chromatic mutation and rhapsodic form, make little sense in classical terms. Yet once one grasps that the process of chromatic alteration is their norm, not a mode of deviation, they become perfectly and immediately intelligible. Their autonomy is in no way compromised, nor do the pieces require extrinsic support from language; any competent listener will recognize that their structural tensions derive from the contrast between a continual attack on the stability of their tonal centers and the continual resilience of those centers as sources of structure. Chopin, like Schumann after him, may go so far as to treat the major and minor modes of one key as interchangeable; but even that only emphasizes the simultaneity of tonal stability and tonal instability which informs their works and clarifies their structures. Similarly, one can find in Brahms a deliberate return to the "premise structure" of classical music, as filtered through Beethoven; and Brahms' music clearly attempts to mediate between this structure and the normative instability of nineteenth-century harmony. Subotnik, however, is pressed by her thesis to deny the autonomy and dual structure of Brahms' music. So she says of him that "Those of his instrumental works which achieved popularity allowed the majority of listeners to perceive nothing in them beyond the individuality of Brahms' themes, gestures, and instrumental colors; within his works the classical identity of subjectively designed gesture and objectively rigorous structure was no longer generally audible."1 Subotnik offers no evidence in support of this claim nor does she mention a single work of Brahms in connection with it. In view of such transparently "classical" structures as the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, the Passacaglia of the Fourth Symphony, the Rondo of the Violin Concerto, and dozens of others, the claim seems improbable at best.   ·  1. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, "The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music, Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment," 4 (Summer 1978): 761.   Lawrence Kramer has written various articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and on the relation between poetry and music. An assistant professor of English at Fordham University, he has written a book on Wordsworth and Keats. Rose Rosengard Subotnik Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music I try to indicate this special quality of classical intelligibility by linking it with the notion of "dual structure," a notion which should not be flattened to mean any sort of intelligibility to those listeners deemed "competent," especially if the term "competence" is used without qualification. Dual structure in music, as I construe it, is an intrastructural system of reference between pairs of discrete semiotic constructs both members of which are in some sense wholly embodied in a given musical structure. These constructs include a general ground of meaning and more particularized semiotic configurations derived from that ground; and because both are present in the musical structure, the relationship between them the meaning of the music can be retrieved directly, wholly, and on a general scale. No extrastructural mediating explanation or specialized information or training is needed; the interpreter need merely use the musical equivalent of reason. The archetype of such a system in music seems to be the relation of implication or self-generation that obtains between premise and conclusion within a pure system of logic, which, as described by Kant in his account of theoretical reason, would be universally intelligible.   Rose Rosengard Subotnik, assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago, is the author of articles on nineteenth- century music. Her essay which prompted this exchange, "The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music, Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue of . John Reichert But That Was in Another Ball Park: A_Reply_to_Stanley_Fish Fish comes dangerously close to identifying the meaning of a statement with its illocutionary force. At one point he says that "the meaning of a sentence is a function of its illocutionary force"(p. 638). At another he says that a move from a situation in which "I have to study for an exam" is heard as a statement to one in which it is heard as a rejection of a proposal is a move "from one meaning that emerges in a set of circumstances to another meaning that emerges in another set of circumstances"(p. 641). Since "meaning" is so tricky a term, it may be well to remind ourselves that in a situation in which the sentences "I have to tie my shoes," "I have to eat popcorn," and "I hate movies" would all be understood as rejections of an invitation to the movies, no one would mistake the meaning of one for that of either of the other two. The three sentences make different statements, convey different information, and offer different reasons for not going to the movies. There is a sense in which Y's saying "I hate movies" means that (i.e., implies that) he rejects the proposal. But even in that situation, the meaning of "I hate movies" isn't reducible to "I reject your proposal."   