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Elizabeth Abel
         Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire's Response to the_Art_of
            Delacroix
         Baudelaire's response to Delacroix's art and theories provides a
            particularly fruitful focus for a study of the new rapport between
            the former sister arts. There is little similarity between
            Delacroix's action-filled exotic subjects and Baudelaire's more
            intimate and private poetry; their arts must therefore be related
            in some domain apart from content. We are aided in deciphering this
            domain by Baudelaire's extensive commentary on Delacroix. Moreover,
            perhaps because of its subtlety, the relationship between these
            arts has not received the attention it deserves.1 Yet no sooner is
            the possibility for such a study recognized than the problems it
            entails become apparent. Without the focus of common subjects,
            where does one begin? The dangers of impressionistic comparisons of
            study are readily apparent in the tendency of Geistesgeschichte
            studies to transfer stylistic terms from one art form to another,
            creating such bizarre transpositions as "the visible chamber music
            of the bent furniture" or the "Titian style of the madrigal" in
            Spengler's Decline of the West or Wylie Sypher's suggestion that a
            Shakespearean play is like a Renaissance painting because it makes
            use of "perspective" to create a real and believable world.2 And
            indeed it would be misleading to look for particular stylistic
            similarities between Delacroix and Baudelaire. Delacroix's
            dissolution of solid color masses into separate strokes of
            different colors, for example, would appear to be closer to
            Rimbaud's disjointed language than to Baudelaire's carefully
            interwoven sentences. Only by viewing the two art forms as
            interconnected systems can we determine their relationship. If the
            new affiliation of poetry and painting in the Romantic period
            derives from the expression of imaginative unity, a critical
            approach to their relationship must be attuned to different ways of
            expressing unity. The theoretical framework that accounts most
            completely for the kind of relationship existing between Delacroix
            and Baudelaire is provided by the structuralists, although, as we
            shall see, even this approach has limitations.
             
            ·  1. There are several studies of Baudelaire's aesthetics and
            criticism, such as André Ferran's L'Esthétique de Baudelaire
            (Paris, 1968), Margaret Gilman's Baudelaire the Critic (New York,
            1943), and Jean Prévost's Baudelaire: essai sur l'inspiration et la
            création poétiques (Paris, 1953), which contain sections on the
            influence of Delacroix but do not extend their analysis into
            Baudelaire's poetry as a whole. More specific works, such as Lucie
            Horner's Baudelaire critique de Delacroix (Paris, 1973), provides a
            detailed study of their relationship based on their correspondence
            and references to one another, but no analysis of the relationship
            between their two art forms. Some studies of Baudelaire's poetry,
            such as Lloyd James Austin's L'Univers poétique de Baudelaire:
            symbolisme et symbolique (Paris, 1956) and Martin Turnell's
            Baudelaire: A Study of His Poetry (London, 1953), point out aspects
            of Baudelaire's poems that appear relevant to the relationship with
            Delacroix, but they do not make these connections themselves. Most
            commentary on the relationship of Delacroix to Baudelaire's poetry
            is limited to those few poems that Baudelaire wrote on Delacroix's
            paintings.
            ·  2. Wellek and Warren quote the comments on Spengler in Theory of
            Literature, p. 131. Sypher's comments are in Four Ages of
            Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700
            (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 79-80.
             
            Elizabeth Abel is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago. A coeditor of , she is
            currently writing a book on literary and psychoanalytic
            representation of female identity.
Ernest B. Gilman
         Word and Image in Quarles' Emblemes
         In Quarles' world the emblem as traditionally conceived must strain
            across a widening gap between the verbal and the visual. Rosemary
            Freeman's criticism of Quarles, that in a mechanical "imposition of
            meaning" the text of the emblem applies an interpretation to,
            rather than discovers a significance within, the image, is more apt
            than Freeman realized. With the semantic congruence between word
            and image no longer guaranteed, artists attempting to yoke the two
            would have to reconceive the relationship between them. Seen as a
            response to this need, Blake's illuminated books complicate the
            emblem tradition in an art of dazzling improvisatory
            juxtapositions. Indeed, his revaluation of the ties between "body"
            and "soul" may be taken in one sense as a revision of the
            emblematist's traditional distinction. Words, once the soul of the
            emblem, now become truly animate for Blake - flowing, sprouting,
            multicolored - while their quirky energy, no longer restrained by
            standardized print, is embodied on sensual, quasi-pictorial shapes;
            images speak in a new and private vocabulary of emblematic birds,
            curling tendrils, and other forms that gesture allusively from
            plate to plate. These frame, underscore, celebrate, intrude upon,
            parody, or oppose themselves by "contraries" to the meaning of the
            adjoining text. If Quarles' work signals the failure of the emblem
            in England, its success in probing the problems of combining
            language and imagery points toward the renewal of the form in
            Blake.
             
            Ernest B. Gilman, assistant professor of English at the University
            of Virginia, is the author of The Curious Perspective. He is
            currently working on a book on joint literary and pictorial forms
            in the Renaissance.
Leo Steinberg
         The Line of Fate in Michelangelo's Painting
         Let us agree, to begin with, that we are not shown [in Last
            Judgment], as Life Magazine long ago phrased it, a Saint
            Bartholomew who "holds his own mortal skin, in which Michelangelo
            whimsically painted a distorted portrait of himself."1 The
            face was sloughed with the rest of the skin and goes with it. What
            we see is a Saint Bartholomew with another's integument in his
            hand. We next consider an aspect of the self-portrait which even La
            Cava left out of account - its relative siting. This has to matter
            since the portrait lies in the path of Christ's imminent action.
            More than that, it lies on a diagonal that traverses the fresco
            like a heraldic bend chief to base - from left top to right bottom.
            The twofold competence thus assumed by the self-portrait - in its
            concrete location and in the range of its influence - is something
            to marvel at. A hangdog face flops to one side, helpless and limp.
            But the tilt of its axis projected upward across the field strikes
            the apex of the left-hand lunette, the uppermost point of the
            fresco. And if, departing once again from the skin's facial axis,
            we project its course netherward, we discover the line produced to
            aim straight at the fresco's lower right corner. Such results do
            not come by chance. To put it literally, letting metaphor fall
            where it may: it is the extension of the self's axis that strings
            the continuum of heaven and hell.
             
            ·  1. Life Magazine, 6 December 1949, p. 45. So also Redig de
            Campos speaks of the lifeless Apostle's own skin, "dove il
            Buonarroti ha nascoto un singolare autoritratto..in caricatura
            tragica della sua 'infinita miseria'" (Il Giudizio Universale di
            Michelango [Rome, 1964], p. 39). Tolnay sees the matter correctly:
            "It is the artist's empty skin which the saint holds in his hand"
            (The Final Period, p. 44.)
             
            Leo Steinberg is Benjamin Franklin Professor and University
            Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania.
            His publications include Other Criteria: Confrontations with
            Twentieth-Century Art, Michelangelo's Last Paintings, Borromini's
            San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, as well as studies of Leonardo,
            Pontormo, Velazquez, and Picasso.
Gerald Mast
         Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of_Film_Narrative
         If narrating the feeling of stories, fictional or
            otherwise is an inherent possibility of motion pictures (in
            fact, the first possibility to be realized in the history of film),
            then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative
            tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be
            synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films
            how to construct a formative sequence of events within an
            absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film
            narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events
            with an obviously real visual and social setting? And isn't that
            paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film
            today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly
            real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with
            the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important
            than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both
            cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional
            filmed narrative?
             
            Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the
            photographic surfaces of things in the material world (as neither
            Bazin's nor Cavell's aesthetic does), overlooks this paradox
            altogether. It overlooks the fact extremely relevant to the
            cinema that the term "realist" means one thing in its common
            application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in
            its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic
            visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble,"
            "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual
            world. We see or think we see in a painting what we
            see or think we see in the real world.1 But a realistic
            story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and
            "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way
            things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are
            consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about
            psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense
            of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is
            primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping,
            then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-
            century painting/photography with the psychological realism of
            late-nineteenth-century novel/drama.
             
            ·  1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether
            there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting
            or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers
            operate in this assumption because they think there is something
            real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of
            their holding such a belief.
             
            Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of
            the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/
            Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to
            , "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974
            issue.
John R. Searle
         Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation
         Now, back to the picture. On the illusionist reading the spectators
            have become identical with Philip IV and Maria Ana. Given its
            position across the room and our position at the front of the
            scene, we would have to see ourselves in the mirror, but we only
            see the royal couple. Now what exactly is the painter on the left
            painting? Well it is obvious that he is painting us, that is,
            Philip IV and his wife. He looks straight at us, scrutinizing our
            features, before applying the brush to the canvas. We have plainly
            caught him in the very act of painting us. But in what sort of
            picture is he painting us? The standard interpretation is that he
            is painting a full length portrait of what we see in the mirror.
            But there is an objection to that interpretation which seems to me
            fairly convincing. The canvas he is painting on is much too large
            for any such portrait. The canvas on which he is painting is indeed
            about as big as the one we are looking at, about 10 feet high and 8
            feet wide (the dimensions of Las Meninas are 3.19 meters by 2.67
            meters). I think that the painter is painting the picture we are
            seeing; that is, he is painting Las Meninas by Velazquez. Although
            this interpretation seems to me defensible on internal grounds
            alone, there are certain bits of external evidence: as far as we
            know, the only portrait Velazquez ever painted of the royal couple
            is the one we are looking at, Las Meninas. Velazquez is plainly
            painting us, the royal couple, but there is no other picture in
            which he did that; and indeed he seldom used such large canvases
            for interiors. The Spinners is a large-scale interior but most of
            his big canvases are equestrian portraits of Spanish royalty.
             
            John R. Searle, professor of philosophy at the University of
            California at Berkeley, is the author of Speech Acts, The Campus
            War, and Expression and Meaning.
Rudolf Arnheim
         A Plea for Visual Thinking
         The habit of separating the intuitive from the abstractive
            functions, as they were called in the Middle Ages, goes far back in
            our tradition. Descartes, in the sixth Meditation, defined man as
            "a thing that thinks," to which reasoning came naturally; whereas
            imagining, the activity of the senses, required a special effort
            and was in no way necessary to the human nature or essence. The
            passive ability to receive images of sensory things, said
            Descartes, would be useless if there did not exist in the mind a
            further and higher active faculty capable of shaping these images
            and of correcting the errors that derive from sensory experience. A
            century later Leibnitz spoke of two levels of clear cognition.1
            Reasoning was cognition of the higher degree: it was distinct, that
            is, it could analyze things into their components. Sensory
            experience, on the other hand, was cognition of the lower order: it
            also could be clear but it was confused, in the original Latin
            sense of the term; that is, all elements fused and mingled together
            in an indivisible whole. Thus artists, who rely on this inferior
            faculty, are good judges of works of art but when asked what is
            wrong with a particular piece that displeases them can only reply
            that it lacks nescio quid, a certain "I don't know what."
             
            · 1. Leibnitz, Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain (Paris,
            1966), bk. 2, chap. 29.
             
            Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A
            Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, The
            Dynamics of Architectural Form, and Visual Thinking. His previous
            contributions to  are "On the Nature of
            Photography" (Autumn 1974) and "A Stricture on Space and Time"
            (Summer 1978).
Joel Snyder
         Picturing Vision
         I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different
            kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is
            remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures
            that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear
            perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules
            but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" (e.g., paintings that
            have been "fudged" so that certain "distortions" generated by
            strict adherence to the stipulated geometry have been "softened" or
            corrected), and pictures made in flagrant contravention of
            perspective geometry (e.g., pictures that look likethey were made
            with one point perspective but that have two vanishing points). We
            accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance
            with the rules of perspective construction that we could never
            judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see
            (e.g., a picture done in three point perspective looking down at
            skyscrapers). We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp
            disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision (e.g.,
            an architectural view across a plaza in which all objects in every
            plane are in focus; a brief look around the room he is sitting in
            will convince the reader that we cannot see that way.) . . . There
            is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special
            relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us
            to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into
            our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to
            use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask
            questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a
            window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the
            objects they represent (I do not mean to imply that they represent
            only objects) and so, for example, to buy clothing from an
            illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from
            pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to
            what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important
            respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is
            pictured.
             
            Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and
            design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory
            and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is
            currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H.
            O'Sullivan. His contributions to  include
            "Photography, Vision, and Representation" (written with Neil Walsh
            Allen)( Autumn 1975) and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost",
            written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue.
Robert P. Morgan
         Musical Time/Musical Space
         There is no question, of course, that music is a temporal art.
            Stravinsky, noting that it is inconceivable apart from the elements
            of sound and time, classifies it quite simply as "a certain
            organization in time, a chrononomy."1 His definition stands as part
            of a long and honored tradition that encompasses such diverse
            figures as Racine, Lessing, and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer, putting
            the case in its strongest terms, remarks that music is "perceived
            solely in and through time, to the complete exclusion of space,"
            thus making explicit the opposition between time and space and
            ruling out the latter as a possible area for legitimate musical
            experience.
             
