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 &lsquo;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 &amp; 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 .