John Reichert, chairman of the English department at Williams College, is the author of Making Sense of Literature. He has contributed "Making Sense of Interpretation" to . Stanley E. Fish A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to_Stop_Worrying_and_Learn_to Love Interpretation I could go on in this way, replying to Reichert's reply, point by point, but the pattern of my replies is already set: he charges that my position entails certain undesirable consequences and flies in the face of some of our most basic intuitions; I labor to show that none of those consequences (the lack of a basis for deciding that something is wrong, etc.) follow and that our basic intuitions are confirmed (albeit in a new light) rather than denied by what I have to say. This of course is exactly what I was doing in the article to which he takes exception and will soon do at length in a book to be published within the year. I am not, however, optimistic that a reading of that book will make Reichert a convert because the fears that impel his argument are so basic to his beliefs. I take the key sentence in his article to be this one: "Since I would like to think that I read the same King Lear that Dr. Johnson read, and am therefore free to disagree with his interpretation of it, I would like to find a way out of Fish's formulation of the reader's situation" (pp. 164-65). Reichert's commitment to what he would like to be able to do and his conviction that if what I say is true he will be unable to do it make it impossible for him to regard my position as anything but perverse and dangerous. Even if I could demonstrate in his own terms (as I think I have) that his fears are unfounded that he is still free to disagree with Dr. Johnson or anyone else any argument I might make would be received within the belief that it had to be wrong, and within that belief he could only hear it as wrong. (Of course I am equally open to this characterization; when Reichert or anyone else identifies something an object, a text, an intention as being available independently of interpretation, I know in advance that it could not be so and I look immediately for ways to demystify or deconstruct it. I always succeed.) To this Reichert would probably reply that arguments are either good or bad, irrespective of beliefs, and that mine are bad; but it is my contention that arguments are forceful only within a set of beliefs and that unless someone is willing to entertain the possibility that his beliefs are wrong he will be unable even to hear an argument that constitutes a challenge to them. That is why the fact that Reichert is likely to remain unconvinced by my argument is its strongest confirmation.   Stanley Fish is the author of, among other works, Is There a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and in Literary Criticism. His contributions to include "Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer 1978), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980). vol6num2cov290x435.jpg] Ralph W. Rader The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry a critical inquiry seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to show that we could in significant measure understand and explain literature and its value as standing independent of our understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on the real being of literature and the possibility of valid conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those whom it influences. His creative constitution and the length and circumstances of his life were such as to allow only the one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a series of articles in which he modified and expanded the application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic forms what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and redefined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work and marks their value and his intention.   Ralph W. Rader, chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. His previous contributions to are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" (Winter 1974), "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" (June 1975), and "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976). Lawrence Lipking Arguing with Shelly Now Shelly should be allowed a word. The way I have formulated the problem, he reminds me, suffers from glibness if not actual misrepresentation; above all in my tendency to equate artistic ends with artistic conventions. I accuse him of rigidity, yet define the western far more rigidly than he would do, even to the point of suggesting that a novel with real Indians in it would no longer be a western. Generic laws are not so arbitrary. The end of a work of art, as he understands it, cannot be located merely in some set of formal requirements (14 lines of rhyming iambic pentameter) or reproducible actions (the U.S. Cavalry rides to the rescue). We do not make works of art by satisfying a checklist of conventions. Rather, the ends obeyed by a work of art a concrete whole derive from the total effect that it tries to achieve. In a well-constructed piece of fiction, every element, including the ethical statements and implied moral judgments, contributes to and is subordinate to that total effect. Hence the seeming contradiction between artistic ends and moral means turns out, on analysis, to be illusory. An artistic end can accommodate any degree of moral complexity, even ethical ambiguities and contradictions, so long as they help shape the whole. Even Blifil could have been a richly complex character, if Fielding had wanted him to be, so long as his complexity had been made functional to the desired effect of Tom Jones. Only incompetent or convention- bound novelists find themselves compelled to make insincere judgments. A good novelist learns to advance his ends by every means, from his most outrageous leaps of the imagination to his most subtle ethical discriminations. If a good novel communicates some tension or internal contradictions, we have no right to conclude that such an effect was forced on the novelist against his will. Perhaps that tension manifests or articulates the author's most sincere and profound moral convictions.   