            Yet anyone familiar with the philosophical and theoretical
            literature dealing with music must be struck by the persistence
            with which spatial terminology and categories appear. Indeed, it
            would seem to be impossible to talk about music at all without
            invoking spatial notions of one kind or another. Thus in discussing
            even the most elementary aspects of pitch organization and
            among the musical elements, only pitch, we should remember, is
            uniquely musical one finds it necessary to rely upon such
            spatially oriented oppositions as "up and down," "high and low,"
            "small and large" (in regard to intervallic "distances"), and so
            on. Space, then, pace Schopenhauer, apparently forms an inseparable
            part of the musical experience.
             
            ·  1. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons,
            trans, Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), p.
            28.
             
            Robert P. Morgan is active as both a music composer and theorist. A
            professor of music at the University of Chicago, he is currently
            composing a concerto for flute, oboe, and string orchestra to be
            performed at Swarthmore College. His previous contribution to
            , "On the Analysis of Recent Music," appeared in
            the Autumn 1977 issue. Anthony Gilbert responds to the current
            essay in "Musical Space: A Composer's View" (Spring 1981).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory
         Although the notion of spatiality has always lurked in the
            background of discussions of literary form, the self-conscious use
            of the term as a critical concept is generally traced to Joseph
            Frank's seminal essay of 1945, "Spatial Form in Modern
            Literature."1 Frank's basic argument is that modernist literary
            works (particularly by Eliot, Pound, and Joyce) are "spatial"
            insofar as they replace history and narrative sequence with a sense
            of mythic simultaneity and disrupt the normal continuities of
            English prose with disjunctive syntactic arrangements. This
            argument has been attacked on several fronts. An almost universal
            objection is that spatial form is a "mere metaphor" which has been
            given misplaced concreteness and that it denies the essentially
            temporal nature of literature. Some critics will concede that the
            metaphor contains a half-truth, but one which is likely to distract
            attention from more important features of the reading experience.
            The most polemical attacks have come from those who regard spatial
            form as an actual, but highly regrettable, characteristic of modern
            literature and who have linked it with antihistorical and even
            fascist ideologies.2 Advocates of Frank's position, on the other
            hand, have generally been content to extrapolate his premises
            rather than criticize them, and have compiled an ever-mounting list
            of modernist texts which can be seen, in some sense, as
            "antitemporal." The whole debate can best be advanced, in my view,
            not by some patchwork compromise among the conflicting claims but
            by a radical, even outrageous statement of the basic hypothesis in
            its most general form. I propose, therefore, that far from being a
            unique phenomenon of some modern literature, and far from being
            restricted to the features which Frank identifies in those works
            (simultaneity and discontinuity), spatial form is a crucial aspect
            of the experience and interpretation of literature in all ages and
            cultures. The burden of proof, in other words, is not on Frank to
            show that some works have spatial form but on his critics to
            provide an example of any work that does not.
             
            ·  1. Frank's essay first appeared in Sewanee Review 53 (Spring,
            Summer, Autumn 1945) and was revised in his The Widening Gyre (New
            Brunswick, N.J., 1963). Frank's basic argument has not changed
            essentially even in his most avante-garde statements; he still
            regards spatial form "as a particular phenomenon of modern avante-
            garde writing." See "Spatial Form: An Answer to Critics," Critical
            Inquiry 4 (Winter 1977): 231-52. A useful bibliography, "Space and
            Spatial Form in Narrative," is being complied by Jeffrey Smitten
            (department of English, Texas Tech University).
            ·  2. This charge generally links the notion of spatial form with
            Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, the imagist movement, the
            "irrationality" and pessimistic antihistoricism of modernism, and
            the conservative Romantic tradition. Frank discusses the complex
            motives behind these associations in the work of Robert Weimann and
            Frank Kermode in his "Answer to Critics," pp. 238-48.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of , is the author of
            Blake's Composite Art,and The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and
            Times of a Cultural Icon. The present essay is part of Iconology:
            The Image in Literature and the Visual Arts. "Diagrammatology"
            appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of . Leon Surette
            responds to the current essay in "&lsquo;Rational Form in
            Literature'" (Spring 1981).
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John Hollander
         Stanley Cavell and "The Claim of Reason"
         Even as the philosopher can show us how to treat an object
            conceptually as a work of art, by regarding it in some (unavowedly
            figurative) context, so Cavell constantly implies that there are
            parables to be drawn about the way we treat the objects of our
            consciousness and the subjects of parts of it. But this special
            sort of treatment like projective imagination itself is
            not fancy or wit but more like a kind of epistemological fabling
            that is close to what Shelley called, in A Defense of Poetry,
            "moral imagination." What is so powerful and yet elusive of
            the nets of ordinary intellectual expectation in The Claim of
            Reason is the way in which the activities of philosophizing become
            synecdochic, metonymic, and generally parabolic for the activities
            of the rest of life itself. It is the way in which the large (in
            English), unphilosophical, "poetic," or "religious" questions are
            elicited from their precise and technical microcosms that makes so
            much of this book poetical, but not "literary," philosophy. When he
            writes of how tragedy "is the story and study of a failure of
            acknowledgment, of what goes before it and after it i.e.,
            that the form of tragedy is the public form of skepticism with
            respect to other minds"; or when, after brilliantly adducing The
            Winter's Tale in his consideration of Othello, he confronts the
            magic of Hermione's statue coming to life, he observes that
            "Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his
            particular skepticism," the reader can perceive the kind of vast
            fiction in which minds, bodies, the privacy of insides, dolls,
            statues, and other representations figure as agents and elements.
            It will take longer to understand, I think, the imaginative
            significance of the earlier portions of the book. The philosophers
            who find its terrain familiar tend to have little patience with
            poetry; the reader whose sensibility is "literary" may be unable to
            distinguish between the arguments and examples, and the meta-
            arguments and examples, of the discussions of Wittgensteinian and
            Austinian method. Both kinds of readers should keep at it.
             
            John Hollander, a distinguished poet and critic, is professor of
            English at Yale. The author of The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of
            Music in English Poetry, 1500-1700, Vision and Resonance: Two
            Senses of Poetic Form, and The Figure of Echo,his books of poetry
            include Spectral Emanations and Blue Wine and Other Poems.
Stanley Cavell
         A Reply to John Hollander
         Having just read through John Hollander's brilliant and moving
            response to my book, my first response in turn is one of gratitude,
            for the generosity of his taking of my intentions, allowing them
            room to extend themselves; and of admiration, at the writing of a
            writer who has original and useful things to say about the
            relations of poetry and philosophy, of fable and argument, of trope
            and example, relations at the heart of what my book is about. . . .
            I am reminded of W. H. Auden's foreword to his A Certain World: A
            Commonplace Book in which he recognizes that his compilation
            amounts to a sort of autobiography. He calls it, responding to a
            passage from G. K. Chesterton, "a map of my planet." The passage
            Auden quotes from Chesterton contains these sentences: "The
            original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a
            thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would
            like to make or in which he would wish to wander; the strange flora
            and fauna of his own secret planet; the sort of thing he likes to
            think about." I would like to accept the idea that I have revealed
            a secret planet in revealing myself, a certain errant wholeness,
            with the proviso that no one's planet contains anything anyone
            else's may not contain, or does not contain, or does not have the
            equivalent of; and that their contents are commonplaces, including
            an aspiration toward the better possibility, which I might call the
            life of philosophy. Philosophy, at any rate, must ask no less.
             
            Stanley Cavell's other works include Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            World Viewed, and The Senses of Walden. His contributions to
             are "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979) and
            "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981).
Vincent B. Leitch
         The Lateral Dance: The Deconstructive Criticism of J._Hillis_Miller
         Miller undermines traditional ideas and beliefs about language,
            literature, truth, meaning, consciousness, and interpretation. In
            effect, he assumes the role of unrelenting destroyer or
            nihilistic magician who dances demonically upon the broken
            and scattered fragments of the Western tradition. Everything
            touched soon appears torn. Nothing is ever finally darned over, or
            choreographed for coherence, or foregrounded as (only) magical
            illusion. Miller, the relentless rift-maker, refuses any apparent
            repair and rampages onward, dancing, spell-casting, destroying all.
            As though he were a wizard, he appears in the guise of a bull-
            deconstructer loose in the china shop of Western tradition.
             
            Vincent B. Leitch, associate professor of English at Mercer
            University, is the editor of Robert Southwell's Marie Magdalens
            Funeral Teares and The Poetry of Estonia: Essays in Comparative
            Analysis. Sections of the present essay will appear in his The
            Poetics of Deconstruction, which offers a critical history and
            anatomy of deconstructive criticism.
J. Hillis Miller
         Theory and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch
         Leitch speaks of his procedure with my work as employing an "abrupt
            asyndetic format" and as being "a metonymic montage in which themes
            and citations are playfully and copiously combined." One form of
            this playfulness is the panoply of figures he uses to describe me
            and my criticism. The need to use figures for this is interesting,
            as is their incoherence, though the figures can be shown to fall
            into a rough antithetical pattern. At one moment the deconstructive
            critic is a fairy godmother able to turn the pumpkin of the Western
            tradition into a phantasmal coach. He is a magician or wizard who
            shows that things are not what they have seemed with the great
            texts of our tradition or who turns them into something other than
            what they have seemed solidly to be, pragmatic pumpkins,
            unequivocally there. At the next moment the deconstructer is a
            disco dancer, moving sideways in the "lateral dance of
            interpretation" (my own image, but it was not really mine; it was
            taken from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the novel I was discussing in
            the sentences Leitch quotes). The more or less benign fairy
            godmother and dancer then turns into a "nihilistic magician - who
            dances demonically upon the broken and scattered fragments of the
            Western tradition." He becomes a ferocious shaman, "Ravening,
            raging, and uprooting that he may come/Into the desolation of
            reality" (Yeats). He is "a bull-deconstructer loose in the china
            shop of Western tradition" (Leitch). In the next moment the bull
            metamorphoses into a lamb, as Leitch realizes the conservative
            aspects of deconstruction, the way it claims to be rescuing and
            preserving aspects of our culture which have always been there,
            both in literary and philosophical works and in the techniques of
            interpreting them. The same point is made more sharply and
            critically by William E. Cain in another recent essay on my work
            (College English 41, no.4. [December 1979]: 367-81). In the final
            paragraph of his essay, Leitch has fun inventing permutations of an
            image of sand in the salad from one of my essays. Will
            deconstruction sandblast the whole shebang, or will the alien grain
            of sand turn into a pearl of price?
             
            J. Hillis Miller is Frederick W. Hilles Professor of English at
            Yale. His previous contributions to  are "Ariadne's
            Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line" (Autumn 1976) and "The
            Critic as Host" (Spring 1977).
Dore Ashton
         On Harold Rosenberg
         Rosenberg was a chronicler and a good one, yet much of his inner
            dialogue was not with the present so much as the omnipresent
            artistic past. The central question, posed early in his life,
            concerned a man's individuality. Dostoyevsky had called it his
            "dearest" possession. At no time, even in his Marxist youth, did
            Rosenberg relinquish his vision of the individual as the central,
            most important player in any drama. Rosenberg was positively
            possessed with Dostoyevsky's doubts. One can hear the rant of the
            man from the underground repeatedly in Rosenberg's written
            works the stubborn hero who maintains the right even to be
            absurd and to "desire for himself what is positively harmful and
            stupid" if he claims it as a right. The right of the individual to
            live up to man's nature which, as Dostoyevsky said, "acts as one
            whole, with everything in it, conscious or unconscious" was
            Rosenberg's most consistent ideal.
             
            The individual he most admired, both in himself and in others, was
            the artist. But only in spite of everything. No one was more alert
            to the tartufferie that bedevils the world of the artist. Rosenberg
            craved sincerity with the same kind of passion for it he had found
            in Dostoyevsky. Art and artifact would not be a substitute for
            ethics and hard thought. Rosenberg's deepest conviction is revealed
            in his 1960 essay, "Literary Form and Social Hallucination," which
            begins with Dostoyevsky complaining about literature that does not
            lead to truth.
             
            Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, is the
            author of numerous works, including Abstract Art Before Columbus,
            Poets and the Past, A Reading Of Modern Art, and, most recently, A
            Fable of Modern Art. Her previous contribution to ,
            "No More than an Accident?" appeared in the Winter 1976 issue.
Michael Riffaterre
         Syllepsis
         Ambiguity is not the polysemy most words display as dictionary
            entries but results from the context's blocking of the reader's
            choice among competing meanings, as when, to use an example from
            Derrida, a French context hinders the reader from deciding
            whetherplus de means "lack" (no more) or "excess" (more than).1 In
            this case, the undecidability is due entirely to the fact that the
            reader is playing a score, the syntax, that will not let him
            choose. This must be because the score is badly written; yet it is
            precisely this sort of willful neglect that critics have labeled
            poetic license, thereby underlining its literary nature.
            Undecidability has become a central feature in Derrida's analyses
            of literariness, and it is also the main underpinning of his
            creative writing.2 Better still, his own critical discourse has put
            undecidability to use, not a rare case of metalanguage imitating
            the very devices of the language it purports to analyze. My example
            are therefore drawn from Derrida on the assumption that his
            conscious practice of écriture, backed up by a sophisticated
            theory, will be particularly illuminating. For my own analysis of
            these phenomena, I shall be using a special word that Derrida has
            adopted and adapted from the terminology of ancient rhetoric. He
            proposes it in his commentary on this sentence of Mallarmé's: "La
            scène n'illustre que l'idée, pas une action effective, dans une
            hymen . . . entre le désir et l'accomplissement, la perpétration et
            son souvenir."3 Our critic points out that the grammar prevents the
            reader from choosing between hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union
            or fusion, and as "vaginal membrane," the barrier is broken through
            if desire is to reach what it desires. Undecidability is the
            effective mechanism of pantomime as an art form since from mimicry
            alone, without words, the spectator cannot tell whether a dreamed,
            or a remembered, or a present act is being set forth. This, in
            turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarmé's concept of
            poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a
            "syllepsis,"4 the trope that consists in understanding the same
            word in two different ways at the same time, one meaning being
            literal or primary, the other figurative.5 The second meaning is
            not just different from and incompatible with the first: it is tied
            to the first as its polar opposite or the way the reverse of a coin
            is bound to its obverse the hymen as unbroken membrane is
            also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its
            undecidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an
            image but that it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis.
             
            ·  1. See Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 307.
            ·  2. Because Derrida is a philosopher by trade, one would expect
            his undecidability to reflect the very precise logical and
            mathematical concepts of that discipline - which is to say, the
            limitations inherent in the axiomatic method. Kristeva, for
            example, tries to do this in her Le Texts du roman: Approche
            sèmiologique d'une structure discursive transformationnelle (The
            Hague, 1970), pp. 76-78. So far as I can make out, however (as a
            layman I have hardly been able to go beyond the relatively
            simplified but highly instructive exposition of the problem in
            Ernst Nagel and James R. Newman's Gödel's Proof [New York, 1958]),
            Derrida's critical theory and reading practice do not pack more
            into the word "undecidable" than does the definition I offer in
            this paper.
            ·  3. Stephane Mallarmé, Mimique, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1951),
            p. 310: "the scene [a drama, or rather a pantomime] bodies forth
            only an idea, not an action: it is like a hymen between desire and
            its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it";
            here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited.
            Derrida's commentary, "La Double Séance," has been rpt. in La
            Dissémination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff.
            ·  4. See La Dissémination, p. 249.
            ·  5. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise,
            Des Tropes (Paris, 1730). That syllepsis must be distinguished from
            the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the zeugma is apparent in
            Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich,
            1960), pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars.
            7-8.
             
            Michael Riffaterre, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French Literature
            and chairman of the department of French and Romance literatures at
            Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is the
            author of Semiotics of Poetry, La Production du Texte, Typology of
            Intertextuality and A Grammar of Descriptive Poetry. "Syllepsis"
            developed out of seminars he led at the Irvine School of Criticism
            and Theory and at Johns Hopkins University.
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
         Doubles and Counterparts: Patterns of Interchangeability in Borges'
            "The Garden of Forking Paths"
         Analogy among characters is not the only structural device which
            blurs the boundaries of the self. The very repetition of the act of
            narration, involving a chain of quotations, makes the story a
            perfect example of what Jakobson calls "speech within speech"1 and
            divorces the various characters from their own discourse. In
            addition to the real author's speech to the real reader,
            crystallized in that of the implied author to the implied reader,
            the whole story is the speech of an extradiegetic-heterodiegetic
            narrator who, in the footnote, calls himself "editor" and who sums
            up Liddell Hart's account and juxtaposes it with Yu Tsun's dictated
            statement. Just as the editor quotes Tsun, so Tsun, an
            extradiegetic-homodiegetic narrator, quotes Albert who in turn
            quotes Ts'ui Pên, sometimes verbatim, as in the case of the crucial
            letter, sometimes by conjecture, as in the instance of Pên's
            supposed declarations about the book and the maze. Quotation, then,
            is a dominant narrative mode in this story, and quotation is the
            appropriation by one person of the speech of another. Since a
            person is to a large extent constituted by one person of his
            discourse, such an appropriation implies, at least partly, an
            interpenetration of personalities. Thus both repetition through
            analogy and repetition through quotation threaten the absolute
            autonomy of the self.
             
            ·  1. Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Essays on the
            Language of Literature, ed. Seymour Chatman and Samuel R. Levin
            (Boston, 1967), pp. 296-322.
             
            Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan is a senior lecturer in the department of
            English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of The
            Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, she is currently
            writing on the poetics of repetition and, in collaboration with
            Moshe Ron, on contemporary narrative theory.
Loy D. Martin
         Literary Invention: The Invention of the Individual Talent
         In a paper presented at a symposium on structuralism at the Johns
            Hopkins University in 1968, the historian Charles Morazé analyzed
            the issue of invention largely with reference to mathematics and
            the theory of Henri Poincare.1 Poincare, along with the
            physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, was the first to put forward a
            theory of scientific discovery as occurring in discrete phases. In
            1926, Joseph Wallas generalized this theory to apply to all
            creativity, positing phrases which closely resemble those of
            Morazé. While both Poincare and Wallas use a four-phrase model of
            invention, Morazé reduces his to three phrases: information,
            cogitation, and intellection. In information, the inventor becomes
            familiar with the sign systems and knowledge, the "collective
            contributions of society," relevant to his field of problems.
            Cogitation assembles these materials and concentrates them until "a
            certain moment" when "a light breaks through." This "sudden
            illumination...forces us to insist upon the neurological character"
            of the inventive moment. Finally, in intellection, the inventor
            rationally evaluates the utility of his invention and thus, in a
            sense, steps outside of himself and rejoins society. The
            distinction which organizes Morazé 's entire account, as well as
            most of the discussion that followed his presentation, is between
            the "collective" support and control of the inventor and his own
            individual, or "neurological," act of synthesis or creation.
             
            ·  1. See Charles Morazé 's "Literary Invention," in The
            Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the
            Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore,
            1972), pp. 22-55.
             
            Loy D. Martin is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago. He has written The Language of Invention, a
            study of Robert Browning and the genesis of the dramatic monologue.
            "A Reply to Carl Pletsch and Richard Schiff" appeared in the Spring
            1981 issue of .
Jay Schleusener
         Convention and the Context of Reading
         Speech-act theory is often called upon to support one of the
            central claims of contextualism: that works of literature differ
            from ordinary speech because they are not tied to an immediate
            social context. The distinction is simple enough. Speakers and
            hearers meet face-to-face in a world of concrete circumstances that
            has a good deal to do with what they say. Their use of language is
            supported by facts that help to clarify their meaning, and they
            understand one another partly because they share an understanding
            of their situation. Authors and readers, on the other hand, can
            hardly be said to meet anywhere at all. Their only common ground is
            the text, and they share nothing but the words that pass between
            them. Meanings that might be clear enough in the social context of
            ordinary speech tend toward ambiguity in this circumstantial void
            where author and reader must do without a common world of reference
            and make the best of a language that cannot rely on the casual
            support of facts.
             
            Jay Schleusener, an associate professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, is currently completing a book on Piers
            Plowman. His previous contribution to , "Literary
            Criticism and the Philosophy of Science: Rader's 'Fact, Theory, and
            Literary Explanation,'" appeared in the Summer 1975 issue.
John C. Sherwood
         Prolegomena to Any Future Criticism Which Shall Claim_to_Make_Sense
         The principle of selection necessarily follows if we accept that a
            poem is a verbal structure of a very complex kind involving the
            interaction of all kinds of elements ideas, images, rhythms,
            rhetorical features, narrative, logical patterns, whatever. The
            possible relationships among all these elements seem infinite or at
            least, in Frye's phrase, unlimited. (Although the terms used here
            may sound like those of a formalist, one easily could make the same
            point in structuralist terms, for not only must the elements within
            a given structure be related to other structures inside and outside
            the poem.) Hence, a definitive critique of any work seems, even in
            theory, impossible. It is hard to see how the human mind could
            consciously contemplate, much less articulate, all aspects at once,
            even in short pieces; as the various aspects are enumerated, we
            begin to lose sight of the wood for the trees, to lose our grip on
            the integrated whole which we at least partially intuit at a given
            moment in time. And so many are the attitudes and interests which
            may be brought to bear upon a poem that the critique which once
            seemed definitive soon seems incomplete to the critic after a
            further reading, for every time we read a work of any complexity,
            we find something new; and even the less sensitive know that each
            new school of criticism, not to mention each latest shift in
            politics, society, or psychology, will throw at least some of our
            masterpieces into a new light. As for translation, the only way to
            avoid it would be wholesale quotation, and even that would be a
            partial translation in that it would alter the poet's total meaning
            by substituting a part for the whole.
             
            John C. Sherwood, professor of English at the University of Oregon,
            is the author of articles on Dryden, modern literature, and English
            composition. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography
            of R. S. Crane.
Howard Felperin
         Romance and Romanticism
         The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those
            earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both
            fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I
            have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a
            'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most
            part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are
            directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und
            sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply
            "primitive" or "popular" and is not historically identified, as it
            is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in
            Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's
            terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously,
            Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the
            Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending
            scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low
            mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in
            which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval,
            Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern.
            Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet
            in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic
            poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and
            chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of
            disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and
            univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and
            discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves,
            following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history
            that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich
            von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the
            individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye
            systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any
            of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools
            of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past
            three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme
            that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in
            the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's
            rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is
            commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it.
             
            ·  1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957),
            p. 35.
             
            Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and
            Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the
            University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace
            Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Cary Nelson
         Soliciting Self-Knowledge: The Rhetoric of Susan Sontag's Criticism
         Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but
            not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the
            ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for
            works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence.
            Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely
            uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for
            partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an
            experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For
            example, she describes the "happening" as an event "designed to
            tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly
            discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North
            Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of
            difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not
            her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating
            unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the
            main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible
            subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the
            text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit
            and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an
            easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult
            and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be
            understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly
            unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we
            may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by
            critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to
            Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and
            understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers
            to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads
            Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable
            voice and presence."4
             
            ·  1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and
            intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not
            especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult
            topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly
            because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has
            written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own
            innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" (On
            Photography [New York, 1977], p. 43)
            ·  2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in
            Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the
            occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful
            and extended pieces.
            ·  3. Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York, 1966), p. 267.
            ·  4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (New
            York, 1976), p. lix.
             
            Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois.
            He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space
            and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary
            American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of
            Critical Discourse.
Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
         The Unreality of Realism
         What should be immediately apparent to any writer of realistic
            fiction is its unreal or synthetic nature. Regardless of how
            persuasive the forgery appears, it is still a forgery. The colors
            of the painting are not identical to those of the real world. The
            illusion of similarity is achieved by trickery. The houses of
            realistic novels are like those found on a stage set; they are
            there to lend reality and weight to what is important, which may be
            a conversation between two realistically dressed people, walking in
            front of the novels' realistic buildings, conversing about
            something which would, in actuality, be impossible to talk about
            openly, something which would, ordinarily, seem impossible to take
            seriously as a motive for violent emotion which leads to violent
            action. No matter how expertly and exactly a novelist's world
            duplicates common reality, the duplication must be a means to an
            end. Duplication itself is not the novel's goal. If it were, the
            novelist would be properly defined as a camera which takes pictures
            with words or as a maker of verbal documentaries who strives to
            capture the passing scene. This is an axiom which must appear self-
            evident to both the writer and the audience. However, when I wrote
            Anya (New York, 1975), I found that this self-evident truth
            provided random and unreliable light; if this truth had been a
            source of electricity, it would be safe to say that its failure to
            illuminate caused a blackout of comprehension for many critics and
            readers.
             
            Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, professor of English at Brooklyn College
            of the City University of New York, is the author of Falling,
            Anya,and Time in Its Flight, several collections of poetry,
            including Rhymes and Runes of the Toad and Alphabet for the Lost
            Years, and, most recently, The Queen of Egypt and Other Stories.
Lawrence W. Hyman
         Harpsicord Exercises and the My Lai Massacre
         That there is something not altogether honest about a didactic
            novel can be seen once we imagine a novel which violates our
            political sympathies or our moral principles, such as a novel that
            shows the Nazis or the American soldiers at My Lai as heroes. We
            certainly would not like this novel. But could we refute it because
            of our certain knowledge that these men, in real life, were
            murderers? I don't think so, since a skillful writer could easily
            make his characters act heroically in the situation and even
            make us dislike their victims. Could we say that the situation is
            false? Perhaps, but since the actions and the characters are
            fictional, what does it mean to refute them? We can say that a
            novel is bad or unconvincing if the characters do not resemble
            people in real life or if the actions do not satisfy our sense of
            logic or probability. But these are literary objections, not
            political ones. And because the writer cannot be refuted by
            evidence from the real world, he cannot make pronouncements about
            this world. For example, even if there were evidence that no slave
            resembled Tom and no overseer resembled Legree, such evidence could
            not refute the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. And as Moody Prior points
            out in his essay ("Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom,"  5
            [Summer 1979]: 635-50), our disagreement with the philosophy of
            spiritual, rather than physical resistance to slavery cannot take
            away the heroism of Tom's action. His final act of forgiveness is
            indeed Christ-like, and no philosophy of political activism which
            is validated by, let us say, our admiration for Tom within the
            novel cannot validate Tom's kind of inward action in the real
            world. If it did, then our admiration for Tom, a fictional
            character, would prelude our support for a more active resistance
            to oppression. But, of course, it does not, or at least it should
            not, if we are to see fiction as performing a different role than
            politics and philosophy.
             
            Lawrence W. Hyman, professor of English at Brooklyn College of the
            City University of New York, is the author of The Quarrel Within:
            Art and Morality in Milton's Poetry. His previous contribution to
            , "The 'New Contextualism' Has Arrived: A Reply to
            Edward Wasiolek," appeared in the Winter 1975 issue.
Strother Purdy
         Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman
         We differ mainly, I think, in that Hyman is willing to indulge his
            taste for subtlety more extensively than I am. He seems comfortable
            with post-modern paradoxes like "the tendency of a literary work to
            refuse to give us a moral direction is itself a value" and believes
            that this refusal is properly based on the writer's incapacity to
            "make pronouncements about [the] world." It could be I mistake him
            here, and he means only to reject those solutions toutes faites
            that are part of the didactic mode, in which case I agree once
            more. But I feel the thrust of his argument is to deny the
            existence of the first of the two abysses, frivolity and
            propaganda, into which, according to Camus, it is the task of the
            writer to keep from falling. To seek a strengthening of moral
            commitment in a literature that operates at "a level of awareness
            deeper than our moral and political judgments" is certainly to
            avoid exposure to propaganda; but it is also something of a
            logical and psychological contradiction in terms and
            therefore doomed to irrelevance or, in Camus' terms, frivolity. One
            cannot answer for individual variations on common aesthetic
            experiences, of course; there exist men and women and literary
            characters who find strength to take a moral stand in the
            contemplation of a Chinese jar or in what I called harpsichord
            exercises the term includes, after all, Das wohltemperiertes
            Klavier but such experiences, for all their abstract beauty,
            lack a social basis and a social relevance. The mimetic imperative
            is not so easily bypassed.
             
            Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is
            the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary
            Literature, and Henry James. He has also contributed "Stalingrad
            and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation" to .
John Reichert
         Making Sense of Interpretation
         If we are capable of changing our minds of rejecting, that
            is, one hypothesis for another the issue becomes one of the
            criteria which govern our choices. Are they, as [Stanley] Fish
            would argue, dependent on "beliefs" and "assumptions"? Perhaps, at
            some very fundamental level, they are. But I do not think Fish has
            succeeded in showing them to be so. Certainly the criteria are
            independent of anything so specific as beliefs about the nature of
            literature or the human mind. Who among us, for example, whatever
            the object of interpretation, would choose one on the grounds of
            its greater inconsistency, or on the grounds of its accounting for
            fewer of the facts that we want to explain, or on the grounds of
            its being unnecessarily complicated? On the contrary, do we not
            tend to argue, as Fish does so effectively, as if counterexamples
            and inconsistencies tell against an hypothesis? It may be the case
            that our cherished beliefs (in the unconscious, say, or in ordinary
            language, or in progress) often make it difficult in practice even
            to formulate our questions in ways that allow such criteria as I
            have hinted at to come into play. But why should hard work
            discourage us?
             
            John Reichert is the chairman of the English department at Williams
            College and the author of Making Sense of Literature. He has
            contributed "But That Was in Another Ball Park: A Reply to Stanley
            Fish" to .
Stanley E. Fish
         One More Time
         What I would add, and what Reichert seems unable to see, is that
            the facts of the text do not identify themselves. He faults Roskill
            for failing to see that coherence is not a function of the text but
            of "principles we bring to the text"; yet he himself does not see
            that the text, insofar as one can point to it, is produced by those
            same principles. Indeed, Reichert is continually doing the very
            thing for which he criticizes Roskill, attributing to the text
            qualities and features that are the product of interpretive
            strategies. Thus, for example, he cites the instance of "the
            interpreter . . . noticing something in the text that makes his
            former reading seem implausible" as evidence that the text is at
            some level independent of interpretation; but noticeability is a
            function of what it is possibleto notice given a particular set of
            assumptions: a reader innocent of the principles of typology would
            be incapable of "noticing" a typological pattern, whereas for a
            reader like Madsen, the pattern will seem to announce itself; and a
            reader who "notices" something he didn't "notice" before is a
            reader who (for a variety of reasons that one could discuss) is
            proceeding within a different set of interpretive assumptions. That
            which is noticeable, in short, can never be the means of confirming
            or constraining interpretations because it is always a product of
            one. The same argument dissolves the distinction, invoked by
            Reichert, between extratextual and textual evidence; it is not that
            such a distinction is never in force (it almost always is) but that
            what counts as internal and external evidence will vary according
            to the interpretive principles one espouses. Just what is and what
            is not extratextual is a matter of continual debate, and when the
            debate has been (temporarily) concluded, it is not because the
            matter has been settled by the facts but because one set of
            interpretive principles has won the right to say what the facts
            are.
             
            Stanley E. Fishis the author of, among other works, Is There a Text
            in This Class: The Sources of Interpretative Authority. 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 "A Reply to John
            Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love
            Interpretation" (Autumn 1979).
Leonard Dean
         Theory and the Muddle
         Editor's Note: We are happy to print the following comment by
            Leonard Dean as a reminder that the arbitrary, improvisatory nature
            of practical criticism (dignified by certain theorists under the
            rubric ofbricolage) has its origins in a much more homely and
            familiar phenomenon.
             
            A muddler naturally feels flattered by any kind of praise from the
            world of theory, as, for example, by Robert Scholes' generous
            remark that "muddling along, in literary theory as in life, is
            often more humane and even more efficient than the alternatives
            offered by political, ethical, or aesthetic systems. We may in fact
            'know' more than we can systematize about certain kinds of human
            behavior, so that our intuitions may indeed be superior to our more
            reasoned positions" ("Toward a Semiotics of Literature," Critical
            Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]: 105). For a moment praise like that makes
            a muddler feel the way the ghost of Shakespeare must have felt when
            he was called a natural genius in the days of the Rules, but then
            you remember how it really was and is. Like Shakespeare and the New
            Dealers we patched things together under pressure, and like them we
            borrowed from anybody. New critical methods were a godsend for
            anyone who was trying to revive an old survey course into a
            discussion of literature, and equally useful were old critical
            methods like those used by Dr. Johnson for the job of general
            public education.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Editor's Note: On Narrative
         The essays included in this special issue of  are a
            product of the symposium on "Narrative: The Illusion of
            Sequence" held at the University of Chicago on 26-28 October
            1979. The rather special character of this symposium was not
            fragmented into concurrent or competing sessions, and all the
            speakers remained throughout the entire weekend to discuss the
            papers of their fellow participants. Several distinguished
            participants, in fact, did not read papers but confined their
            contributions to the conversations which developed over the several
            sessions of the three-day program. The impact of these sustained
            discussions is reflected in the revisions which the authors made in
            preparing their papers for this special issue, and thus this
            collection is a "product" of the symposium in a fairly
            precise sense.
Hayden White
         The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of_Reality
         To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite
            reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the
            nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so
            inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way
            things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical
            only in a culture in which it was absent absent or, as in
            some domains of Western intellectual and artistic culture,
            programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative
            and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and
            already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is
            simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical,
            transcultural."1 Far from being a problem, then, narrative might
            well be considered a solution to a problem of general human
            concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into
            telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form
            assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human
            rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to
            comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we
            have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from
            another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us. As
            Barthes says, "narrative...is translatable without fundamental
            damage" in a way that a lyric poem or a philosophical discourse is
            not.
             
            ·  1. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
            Narratives,"Music, Image, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York,
            1977), p. 79.
            ·  2. The words "narrative," "narration," "to narrate," and so on
            derive via the Latin gnārus ("knowing," "acquainted with,"
            "expert," "skillful," and so forth) and narro ("relate," "tell")
            from the Sanskrit root gnâ ("know"). The same root yields γνωριμος
            ("knowable," "known"): see Emile Boisacq,
            Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Heidelberg, 1950),
            under the entry for this word. My thanks to Ted Morris of Cornell,
            one of our greatest etymologists.
             
            Hayden White, professor in the program of history of consciousness
            at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of The
            Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, The Greco-Roman
            Tradition, and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
            Nineteenth Century Europe. " The Narrativization of Real Events"
            appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . Critical
            Responses to the present essay include Louis O. Mink's "Everyman
            His or Her Own Annalist", and Marilyn Robinson Waldman's "The
            Otherwise Unnoteworthy Year 711: A Reply to Hayden White," both in
            the Summer 1981 issue of .
Roy Schafer
         Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue
         The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to
            tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to
            tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage
            point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration
            is not the first occasion of thought Freud's wish-fulfilling
            hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from
            a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something
            told by an analysand and the analysand's response to that narrative
            transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies
            the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from
            this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are
            constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which
            analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as
            positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and
            more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The
            narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of
            the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and
            retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always
            present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue.
             
            Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at
            Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology
            at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at
            Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and
            Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis,
            Language and Insight,and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis:
            Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time.
Jacques Derrida
         The Law of Genre
         The law is mad. The law is mad, is madness; but madness is not the
            predicate of law. There is no madness without the law; madness
            cannot be conceived before its relation to law. Madness is law, the
            law is madness. There is a general trait here: the madness of law
            mad for me, the silhouette of my daughter mad about me, her mother,
            etc. But La Folie du jour, An (accountless)Account?, carrying and
            miscarrying its titles, is not at all exemplary of this general
            trait. Not at all, not wholly. This is not an example of a general
            or generic whole. The whole, which begins by finishing and never
            finishes beginning apart from itself, the whole that stays at the
            edgeless boundary of itself, the whole greater and less than a
            whole and nothing, An Account? will not have been exemplary.
            Rather, with regard to the whole, it will have been wholly counter-
            exemplary.
             
            The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of
            order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference,
            taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order
            of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth,
            natural light and sense of history. Now, the test of An Account?
            brought to light the madness of genre. Madness has given birth to
            and thrown light on the genre in the most dazzling, most blinding
            sense of the word. And in the writing of An Account?, in
            literature, satirically practicing all genres, imbibing them but
            never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of genres,
            she, madness, has started spinning Peterson's genre-disc like a
            demented sun. And she does not only do so in literature, for in
            concealing the boundaries that sunder mode and genre, she has also
            inundated and divided the borders between literature and its
            others.
             
            Jacques Derrida is professor of history of philosophy at L'Ecole
            Normale Supérieure in Paris. His greatly influential works include
            Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Spurs: Of Nietzsche's
            Styles, Positions, and Dissemination. Avital Ronell teaches German
            at the University of Virginia and is the author of Poetics of
            Desire and Principles of Textuality in Kafka's "Das Schloss."
Frank Kermode
         Secrets and Narrative Sequence
         The capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that
            mind without giving up secret potential may be crudely represented
            as a dialogue between story and interpretation. This dialogue
            begins when the author puts pen to paper and it continues through
            every reading that is not merely submissive. In this sense we can
            see without too much difficulty that all narrative, in the writing
            and the reading, has something in common with the continuous
            modification of text that takes place in a psychoanalytical process
            (which may tempt us to relate secrets to the condensations and
            displacements of dreams) or in the distortions induced in
            historical narrative by metahistorical considerations.
             
            All that I leave to Roy Schafer1 and Hayden White. My immediate
            purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to
            think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two
            intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its
            progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first
            process tends toward clarity and propriety ("refined common
            sense"), the second toward secrecy, toward distortions which cover
            secrets. The proposition is not altogether alien to the now classic
            fabula/sujet distinction. A test for connexity (an important aspect
            of propriety) is that one can accurately infer the fable (which is
            not to say it ever had an independent existence). The sujet is what
            became of the fable when interpretation distorted its pristine,
            sequential propriety (and not only by dislocating its order of
            presentation, though the power to do so provides occasions for
            unobvious interpretations of a kind sequence cannot afford).
             
            ·  1. Not forever, I hope; his essay and its "refined common sense"
            have powerful implications for a more general narrative theory.
             
            Frank Kermodeis King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge
            University. 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 previous contributions to 
            are "Novels: Recognition and Deception" (Autumn 1974), "A Reply to
            Denis Donoghue" (Spring 1975), and "A Reply to Joseph Frank"
            (Spring 1978).
Nelson Goodman
         Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony
         In sum, flashbacks and foreflashes are commonplace in narrative,
            and such rearrangements in the telling of a story seem to leave us
            not only with a story but with very much the same story.1 . . .
            Will no disparity between the order of telling and the order of
            occurrence destroy either the basic identity or the narrative
            status of any story? An exception seems ready at hand: suppose we
            simply run our film...backwards. The result, though indeed a story,
            seems hardly to be the same story in any usual sense . . . Does
            cinematic narrative actually differ this sharply from narrative in
            a series of snapshots or in words? I think not. Our first impulse
            with any tale when the order of telling is clear is to take the
            order of occurrence to be the same as the order of telling; we then
            make any needed corrections in accord with temporal indications
            given in the narrative and with our antecedent knowledge both of
            what happened and of causal processes in general. But discrepancy
            between order of telling and order of occurrence cannot always be
            discovered instantaneously or at all. If our series of
            snapshots is shown in reverse order at normal speed, we readily
            detect the reversal; for we know that a race begins at the starting
            gate, ends at the finish line, and so on. Even if the pictures do
            not show the starting gate or finish line or other identifiable
            parts of the track, we are not deceived, for we know that horses do
            not run backward. But when the film is run backward, such clues and
            considerations usually cannot be brought to bear soon enough, and
            we momentarily mistake the direction of the actions filmed. A
            little time is needed to make the correction. What seemed like a
            drastic difference between film and other forms of narrative
            amounts to nothing more than this lag.
             
            ·  1. In an obvious and important sense. Of course, whether two
            version are properly said to be of the same story or of the
            same world depends upon which of many permissible
            interpretations of sameness is understood; but that need not
            trouble us here.
             
            Nelson Goodman is emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard and
            the founder of both Project Zero and the Harvard Dance Center. His
            works include The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction, and
            Forecast, and Ways of Worldmaking. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiryare "The Status of Style" (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer
            1981).
Seymour Chatman
         What Novels Can Do That Films Can't (and_Vice_Versa)
         The key word in amy account of the different ways that visual
            details are presented by novels and films is "assert." I wish to
            communicate by that word the force it has in ordinary rhetoric: an
            "assertion" is a statement, usually an independent sentence or
            clause, that something is in fact the case, that it is a certain
            sort of thing, that it does in fact have certain properties or
            enter into certain relations, namely, those listed. Opposed to
            asserting there is mere "naming." When I say, "The cart was tiny;
            it came onto the bridge," I am asserting that certain property of
            the cart of being small in size and that certain relation of
            arriving at the bridge. However, when I say "The green cart came
            onto the bridge," I am asserting nothing more than its arrival at
            the bridge; the greenness of the cart is not asserted but slipped
            in without syntactic fuss. It is only named. Textually, it emerges
            by the way. Now, most film narratives seem to be of the latter
            textual order: it requires special effort for films to assert a
            property or relation. The dominant mode is presentational, not
            assertive. A film doesn't say, "This is the state of affairs," it
            merely shows you that state of affairs. Of course, there could be a
            character or a voice-over commentator asserting a property or
            relation; but then the film would be using its sound track in much
            the same way as fiction uses assertive syntax. It is not cinematic
            description but merely description by literary assertion
            transferred to film. Filmmakers and critics traditionally show
            disdain for verbal commentary because it explicates what, they
            feel, should be implicated visually. So in its essential visual
            mode, film does not describe at all but merely presents; or better,
            it depicts, in the original etymological sense of that word:
            renders in pictorial form. I don't think that this is mere purism
            or a die-hard adherence to silent films. Film attracts that
            component of our perceptual apparatus which we tend to favor over
            the other senses. Seeing, after all, is believing.
             
            Seymour Chatman, professor in the department of rhetoric at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Later
            Style of Henry James and Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure
            in Fiction and Film. His contribution to , "Reply
            to Barbara Herrnstein Smith" appeared in the Summer 1981 issue.
Victor Turner
         Social Dramas and Stories about Them
         Although it might be argued that the social drama is a story in
            [Hayden] White's sense, in that it has discernible inaugural,
            transitional, and terminal motifs, that is, a beginning, a middle,
            and an end, my observations convince me that it is, indeed, a
            spontaneous unit of social process and a fact of everyone's
            experience in every human society. My hypothesis, based on repeated
            observations of such processual units in a range of sociocultural
            systems and in my reading in ethnography and history, is that
            social dramas, "dramas of living," as Kenneth Burke calls them, can
            be aptly studied as having four phases. These I label breach,
            crisis, redress, and either reintegration orrecognition of schism.
            Social dramas occur within groups of persons who share values and
            interests and who have a real or alleged common history. The main
            actors are persons for whom the group has a high value priority.
            Most of us have what I call our "star" group or groups to which we
            owe our deepest loyalty and whose fate is for us of the greatest
            personal concern. It is the one with which a person identifies most
            deeply and in which he finds fulfillment of his major social and
            personal desires. We are all members of many groups, formal or
            informal, from the family to the nation or some international
            religion or political institution. Each person makes his/her own
            subjective evaluation of the group's respective worth: some are
            "dear" to one, others it is one's "duty to defend," and so on. Some
            tragic situations arise from conflicts of loyalty to different star
            groups.
             
            Victor Turner is professor of anthropology and a member of the
            Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. His many
            publications include Schism and Continuity in an African Society,
            The Forest of Symbols, The Ritual Process,and, with Edith Turner,
            Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture.
Paul Ricoeur
         Narrative Time
         The configurational dimension, in turn, displays temporal features
            that may be opposed to these "features" of episodic time. The
            configurational arrangement makes the succession of events into
            significant wholes that are the correlate of the act of grouping
            together. Thanks to this reflective act in the sense of
            Kant's Critique of Judgment the whole plot may be translated
            into one "thought." "Thought," in this narrative context, may
            assume various meanings. It may characterize, for instance,
            following Aristotle's Poetics, the "theme" (dianoia) that
            accompanies the "fable" or "plot" (mythos) of a tragedy.1 "Thought"
            may also designate the "point" of the Hebraic maschal or of the
            biblical parable, concerning which Jeremias observes that the point
            of the parable is what allows us to translate it into a proverb or
            an aphorism. The term "thought" may also apply to the "colligatory
            terms" used in history writing, such terms as "the Renaissance,"
            "the Industrial Revolution," and so on, which, according to Walsh
            and Dray, allow us to apprehend a set of historical events under a
            common denominator. (Here "colligatory terms" correspond to the
            kind of explanation that Dray puts under the heading of "explaining
            what.") In a word, the correlation between thought and plot
            supersedes the "then" and "and then" of mere succession. But it
            would be a complete mistake to consider "thought" as a-
            chronological. "Fable" and "theme" are as closely tied together as
            episode and configuration. The time of fable-and theme, if we may
            make of this a hyphenated expression, is more deeply temporal than
            the time of merely episodic narratives.
             
            ·  1. It may be noted in passing that this correlation between
            "theme" and "plot" is also the basis of Northup Frye's "archetypal"
            criticism.
             
            Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the Université de Paris
            (Nanterre) and John Nuveen Professor at the University of Chicago.
            Some of his works to appear in English are Husserl: An Analysis of
            His Phenomenology, Main Trends in Philosophy,and The Conflict of
            Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics. His previous contribution
            to , "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition,
            Imagination, and Feeling," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue.
Ursula K. Le Guin
         It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; or,_Why_Are_We_Huddling_about_the
            Campfire?
         It was a dark and stormy night, in the otherwise unnoteworthy year
            711 E.C. (Eskimo Calendar), and the great-aunt sat crouched at her
            typewriter, holding his hands out to it from time to time as if for
            warmth and swinging on a swing. He was a handsome boy of about
            eighteen, one of those men who suddenly excite your desire when you
            meet them in the street, and who leave you with a vague feeling of
            uneasiness and excited senses. On the plate beside the typewriter
            lay a slice of tomato. It was a flawless slice. It was a perfect
            slice of a perfect tomato. It is perfectly boring. I hold out my
            hands to the typewriter again, while swinging and showing my
            delicate limbs, and observe that the rows of keys are marked with
            all the letters of the English alphabet, and all the letters of the
            French alphabet minus accent marks, and all the letters of the
            Polish alphabet except the dark L. By striking these keys with the
            ends of my fingers or, conceivably, a small blunt object, the aging
            woman can create a flaw in the tomato. She did so at once. It was
            then a seriously, indeed a disgustingly flawed tomato, but it
            continued to be perfectly boring until eaten. She expired instantly
            in awful agony, of snakebite, flinging the window wide to get air.
            It is a dark and stormy night and the rain falling in in the
            typewriter keys writes a story in German about a great-aunt who
            went to a symposium on narrative and got eaten in the forest by a
            metabear. She writes the story while reading it with close
            attention, not sure what to expect, but collaborating hard, as if
            that was anything new; and this is the story I wrote . . .
             
            Ursula K. Le Guin, distinguished novelist, poet, and essayist, is
            the author of The Left Hand of Darkness, Malafrena,and The
            Dispossessed, for which she won both the Hugo and the Nebula Award.
            Her novel The Lathe of Heaven was made into a film by the Public
            Broadcasting System.
Paul Hernadi
         On the How, What, and Why of Narrative
         Why, then, do we huddle in the dark around the campfires of our
            flickering narratives? There are obviously many different reasons
            for doing so. Yet, having heard various récits whether
            "stories" or "accounts" during the narrative conference, I am
            more inclined than ever to see self-assertive entertainment and
            self-transcending commitment as two kinds of ultimate motivation
            for our countless narratives. Stories and histories and other
            narrative or descriptive accounts help us to escape boredom
            andindifference ours as well as that of other people. Those
            nearly vacant states of mind at the zero degree of entertainment
            and commitment bring us frightfully close to the experience of
            nonexistence. Hence our desire to replace boredom by thrilling or
            gratifying entertainment (remember Edmund Burke's contrast between
            the Sublime and the Beautiful?) and to replace indifference by the
            social or cosmic commitment either to change the world or to change
            ourselves. In a world of unmixed colors and pure literary genres,
            tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance might answer distinct needs
            for thrill, gratification, indignation, and admiration. But, as Roy
            Schafer and Victor Turner have reminded us, the private and social
            dramas underlying psychoanalytical and anthropological accounts are
            even less pure than most works of literature. Couldn't we conclude
            that life's internal and external dramas stem from a compound
            desire for self-assertion and self-transcendence a desire
            which, in the realm of literary entertainment and commitment,
            motivates the emergence and appreciation of tragicomedy?
             
            Paul Hernadi teaches English and comparative literature at the
            University of Iowa. He is the author of Beyond Genre: New
            Directions in Literary Classification and the editor of What is
            Literature? and What is Criticism? His previous contribution to
            ,"Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics," appeared
            in the Winter 1976 issue.
Robert Scholes
         Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative
         This long digression into language was necessary because we cannot
            understand verbal narrative unless we are aware of the iconic and
            indexical dimensions of language. Narrative is not just a
            sequencing, or the illusion of sequence, as the title of our
            conference would have it; narrative is a sequencing of something
            for somebody. To put anything into words is to sequence it, but to
            enumerate the parts of an automobile is not to narrate them, even
            though the enumeration must mention each part in the enumeration's
            own discursive order. One cannot narrate a picture, or a person, or
            a building, or a tree, or a philosophy. Narration is a word that
            implicates its object in its meaning. Only one kind of thing can be
            narrated: a time-thing, or to use our normal word for it, an
            "event." And strictly speaking, we require more than one event
            before we recognize that we are in the presence of a narrative. And
            what is an event? A narrated event is the symbolization of a real
            event: a temporal icon. A narration is the symbolic presentation of
            a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by
            time. Without temporal relation we have only a list. A telephone
            directory is a list, but we can give it a strong push in the
            direction of narrative by adding the word "begat" between the first
            and second entries and the words "who begat" after each successive
            entry until the end. This will resemble certain minimal religious
            narratives, even down to the exclusion of female names from most of
            the list (the appearance of nonpersonal listings in the phonebook
            complicates things, of course).
             