Lawrence Lipking, Chester Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Northwestern University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary Criticism 1900-1970. He is currently completing a work dealing with poetic careers, which is to be included in a larger project, The Poet-Critics, and is studying the literary tradition of "abandoned women." His previous contribution to , "The Marginal Gloss," appeared in the Summer 1977 issue. James R. Kincaid Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years_Later What so many readers whether "sensitive and intelligent" and comprising "generations" I do not know have found in Fiction and the Shape of Belief is sheer delight in the rigor and shrewdness of the argument. The most formidable part of Sacks' book is precisely what one would at first necessarily consider the soft spot: the relations of "belief" to fictional form. If one allows the assumptions about a stable and controllable language implicit in the argument and then perhaps substitutes a Boothian term like "implied author" for "Fielding," the demonstrations are irresistible. Sacks sets himself the job of trying to "formulate a theory about a constant and necessary relationship between the ethical beliefs of novelists . . . and novels" (p. 27). He works his way through various possibilities largely by means of eliminating the crude and the obvious. The question "What must Fielding have believed to have created such a character or devised such a situation?" is at first answered by "Almost anything." We can infer little directly about belief from "situation characters"; we must be very careful not to regard the speeches of paragon characters as "isolable topical essays" (p. 141). While the model of a novel presented to us is "constructed," architectural, and therefore undynamic, it is also highly complex. The process of making inferences from the relations between parts and between the parts and the whole, of comparing signals with other signals, is delicate indeed. Sacks' method is to lead us gradually toward more and more complex formulations of belief, blocking easy answers and forcing us to take more and more into account. He is gracious toward but has little interest in historical or biographical evidence that would bear on the question of belief; his subject is relentlessly formal. The central concern "How can any novelist embody his beliefs in novels?" is focused on "how," on the manipulation of formal devices, not on the content of that belief. Once inside the system, one can do little but cheer.   James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns, and The Novels of Anthony Trollope, he is currently writing a book on narrative structures and the question of coherence. His previous contributions to are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Text" (Summer 1977) and "Pluralistic Monism" (Summer 1978). Mary Doyle Springer Upon ReadingFiction and the Shape of Belief If I choose two words in the book that I think have been most influential, I would choose "mutually exclusive." Sacks was scarcely the first critic to observe that the kinds of fiction are usually actions, apologues, or satires. But no other theoretician has insisted so cogently as he did that, as principles governing the interaction of parts in a coherent work, these principles are mutually exclusive, "mutually incompatible." The reason Sacks became a great journal editor was that the firmness of his own principles never blinded him to the value of other and very different theoretical questions which might be addressed to a work of fiction. And his tone of voice was never brazen but always that of the eighteenth-century gentleman: Come, let us reason together. Yet he never blinked his adherence to the truths he saw: he stated them directly, and he taught us to strive equally to face the consequences of holistic recognition of forms: "One cannot create an action which is also a satire any more than he can write an active sentence which is also a passive sentence in English. To carry the analogy a step farther, the observation that the types are mutually incompatible is no more an attempt to dictate to writers what they may or may not do than is the observation that active sentences are not passive sentences" (p. 46).   Mary Doyle Springer, associate professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California, is the author of Forms of the Modern Novella and A Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of Henry James. She is presently at work on a companion theoretical study dealing with the rhetoric of dramatic character in performance. Sheldon Sacks The Pursuit of Lew Archer For example, in the traditional "who done it" (much of Ellery Queen, some of the early Gardner, and a number of Agatha Christie's best tales), the basic pleasure is in the creation and solution of the riddle itself - somewhat akin to the pleasure of solving a difficult crossword puzzle. In such works the riddle itself must be sufficiently ingenious to surprise us but never so labyrinthine as to destroy the illusion that we may beat the professional to the solution. In no case may necessary clues be withheld for, failing to solve the riddle ourselves, we must at the very least see how we should have been able to solve it with the same information as the professional; given an unreliable narrator, we will feel deceived rather than pleasantly surprised. It is clear that in such instances the value judgments, as opposed to the riddle, should be as unoriginal and conventional as possible. The agents or agent whose initial act caused the riddle might best perform