            Robert Scholes is professor of English and comparative literature
            and director of the semiotics program at Brown University. He is
            the author of Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction,
            Fabulation and Metafiction, and Reading, Writing, and Semiotics.
            "Toward a Semiotics of Literature," his previous contribution to
            ,appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue.
Barbera Herrnstein Smith
         Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories
         . . . I should like to review and summarize the preceding general
            points:
             
            1. For any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic
            story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of
            other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or
            perceived as relatedto it.
            2. Among the narratives that can be constructed in response to a
            given narrative are not only those that we commonly refer to as
            "versions" of it (for example, translations, adaptations,
            abridgements, and paraphrases) but also those retellings that we
            call "plot summaries," "interpretations," and, sometimes, "basic
            stories." None of these retellings, however, is more absolutely
            basic than any of the others.
            3. For any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories
            that can be constructed in response to it because basic-ness is
            always arrived at by the exercise of some set of operations, in
            accord with some set of principles, that reflect some set of
            interests, all of which are, by nature, variable and thus multiple.
            Whenever we start to cut back, peel off, strip away, lay bare, and
            so forth, we always do so in accord with certain assumptions and
            purposes which, in turn, create hierarchies of relevance and
            centrality; and it is in terms of these hierarchies that we will
            distinguish certain elements and relations as being central or
            peripheral, more important or less important, and more basic or
            less basic.
            4. The form and feature of any "version" of a narrative will be a
            function of, among other things, the particular motives that
            elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was
            designed to serve. Some versions, such as translation and
            transcriptions, may be constructed in order to preserve and
            transmit a culturally valued verbal structure. Others, such as
            adaptations and abridgements, may be constructed in order to amuse
            or instruct a specific audience. And someversions, such as
            "interpretations," "plot summaries," and "basic stories," may be
            constructed in order to advance the objectives of a particular
            discipline, such as literary history, folklore,
            psychiatry or, of course, narratology. None of these latter
            versions, however, is any less motivated or, accordingly, formally
            contingent than any of the other versions constructed to serve
            other interests or functions.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smith is professor of English and communications
            and the director of the Center for the Study of Art and Symbolic
            Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of
            Poetic Closure and On the Margins of Discourse. "On the Margins of
            Discourse" was also contributed as an essay to  in
            the June 1975 issue. Responses to the present essay are Nelson
            Goodman's "The Telling and the Told" and Seymour Chatman's "Reply
            to Barbara Herrnstein Smith". Both appear in the Summer 1981 issue
            of .
E.H. Gombrich
         Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the_Moving_Eye
         I have stressed here and elsewhere that perspective cannot and need
            not claim to represent the world "as we see it." The perceptual
            constancies which make us underrate the degree of objective
            diminutions with distance, it turns out, constitute only one of the
            factors refuting this claim. The selectivity of vision can now be
            seen to be another. There are many ways of "seeing the world," but
            obviously the claim would have to relate to the "snapshot vision"
            of the stationary single eye. To ask, as it has so often been
            asked, whether this eye sees the world in the form of a hollow
            sphere or of a projection plane makes little sense, for it sees
            neither. The one point in focus can hardly be said to be either
            curved or flat, and the remainder of the field of vision is too
            indistinct to permit a decision. True, we can shift the point of
            focus at will, but in doing so we lose the previous perception, and
            all that remains is its memory. Can we, and do we, compare the
            exact extension of these changing percepts in scanning a row of
            columns extended at right angles from the central line of
            vision to mention the most recalcitrant of the posers of
            perspectival theory?1 I very much doubt it. The question refers to
            the convenient choice of projection planes, not to the experience
            of vision.
            ·  1. I now prefer this formulation to my somewhat laboured
            discussion in Art and Illusion, chap. 8, sec. 4.
            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 many influential works include The
            Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The
            Sense of Order,and Ideals and Idols. An early version of "Standards
            of Truth" was presented at Swarthmore College in October 1976 at a
            symposium to mark the retirement of Professor Hans Wallach. His
            contributions to  include "The Museum: Past,
            Present, and Future" (Spring 1977), "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer
            1979), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual
            Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976).
Herbert F. Tucker, Jr.
         Browning's Lyric Intentions
         The lyric speaker begins by turning his or her will into words, but
            begins to be a Browningesque speaker when this conversion leads to
            a turning of the will against words. This inversion, or perversion,
            of the will against its own expression requires a reader to
            entertain a complex notion of the relationship between intention
            and language or, more accurately, to hold in suspension two
            competing versions of that relationship. A reader learns not only
            to conceive interpretation in the simple lyric sense, as a
            prevailing assertion of the will, but also to conceive any given
            assertion of the will, any intention given over to articulation in
            language, as an interpretation and therefore a potential
            falsification inviting further refinement. The playful competition
            Browning urges between these two conceptions of intentionality
            frees meaning to wander somewhere beyond the ken of each lyric
            speaker, somewhere in the future of lyric utterance. Meaning is to
            the dramatic lyric what action is to the drama proper; and much as
            the curious "action in character" of Browning's dramas defers
            dramatic action and makes room for play, so Browning defers meaning
            in the lyrics by enlisting the patterning forces of the self-
            interfering will.1
            · 1. Browning remarked in the preface to Strafford that his play
            turned on "Action in the Character rather than Character in Action"
            (Complete Works, 2:9).
            Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., an assistant professor of English at
            Northwestern University, has published articles on Hopkins and
            Browning. An expanded version of the present essay appears in his
            Browning's Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure.
Gerald L. Bruns
         Intention, Authority, and Meaning
         [Herbert F.] Tucker has shown us in a very practical way that the
            concept of meaning is the problem of problems, not only in
            hermeneutics but in literary theory and, indeed, literary study
            generally. It may well be that in literary study there can be no
            talk of meaning that is not ambiguous, that does not require us to
            speak in figures or by means of metaphorical improvisations. It
            would not necessarily follow that our talk of meaning is merely
            provisional or without philosophical authority since we know now
            that considerable authority attaches to ordinary language, whence
            we obtain our use of the word "meaning" as well as the figurations
            that we use to talk our way around it. To be sure, the discipline
            of literary study is now rapidly filling with grave masters who
            take our figures to mean that meaning is literally
            unspeakable only so many transferences and substitutions
            within a system of differences alarmingly vast (a system whose
            center is everywhere and whose circumference is an illusion). This
            is itself a terrific idea, or a terrific figure, although it is
            used mainly to expose the thoughtless way we talk about meaning as
            well as our offhand assumptions about the conditions that make
            understanding possible. Our problem in literary study is not that
            meaning is unspeakable even if it were it would not be a
            problem but that we rarely reflect on the subject of meaning
            in a disciplined way. In our time, meaning as a topic of study is
            the preserve of logicians. It is almost exclusively a theme of
            analytical philosophy, and even those not bound by this philosophy
            address themselves to the analytical tradition when they speak of
            meaning.1 It is time that we entered into this discourse on
            meaning; a paper as fine as Tucker's should serve as a summons.
            · 1. Among numerous cases, see John R. Searle, "Metaphor" and
            "Literal Meaning," Expression and Meaning (Cambridge, 1979), pp.
            76-136, and "Intentionality and the Use of Language," in Meaning
            and Use, ed. Avishai Margalit (Dordrecht and Boston, 1979), pp.
            181-97.
            Gerald l. Bruns, professor of English at the University of Iowa, is
            the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and
            Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Interpretation in Literary
            History.
Joseph Kerman
         How We Got into Analysis, and How to_Get_Out
         It may be objected that musical analysts claim to be working with
            objective methodologies which leave no place for aesthetic
            criteria, for the consideration of value. If that were the case,
            the reluctance of so many writers to subsume analysis under
            criticism might be understandable. But are these claims true? Are
            they, indeed, even seriously entered?
            Certainly the original masters of analysis left no doubt that for
            them analysis was an essential adjunct to a fully articulated
            aesthetic value system. Heinrich Schenker always insisted on the
            superiority of the towering products of the German musical genius.
            Sir Donald Tovey pontificated about "the main stream of music" and
            on occasion developed this metaphor in considerable detail. It is
            only in more recent times that analysts have avoided value
            judgments and adapted their work to a format of strictly corrigible
            propositions, mathematical equations, set-theory formulations, and
            the like all this, apparently, in an effort to achieve the
            objective status and hence the authority of scientific inquiry.
            Articles on music composed after 1950, in particular, appear
            sometimes to mimic scientific papers in the way that South American
            bugs and flies will mimic the dreaded carpenter wasp. In a somewhat
            different adaptation, the distinguished analyst Allen Forte wrote
            an entire small book, The Compositional Matrix, from which all
            affective or valuational terms (such as "nice" or "good") are
            meticulously excluded. The same tendency is evident in much recent
            periodical literature.
            Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California
            at Berkeley, has been the editor of Nineteenth-Century Music. His
            books include Opera as Drama, The Elizabethan Madrigal, The
            Beethoven Quartets, Listen(with Vivian Kerman), and The Masses and
            Motets of William Byrd.
Bert O. States
         The Persistence of the Archetype
         If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the
            Ur-myth, or any other myth, in our literature, could we not more
            directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to
            remember in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and
            literature is the social life of the species which, in
            Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual eviction; but as
            regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life is
            reflected in art it is more a history of assimilation and
            repetition. "The work of the brain," to cite a recent article in
            Scientific American, "is to create a model of a possible world
            rather than to record and transmit to the mind a world that is
            metaphysically true…Different worlds are presumably constructed by
            similar species."1 And, presumably, similar worlds are constructed
            by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at something like this
            in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," but one
            has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he would like
            to have the [myth/ritual] cart before the creative horse.2 However
            much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not
            creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful
            hypothesis. One might just as well look upon the remains of early
            man's shelters, marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and
            conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs.
            ·  1. Harry J. Jerison, "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind,"
            Scientific American, January 1976, p. 99.
            ·  2. Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the
            Use and Abuse of Myth (East Lansing, Mich., 1964), p. 250.
            Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of
            California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A
            Poeticsand The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on "Waiting for Godot."
Norman N. Holland
         Why Ellen Laughed
         I propose this: Ellen [a graduate student] laughs because she is
            re-creating her identity. This theory differs from the others
            because "identity" is not simply a category that is filled or not,
            like "incongruity" or "superiority" which become variables in an
            "if this, then that" explanation. "If there is a sudden
            incongruity, people will laugh." Rather, identity is a further
            question, a way of asking, Can I understand Ellen's actions as a
            theme and variations? Moreover, any such interpretation is itself a
            part of the interpreter's actions, hence a function of his - in
            this case, my - identity. The principle is general, but putting it
            into practice in each instance is unique. Unlike an "if this, then
            that" which leads to closure, an explanation through identity leads
            to a continuing dialogue. One asks questions of an individual
            situation, like Ellen's laughing at [B.] Kliban's cartoons. One
            gets answers that lead to a fuller understanding of that situation.
            The answers can be generalized into questions, leading to more and
            closer questioning and more answers that lead to more questions,
            all within the general principle of identity re-creation as
            embodied in the unique situation.
            Norman N. Holland is the James H. McNulty Professor of English at
            the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has written a book
            on the theory of laughter presented in the present essay. His
            previous contributions to  are "Literary
            Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis" (Winter 1976)
            and "Human Identity" (Spring 1978).
Walter Benn Michaels
         Sister Carrie's Popular Economy
         Instead of seeing satisfaction as the necessary and appropriate
            goal of desire, Dreiser seems to see it only as an inevitable but
            potentially fatal by-product. Desire, for him, is most powerful
            when it outstrips its object; indeed, it is the very fact of this
            excessiveness that fuels Sister Carrie's economy which is one
            reason why Carrie is right to think of money ("something everybody
            else has and I must get") as "power itself." The economy runs on
            desire, which is to say, money, or the impossibility of ever having
            enough money. Nothing is more characteristic of Carrie than her
            ability to "indulge" in what Dreiser calls "the most high-flown
            speculations,"1 rocking in her chair and spending in "her fancy"
            money she hasn't yet earned. Fancy or imagination is the very agent
            of excessive desire for Carrie, enabling her to get "beyond, in her
            desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills" (p. 48). When
            Drouet suggests to her that she has dramatic ability,
            "imagination," as usual, "exaggerated the possibilities for her. It
            was as if he had put fifty cents in her hand and she had exercised
            the thoughts of a thousand dollars" (p. 118).
            · 1. Thomas Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer (New York,
            1970), p. 22. All subsequent references to this work will be cited
            parenthetically in the text.
            Walter Benn Michaels is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of articles on
            American literature and literary theory and a book entitledAmerican
            Epistemologies: Literary Theory and Pragmatism.
Sandra M. Gilbert
         Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in_Modern_Literature
         There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female
            and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative
            costumes. Balancing self against mask, true garment against false
            costume, Yeats articulates a perception of himself and his place in
            society that most other male modernists share, even those who
            experiment more radically with costume as metaphor. But female
            modernists like Woolf, together with their post-modernist heirs,
            imagine costumes of the mind with much greater irony and ambiguity,
            in part because women's clothing is more closely connected with the
            pressures and oppressions of gender and in part because women have
            far more to gain from the identification of costume with self or
            gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex roles, both overt
            and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated with the
            intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But
            although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce,
            Lawrence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf,
            and H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male
            modernists from the way it operates for female modernists.
            Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of
            California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems
            of D.H. Lawrenceand In the Fourth World; the coauthor, with Susan
            Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
            Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and its sequel, No Man's
            Land: The Woman Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary
            Imagination.
Joyce Carol Oates
         The Picture of Dorian Gray: Wilde's Parable of_the_Fall
         Beyond the defiance of the young iconoclast Wilde himself, of
            course and the rather perfunctory curve of Dorian Gray to
            that gothic final sight (beautiful Dorian dead with a knife in his
            heart, "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage"), there is
            another, possibly less strident, but more central theme. That one
            is damned for selling one's soul to the devil (for whatever
            prize "eternal youth" is a trivial enough one) is a
            commonplace in legends; what arrests our attention more, perhaps,
            is Wilde's claim or boast or worry or warning that one might indeed
            be poisoned by a book . . . and that the artist, even the
            presumably "good" Basil Hallward, is the diabolical agent. Wilde's
            novel must be seen as a highly serious meditation upon the moral
            role of the artist an interior challenge, in fact, to the
            insouciance of the famous pronouncements that would assure us that
            there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book ("Books are
            well written, or badly written," Wilde claims in his preface. "That
            is all.") or that all art is "quite useless." Wilde's genius was
            disfigured by his talent: he always sounds much more flippant, far
            more superficial, than he really is. So one always say about Dorian
            Gray, with an air of surprise, that the novel is exceptionally good
            after all and anyone who has read it recently replies, with
            the same air of faint incredulity, yes, it isexceptionally
            good in fact, one of the strongest and most haunting of
            English novels. Yet its reputation remains questionable. Gerald
            Weales virtually dismisses it as "terribly fin de siècle" in a
            rather flippant introduction to the novel, and it would be
            difficult to find a critic who would choose to discuss it in terms
            other than the familiar ones of decadence, art for art's sake, art
            as "the telling of beautiful untrue things."
             
            Joyce Carol Oates has written, among others, Bellefleur, Childhood,
            a collection of short stories, Nightside, and Son of the
            Morning.Her contributions to ,include "Jocoserious
            Joyce" (Summer 1976) and "Lawrence's Gotterdammerung" (Spring
            1978).
Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen
         Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost
         Surely [John R.] Searle must rely on a stable, formal conception of
            the point of view. He sets Las Meninas on a par with the antimony
            of the liar and the paradoxes of set theory. (It is apparently
            because of what he takes to be its rather strict analogy with these
            conundrums that Searle goes on to say that Las Meninas is involved
            with self-reference.) But nothing is an antimony or a paradox just
            because it seems so or just because it is confusing or difficult,
            even if it seems so to everyone. To deserve such a description, a
            thing must be, so to speak, intrinsically intractable, not merely
            resistant when looked at in a particular way. If a man says "I do
            not believe I am alive," that would be odd, and it would be hard to
            understand just what he means, and it may even be hard or
            impossible to believe that he is telling the truth; but there is no
            antimony. If a man says "I am lying," then we have a primitive
            version of the antimony of the liar. Given the meaning of this
            utterance and nothing else there is no way to get a
            grip on it. If what the man says is true, then it's false; if what
            he says is false, then it's true.
             
            Joel Snyder, a practicing photographer, is associate professor of
            humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago. His
            contributions to include "Photography, Vision, and
            Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn 1975), and
            "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980). Ted Cohen, associate professor of
            philosophy at the University of Chicago, has written on language,
            aesthetics, and taste. His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," appeared in
            the Autumn 1978 issue.
Tzvetan Todorov
         The Last Barthes
         It was his mother's death which allowed [Roland] Barthes to write:
            "I looked through…" "To write on something is to forfeit it,"
            Barthes used to say, reciprocally, it is licit to write on what is
            already dead, it was Barthes himself in one of his acceptations.
            His mother was for Barthes the internal order, who permitted both
            the external other and the I to exist. Once she was dead, his life
            was over and could therefore become the object of writing. Barthes
            no doubt had other books to write; but he no longer had any life to
            live.
             
            I find it emblematic that his last book should have been "on
            photography" (however deceptively). Eloquent or discreet, a
            photograph never says anything but: I was there; it leads to a
            gesture of monstration, to a silent deixis, and symbolizes a pre-
            or post-discursive world; it makes me an object, that is, a dead
            man. What Barthes himself calls "my last investigation" (accident?
            oversight? premonition?) also concerned death.
             
            Tzvetan Todorov, of the Centre National de la Recherche
            Scientifique in Paris, has numerous books on literary theory,
            including Théories du symbole and Symbolisme et interprétation,
            which has been published in English. His previous contribution to
            Crtitical Inquiry, "The Verbal Age," appeared in the Winter 1977
            issue. Richard Howard, a poet and critic, has translated many works
            by Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Foucault, and Gilles
            Deleuze.
Garrett Stewart
         Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity
         The ending of neither story [Heart of Darkness] nor film
            [Apocalypse Now] is confused, just bifocal. In Coppola we find writ
            large, for Willard as well as for us, what Conrad seems to keep
            from Marlowe by ironic distance: that the return to civilization
            from primitive haunts can never lay the ghostly image of that
            bestial horror lurking within us, the horror that finds such
            kinship, regressed beyond any ethical restraint, in the jungle's
            heart of darkness. It is a horror which the tropical rain droning
            on the sound track as the film's last trace can scarcely wash
            clean. For just before, staring straight at the camera and through
            it at us for one final time, confirming earlier suggestions of the
            universal complicity in evil, Willard's disembodied face - the
            reflective mind as if unmoored from its whole self, decapitated -
            slides out of view to the right behind the dead but deathless
            carved image. With the film's narrator absorbed into the immemorial
            icon of that anthropomorphic vanity and villainy which has
            comprised his tale, Kurtz's "horror" comes onto the sound track as
            a primal echo in the soul, an echo drenched from without by the
            sounds of a world that outlasts but cannot quench it.
             
            Garrett Stewart, professor of English at the University of
            California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the Trials
            of Imagination. His previous contribution to ,
            "Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection,"
            appeared in the Winter 1976 issue.
             
David M. Halperin
         Solzhenitsyn, Epicurus, and the Ethics of Stalinism
         Why did Solzhenitsyn choose to insert an indictment of Epicureanism
            into the text of his novel?
             
            The answer to this question is simple, but it requires elaborate
            argumentation. Epicureanism in The First Circle stands for the
            ethics of Stalinist society and furnished Solzhenitsyn with the
            vehicle for a destructive critique of Stalinist moral theory. But
            Stalinism has tended to be viewed in the West chiefly as a vicious
            form of political opportunism, its implicit ethical structure has
            escaped due recognition. But Stalinism was more than one man's
            strategy for the seizure and consolidation of power, more even than
            the collective aims, policies, and methods of the Soviet
            bureaucracy. The ideological component of Stalinism must not be
            neglected. Howsoever the integrity of its doctrines was
            subordinated to political exigencies of the moment, Stalinist
            ideology could lay claim to a coherent and distinguished
            intellectual ancestry: it was heir to the materialist philosophy of
            the so-called Left Hegelians (Feuerbach, Belinskii, Marx, and
            Engels), a philosophy militantly reinterpreted by the architects of
            the Russian Revolution. Stalinist ideology expected a profound
            influence on the popular notions of obligation and moral value
            during the period of its ascendancy, smoothing the way of
            acquiescence and cooperation for the reluctant, the dubious, and
            the conscience-stricken. One need not therefore subscribe to an
            idealist interpretation of history in order to agree with
            Solzhenitsyn that Stalin's creation of an univers
            concentrationnaire would have been impossible without an accessory
            code of official ethics.
             
            David M. Halperin, an assistant professor of literature at the
            Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of articles on
            Solzhenitsyn, Conrad, Augustine, Virgil, and ancient bucolic
            poetry.
Elizabeth Ermarth
         Realism, Perspective, and the Novel
         I argue that in realism the identity of things, increasingly
            independent from typological paradigms, becomes series-dependent;
            that is, it becomes a form emergent from a series of instances
            rather than a form intelligible through one instance alone.
            Realistic identity, in other words, becomes abstract, removed from
            direct apprehension to a hidden dimension of depth. In speaking of
            realistic identity, I use the term "identity" to mean the oneness
            or the invariant structure by which we recognize a thing, by which
            we judge it under varying conditions to be the same. This
            conception of identity and all it implies about the regularity of
            nature and about the possibilities of knowledge belongs to an
            empirical epistemology which, though foreign to the Middle Ages and
            radically modifies today, was current throughout the otherwise
            diverse period from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century.
            It is a conception of identity so obvious to us that we have ceased
            to see it as the convention it is, but it was not obvious in the
            Renaissance, and it took a long time to become common sense.
             
            Elizabeth Ermarth teaches English at the University of Maryland,
            Baltimore County, and is the author of several articles on George
            Eliot.
Phillip Harth
         The New Criticism and Eighteenth-Century Poetry
         It is easy to overlook the fact that the kind of personalist
            criticism Brower, Wimsatt, and other New Critics were reacting
            against was a method of interpretation bequeathed by the nineteenth
            century which most of us would now regard as naïve, simplistic, and
            sometimes absurd. With the exception of a few poems such as
            Browning's dramatic monologues, which provided the speaker with an
            explicit identity as unmistakable as that of a character in a
            play "I am poor brother Lippo, by your leave! / You need not
            clap your torches to my face" lyric and didactic poems of the
            first person were invariably treated as personal statements. The
            voice, emotions, attitudes, and state of mind of the speaker were
            those of the poet, and even the most symbolic details were often
            read as literal aspects of the poet's self or environment. Many
            critical studies and anthologies remain today on library shelves
            testifying to the persistence of these critical habits of the late
            1940s and 1950s. On the assumption that Rochester's love poems
            describe his actual sexual experiences, Vivian de Sola Pinto was
            able to write a much longer biography of the poet than would have
            been possible if personalist criticism had not been in vogue.1
            David Nichol Smith could assert that Dryden's Religio Laici "was
            wholly spontaneous" the familiar Romantic criterion - and
            show the poet arguing out "his problems for the peace of his own
            mind."2 If it became unfashionable to speak in that manner of these
            and numerous other poems, it was because the New Critics, along
            with the Chicago critics, had shown convincingly that a lyric poem
            can be dramatic, the imitation of a fictitious speaker responding
            to an imagined situation, and that a didactic poem can deal with
            public issues instead of private agonies.
             
            ·  1. See Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a
            Restoration Poet (London, 1935).
            ·  2. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden (Cambridge, 1950), p. 61.
             
            Phillip Harth is Merritt Y. Hughes Professor of English at the
            University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is the author of Swift and
            Anglican Rationalism and Contexts of Dryden's Thought.
             
Jonathan D. Kramer
         New Temporalities in Music
         As this century has found new temporalities to replace linearity,
            discontinuities have become commonplace. Discontinuity, if carried
            to a pervasive extreme, destroys linearity…There were two enormous
            factors, beyond the general cultural climate, that promoted
            composers' active pursuit of discontinuities. These influences did
            not cause so much as feed the dissatisfaction with linearity that
            many artists felt. But the impact has been profound.
             
            One factor contributing to the increase of discontinuity was the
            gradual absorption of music from totally different cultures, which
            had evolved over the centuries with virtually no contact with
            Western ideas…Cross-cultural exchange in music will, of course,
            never destroy aesthetic boundaries, but music of non-Western
            cultures continues to show Western composers new ways to use and
            experience time.
             