an act of murder for obvious gain or because he wants to replace a current wife with a beautiful mistress. Complexity of thought and judgment must never reach the point where it distracts our attention from the pleasure of the riddle itself; ethical values must merely be minimally consonant with our desire to see the riddle solved in terms that prevent moral indignation. The detective in turn may be given minimal idiosyncrasies that define him as a character, but again since, in this kind of work, the alteration of circumstances of who commits the crime is merely pro forma usually he is merely caught and his future in prison or the electric chair is unstressed the traits possessed by the detective are almost solely restricted to those that allow him to solve the riddle that we should have been able to solve ourselves. It is this kind of work that is frequently advertised by plaintive requests "please don't reveal the ending." We rarely read such works a second time. We are completely remote from the pursuit of Lew Archer. Quentin Bell Bloomsbury and "the Vulgar Passions" As I see it, the historic role of literary Bloomsbury was to act as a sort of check or antibody continually attacking the proponents of the vulgar passions in the body politic whenever these menaced the traditional values of liberal England. In a democracy and perhaps in any modern state there is always a danger that men seeking power will rely upon the feelings rather than the intelligence of the masses. Such appeals to the vulgar passions represent a continual danger; fight on till the Huns are smashed, squeeze Germany until the pips squeak, woman's place is in the home, stamp out dirty unnatural vice, keep the black man in his place exhortations of this kind can be terribly effective. Against them, or most of them, one may oppose the arguments of the Sermon on the Mount: love your enemies, all men are brothers. This Bloomsbury did not do; it had no use either for the hero or for the saint. In its polemics it appeals to good sense and good feeling and relies upon the belief that ultimately the reasoned argument will prevail.   Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin,and On Human Finery.His previous contributions to are "Art and the Elite" (Autumn 1974) and exchanges with E. H. Gombrich (Spring 1976) and James Ackerman (Summer 1979). Wendy Steiner The Case for Unclear Thinking: The New Critics_versus_Charles Morris In 1946, after an eight-year debate with the New Critics, Charles Morris doggedly maintained that "an education which gave due place to semiotic would destroy at its foundations the cleavage and opposition of science and the humanities."1 This insistence on the unity of disciplines the hallmark of the logical empiricist movement and its brainchild, The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (of which Morris was associate editor) effectively silenced semiotics as a force in American literary studies. For the New Critics' point of departure and one of the few tenets that they held in common was the belief that art creates a mode of knowledge different in kind from that of practical or scientific discourse and that a criticism modeled on the latter would miss the essence of its subject matter. The quarrel, which continued unresolved during the polemics of the war years, now fuels the controversy between structuralism and post- structuralism. It lies at the very heart of the question of the relevance of semiotics to the humanities.   ·  1. Charles Morris, Signs, Language, and Behavior, in Writings on the General Theory of Signs (The Hague, 1971), p. 327.   Wendy Steiner, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein. She has written a book on the relations between modern painting and literature and edited the proceedings of the 1978 Ann Arbor Conference on the Semiotics of Art. Ross Miller Chicago Architecture after Mies Mies' disciplined retreat from romantic or individual influence created the illusion of an objective architectural order. Miesian architecture seemed fated, and the public was asked to accept it as a fait accompli. In contrast, Tigerman's "Little House" and the designs of Laurence Booth, Thomas Hall Beeby, Stuart Cohen, James Freed, James Nagle, and Ben Weese are not dependent on their ever being produced. They need not exist in actuality but only in process because their self-conscious styles serve a heuristic purpose. The Chicago Seven exhibitors present an architecture that cannot be understood apart from the ideas which underlie it. The audience is directly involved in architectural creation and leaves such an exhibit better prepared to evaluate the man-made environment. The work is revealed to the audience at its earliest moment of creation and serves as a modest but important first step at demystifying architecture and the entire design process.   Conceptual architecture distinguished from work rendered for particular clients reveals the fundamentally dialectical nature of contemporary architecture. The linking of method, the way an architectural idea evolves (sketches and notes), to product (model and working prints) accentuates the art's dynamic quality. Design in this way is seen not merely as a supraorganizational framework capable of defining large areas of urban or exurban space but as a problem-solving tool that can be sensitively applied to meet the specific needs of an individual or community.   Ross Miller teaches English and American studies at the University of Connecticut. He has written a book on the roots of contemporary architecture in Chicago. Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. Acquisition Material acquisition buying, inheriting, being given and nonmaterial learning a word, assimilating a form have been likened, and in both, meaningful acquisition cannot take place without a taxonomy, a scheme of categories into which the acquired element can be fitted. Then with these elements both material and nonmaterial we create a world or build and project a self, the painter and the interior decorator equally manipulating the elements in a vocabulary. The coarseness of such an outlook seems to bludgeon away long- established fine distinctions. We need not deny, however, that there may be a kind of "indifference" in regard to "the real existence of the thing" which allows us "to play the part of judge in matters of taste," as Kant would have it,1we need not deny the existence of an "aesthetic attitude: it is just that such indifference and such an attitude probably don't have much to do with our day-to-day experience of artifacts and perhaps needn't. The "aesthetic attitude" was not long ago defined by Jerome Stolnitz as "disinterested and sympathetic attention to and contemplation of any object of awareness whatever, for its own sake alone."2 Stolnitz is at pains to distinguish the aesthetic attitude from "interests" with which it may be preferable to confuse it. "One of them," he writes, "is the interest in owning a work of art for the sake of pride or prestige" (p. 20). And again, "Another nonaesthetic interest is the 'cognitive,' i.e., the interest in gaining knowledge about an object" (p. 20). Both these interests sound rather acquisitive, and let us consider the "aesthetic attitude" as somehow tied in everyday practice to the bundle of "acquiring" activities.   ·  1. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1952), p. 43. ·  2. Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (Boston, 1960), excerpted in Introductory Readings in Aesthetics, ed. John Hospers (New York, 1969), p. 19; all further citations in text.   Hiram W. Woodward, Jr. is a lecturer in the department of the history of art at the University of Michigan. He is editor of Eighty Works in the University of Michigan Museum of Art: A Handbookand coeditor (with Luis O. Gomez) of Barabudur: History and Significance of a Buddhist Monument. Stanley Cavell On Makavejev on Bergman Makavejev's recurrence to the ideas of death and birth, in his critical remark about the opening of Persona and in his quoting of Bergman's statement "Each film is my last" (commenting about this that "it is not only a statement about imminent death, but a testimony of an obsessive need to be reborn over and over again"), recalls the recurrence of the ideas of death and birth in Sweet Movie. The sound track opens with a song asking "Is there life after birth?" and the images end with a corpse coming to life; in between, the film is obsessed with images of attempts to be born. The question about life after birth posing the question whether we may hope for mortality as prior to the question whether we may hope for immortality has the satisfying sound of one of Feuerbach's or the early Marx's twists that turn Christianity upside down into socialism. . . . It is the great concluding moments of Sweet Music, however, which bear direct comparison with the great opening moments of Persona. But even to describe those concluding sonorities relevantly requires a general idea of the film as a whole.   Sweet Movie is, at a minimum, the most original exploration known to me of the endless relations between documentary and fictional film, incorporating both; hence in that way an original exploration of the endless relations between reality and fantasy. Its use of documentary footage declares that every movie has a documentary basis at least in the camera's ineluctable interrogation of the natural endowment of the actors, the beings who submit their being to the work of film. My private title for Makavejev's construction of Sweet Movie (his fifth film) and of (his third and fourth films) Innocence Unprotected and WR: Mysteries of the Organism is "the film of excavation." I mean by this of course my sense of his work's digging to unearth buried layers of the psyche but also my sense that these constructions have the feeling of reconstruction as of something lost or broken. The search at once traces their integrity (you might say the autonomy) of the individual strata of a history and plots the positions of adjacent strata. I accept as well the implied sense something the experience of Makavejev's last three films conveys to me that these constructions are inherently the working out of a group's genius, its interactions, not of one individual's plans; though it is true and definitive of Makavejev's work that a group's interactions, or those of shifting groups, work themselves out into comprehensible forms because a given individual is committed to seeing to it that they may.   Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of Must We Mean What We Say?, The World Viewed, The Senses of Walden, and The Claim of Reason. Other contributions include ""A Reply to John Hollander"" (Summer 1980) and "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981). Howard Nemerov On the Measure of Poetry To sum up on forms and rightness. No one wants poetry to be like filling out a form, though plenty of poems look dismally like it. The forms were there to be wrestled with mightily, because they silently and emptily, till one filled them up with the thing said, stood for the recalcitrant outside and other that knows nothing of the human will. The mindless rigidity in principle of the verse patterns suggestively compounded with the sinewy nature of the speaking voice that flowed in continuous energy through the marked- off graph of foot and line and strophe. Together they might be taken to stand for two powers of the mind that ought to work with and against one another to the same effect: the streamy nature of association, said Coleridge, that thinking curbs and rudders. Ezra Pound's commandment to the poet, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome, is a good warning against monotonous cadences; but taken literally it invites the reply that Beethoven did both. For art is a place where you make choices, sometimes difficult ones that require you decide not between good and bad but between this good and that: very often it is between the beauty of a line and the sense of the whole thing. A proverb says you can't do two things at once; but it is conspicuous that in art you must always be doing two things at once, knowing that that is only the minimum requirement:   And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton's sleep!   Howard Nemerov, professor of English at Washington University, is the author of, among other works, Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays and The Collected Poems, for which he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1978.   See also: "Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel" by Peter Viereck in Vol. 5, No. 2 Michael Fischer Rehabilitating Reference: Charles Altieri's "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text" Like many readers, I sympathize with Charles Altieri's attempt in "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text"1 to correct Derrida's assimilation of poetry to linguistic "freeplay without origin." But Altieri's "middle ground" solution is at best a stopgap measure, delaying the deconstructionist project but not finally answering it. Altieri agrees with Derrida that "language is not primarily a set of pictures ideally mirroring a world" (p. 492). But he resists the conclusion that for Derrida follows from this premise, namely, that poems are consequently self-referential and antimimetic. Instead Altieri adopts a position between these two extremes, seeing in art the representation not of reality but of the "stances" we take toward our world. Poems reveal "the qualities of human actions" (p. 498). In "This is Just to Say," for example, Williams constructs a "simple drama" which brings to light a speaker's "honesty, self-knowledge, and faith in his wife's understanding" (p. 503).   ·  1. Charles Altieri, "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The Example of Williams' 'This is Just to Say,'" 5 (Spring 1979): 489-510; all further references to this article will be included in this text.   Michael Fischer is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He has written on nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern critical theory and on the defense of poetry in modern criticism. Charles Altieri Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer I have so far argued in terms of general principles. But they are not worth very much unless they help explain how a cultural account of values can preserve a public sphere of judgments that is not subject to Fischer's charges of arbitrariness, relativism, or confusing value and fact. I assume that I will have gone a long way toward answering Fischer if I can provide an adequate response to his question, "where [does] Williams' poem get its presumably public ideas of honesty, self-knowledge, and faith," without relying on an external order of values human reason can know. For, Fischer suggests, without reference to that order of values there is no defensible way to justify combining objective description of details and evaluative predicates like "honest" and "self-aware."   Charles Altieri, professor of English at the University of Washington, is the author of Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s. "Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The Example of [William Carlos] Williams' 'This is Just to Say'" was contributed to in the Spring 1979 issue. Mark Roskill A Reply to John Reichert and Stanley Fish John Reichert and Stanley Fish, in their discussion of the finding of different "meanings" in Samson Agonistes,1 do not seem to recognize what is really in dispute between them. Certainly they step in to further confusions along the way.   It is true that, as Fish reiterates, the "meaning" which is to be cumulatively grasped from a total work of art, such as a long dramatic poem or novel, is open in principle to unlimited divergencies of interpretation on the basis of either external facts that can be brought to bear on the work (and which are themselves open to differences of understanding) or hypotheses that can be counted or presented as potentially relevant. This is so not only because people differ in their understandings in a great variety of ways (which Fish's term "assumptions" by no means adequately covers) but also because the fundamental indeterminacy of language as distinct from the ambiguity of particular statements2 is capable of being understood as such.   ·  1. John Reichert, "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley Fish," 6 (Autumn 1979): 164-72; Stanley E. Fish, "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation," 6 (Autumn 1979): 173-78. Fish's original essay, "Normal Circumstances . . . and Other Special Cases," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue. ·  2. See for this distinction my remarks in "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in Paintings," 3 (Summer 1977): 702.   Mark Roskill, professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the Impressionist Circle, and What is Art History? He has contributed "On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in Paintings" to the Summer 1977 issue of .