            The second tremendous influence on twentieth-century musical
            discontinuity was technological rather than sociological: the
            invention of recording techniques. Recording has not only brought
            distant and ancient musics into the here and now, it has also made
            the home and the car environment just as viable for music listening
            as the concert hall. The removal of music from the ritualized
            behavior that surrounds concertgoing struck a blow to the internal
            ordering of the listening experience. Furthermore, radios, records,
            and, more recently, tapes allow the listener to enter and exit a
            composition at will. An overriding progression from beginning to
            end may or may not be in the music, but the listener is not captive
            to that completeness. We all spin the dial, and we are more immune
            to having missed part of the music than composers might like to
            think.
             
            Jonathan D. Kramer is an associate professor of music theory and
            composition and director of electronic music at the College-
            Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati. The present
            essay is part of his book, Time and Meaning in Music.
Mari Riess Jones
         Only Time Can Tell: On the Topology of_Mental_Space_and_Time
         An obvious result of including time rules into specifications of
            world patterns is the rather persuasive representation of rhythm.
            Rhythm as a property of world patterns has received relatively
            little attention recently, although it has had a long and
            distinguished history in psychology. Nonetheless, its recent
            neglect means that all too often we have failed to consider the
            implications of time patterning of stimuli that we as psychologists
            routinely present to individuals in our attempts to study human
            performance in many tasks, tasks which often do involve explicitly
            musical stimuli. Often in our psychological studies we present as
            stimuli words, lights, colored forms, or other items in a fashion
            that is regularly spaced in time. It's just common sense, and
            besides it's easier. And other current paradigms have not
            encouraged experimental questions about the temporal patterning of
            stimuli. But consider what this pacing means. We are rhythmically
            programming events. Is it possible that this temporal regularity
            forms attentional waves that buoy up our studies and so make it
            likely that we canstudy what we are most interested in? And, with
            our own attention as psychologists fixed steadily upon the topic of
            our immediate concern (Polanyi's focal target?), is it possible
            that we overlook the fact that underlying our effects is a rhythmic
            regularity that is crucial to having the subject's attention on the
            task at hand?
             
            Mari Riess Jones is professor of psychology at Ohio State
            University and has written numerous articles on the human response
            to patterns in time.
Roger Scruton
         Photography and Representation
         It seems odd to say that photography is not a mode of
            representation. For a photograph has in common with a painting the
            property by which the painting represents the world, the property
            of sharing, in some sense, the appearance of its subject. Indeed,
            it is sometimes thought that since a photograph more effectively
            shares the appearance of its subject than a typical painting,
            photography is a better mode of representation. Photography might
            even be thought of as having replaced painting as a mode of visual
            representation. Painters have felt that if the aim of painting is
            really to reproduce the appearances of things, then painting must
            give way to whatever means are available to reproduce an appearance
            more accurately. It has therefore been said that painting aims to
            record the appearances of things only so as to capture the
            experience of observing them (the impression) and that the accurate
            copying of appearances will normally be at variance with this aim.
            Here we have the seeds of expressionism and the origin of the view
            (a view which not only is mistaken but which has also proved
            disastrous for the history of modern art) that painting is somehow
            purer when it is abstract and closer to its essence as an art.
             
            Roger Scruton is the author of Art and Imagination, The Aesthetics
            of Architecture, The Meaning of Conservatism, From Descartes to
            Wittgenstein, and The Politics of Culture and Other Essays.
Gary Saul Morson
         Tolstoy's Absolute Language
          Among Tolstoy's absolute statements are those that exhibit
            characteristics of both biblical commands and proverbs and of
            other types of absolute statements as well. He also draws, for
            example, on logical propositions, mathematical deductions, laws of
            nature and human nature, dictionary definitions, and metaphysical
            assertions. The language of all these forms is timeless, anonymous,
            and above all categorical. Their stylistic features imply that they
            are not falsifiable and that they are not open to qualification:
            they characteristically include words like "all," "each," "every,"
            "only," and "certainly" and phrases like "there neither is nor can
            be," "the human mind cannot grasp," and "it is impossible that."
            Even in sentences that omit such phrases, the very refusal to use a
            qualifier of any kind can assert unqualifiability. When Tolstoy's
            absolute statements take the form of syllogisms, the use of the
            word "therefore" or some explicit or implicit equivalent carries
            the force of logical inevitability. It carries the same force with
            Tolstoy's enthymemes, which omit the major premise for the reader
            to reconstruct. [An example] from The Death of Ivan Ilysch,1 cited
            above, for instance, contains a minor premise and a conclusion of a
            syllogism; the reader himself must supply the major premise, which
            would be: "The simpler and more ordinary a life is, the more
            terrible it is."
            ·  1. "Ivan Ilysch's life was the most simple and the most
            ordinary, and therefore the most terrible."
            Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilysch, ed. John Bayley, trans.
            Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1967), p.225.
            Gary Saul Morson is an associate professor of Russian literature at
            the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of The Boundaries of
            Genre: Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of
            Literary Utopia,and The Broken Frame: The Anti-tradition of Russian
            Literature.The present article is from a theoretical study of
            literary creativity and the biography of authors.
             
Marshall Brown
         Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness
         There can be no question, of course, of any "influence" of Kant's
            or Rousseau's ideas on Mozart's musical structures. While I have
            used various loosely synonymous nonmusical terms reverie,
            dream, unconscious, ethereal, and so on the analysis could
            proceed on a nonmetaphorical, strictly technical basis. Indeed,
            much of it has. I should therefore clarify why I have superimposed
            this philosophical and literary layer on the musical analysis, even
            at the risk of giving the false impression that I wished to make
            the history of music dependent upon the history of ideas.
            My answer lies, first of all, in the contention in which I
            follow chiefly Michel Foucault, though with
            qualifications that at every period in history a subterranean
            network of constraints governs the organization of human thought.
            Different fields develop and change in parallel not because they
            affect one another but because the infrastructures of mental
            activity affect them all. In this respect, the relationship of
            music and philosophy is no different from the relationship of
            literature and philosophy. The infrastructure is the precondition
            of thought and is by definition unconscious and unarticulated.
            Because it lies outside the limits of the individual disciplines,
            it cannot really be formulated within any of them. Hence arises the
            necessity of comparative study. The infrastructure comes to light
            at the juncture of independent fields. In the present case, it is
            accurate to say that music and philosophy mutually illuminate one
            another precisely because they are such different media; where they
            coincide lie the true invariants of eighteenth-century thought.
            Marshall Brown, an associate professor of English at the University
            of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of The Shape of German
            Romanticism, and Pre-Romanticism: Studies in Stylistic
            Transformation.
James B. White
         Homer's Argument with Culture
         From beginning to end, the poem is literally made up of relations…
            [that] constitute a method of contemplation and criticism, a way of
            inviting the reader to think in terms of one thing in terms of
            another. Consider, for example, Odysseus' trip to Chryse in book 1,
            a passage I never read without surprise: in this tense and heavily
            charged world, in which everything seems to have been put into
            potentially violent contention, why are we given this slow and
            deliberate journey, so heavily formulaic in texture? The answer is
            that this is a ritual of reconciliation, a kind of healing, which
            will receive its most ample performance at the great movement in
            book 24 when Achilles and Priam share their sorrows. A movement
            begins here that will run throughout the poem.
            It is by such an art of arrangement, by placing one thing against
            another, that Homer criticizes the world of book 1 with which he
            began; not, as we expect of a writer today, by elaborating
            competitive languages of motives and value but by ordering his
            materials into patterns of experience that teach the reader
            something different from anything the material itself seems to
            say.1 In a way the poem, as a whole thus has the form of argument;
            not, of course, argument in the ratiocinative sense of a thesis
            supported by propositions, from which it can be said to proceed by
            the rules of logic or the laws of probability, but argument as an
            activity of critical engagement, a definition of resources and a
            testing of limits, that results in the creation of a new position
            taken by the writer and offered to the reader. An argument goes on
            in the text, but its method is closer to that of music than debate.
            ·  1. Cf. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1958) chap. 6, for another view of the ways that
            formula and image combine.
            James B. White is a professor in the law school, the college, and
            the committee on the ancient Mediterranean world at the University
            of Chicago. He is the author of The Legal Imagination,
            Constitutional Criminal Procedure, and a book on rhetoric and
            culture, from which the present article is drawn.
Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr.
         The Concept of Private Meaning in Modern Criticism
         In sum, major critics of the twentieth century continually insist
            that poetry's unique value lies in its ability to convey meanings
            for which there are no public criteria whatsoever. But there are no
            such meanings, and to praise a poem for conveying them is empty.
            Again, these critics assume that what we understand by emotion is
            to be identified simply with an inner experience or state of mind
            and that this state of mind is what is conveyed by, or gives
            meaning and definition to, words which are used to refer to our
            emotional life. The emotions or qualities of emotions supposedly
            communicated by poetry alone, moreover, are said to elude public
            language altogether; they can be neither defined nor discussed but
            only embodied in images. But whatever the status these private
            experiences have for us, they as yet play no part in our language,
            even our poetic language, and reference to them certainly
            contributes nothing to our criticism of poetry. Criticism can play
            a central role in interpreting and shaping our lives, but it will
            only be worth writing if its vocabulary has content. If criticism
            is to become intelligible, it must begin by abandoning the appeal
            to private knowledge.
            Frederic K. Hargreaves, Jr. received his doctorate in English from
            Boston University.
Joel Rudinow
         Duchamp's Mischief
         We began by…implying a comparison between Duchamp and the
            swindlers; we lately find ourselves . . . implying a comparison
            between Duchamp and the child. I believe that in the end both
            comparisons are essential to a thorough understanding of Duchamp's
            significance; it is also, however, essential that each comparison
            temper and qualify the other. The swindlers begin and end as aliens
            to the community on which they practice their art. Duchamp is as
            much inside the artworld as is the child inside his community. On
            the other hand, Duchamp is not disenfranchised, as is the child,
            though, like the child, he is innocent of certain illusions typical
            of full enfranchisement. Like the swindlers, and unlike the child,
            Duchamp is full of guile. He pointedly produces something
            ambiguous, something which supports diametrically opposed readings,
            depending on where one's bets are placed. One of the readings
            amounts to a critique of the other reading as a hoax. But unlike
            the swindle, whose effectiveness depends on the degree to which the
            critique remains hidden and the hoax enjoys full rein, Duchamp's
            gesture is effective, as is the child's unambiguous announcement,
            to the degree that the critique embarrasses the hoax. It seems,
            then, that Duchamp embodies some rare and interesting combination
            of guile and innocence which the fable keeps apart by dividing them
            between agents whose activities are at cross-purposes. The
            limitation of the fable as an analogy is that it provides no model
            for the combination. The fable contains the figures of the
            swindler, of the gullible mark, and of the observer so innocent as
            to be incapable of duplicity. What we are confronted with in
            Duchamp is the figure of the wise guy.
            Joel Rudinow, a conceptual artist, created a multimedia satire
            entitled Higher Learnin'; or, The Song and Dance of Socrates: In
            Which the Love of Wisdom Leads to the Discovery that the Unlived
            Life is Not Worth Examining.
Stanley Cavell
         North By Northwest
         [Alfred Hitchcock's] film is called North by Northwest. I assume
            that nobody will swear from that fact alone that we have here an
            allusion to Hamlet's line that he is but mad north-northwest; even
            considering that Hamlet's line occurs as the players are about to
            enter and that North by Northwest is notable, even within the
            oeuvre of a director pervaded by images and thoughts of the theater
            and of theatricality, for its obsession with the idea of acting;
            and considering that both the play and the film contain plays-
            within-the-play in both of which someone is killed, both being
            constructed to catch the conscience of the one for whose benefit
            they are put on. But there are plenty of further facts. The film
            opens with an ageless male identifying himself first of all as a
            son. He speaks of his efforts to keep the smell of liquor on his
            breath (that is, evidence of his grown-up pleasures) from the
            watchful nose of his mother, and he comes to the attention of his
            enemies because of an unresolved anxiety about getting a message to
            his mother, whereupon he is taken to a mansion in which his
            abductor has usurped another man's house and name and has, it turns
            out, cast his own sister as his wife. (The name, posted at the
            front of the house, is Townsend, and a town is a thing smaller than
            a city but larger than a village, or a hamlet.) The abductor orders
            the son killed by forcing liquid into him. It is perhaps part of
            the picture that the usurper is eager to get to his dinner guests
            and that there is too much competitive or forced drinking of
            liquor. Nor, again, will anyone swear that it is significant that
            the abductor-usurper's henchmen are a pair of men with funny, if
            any, names and a single man who stands in a special relationship
            with the usurper and has a kind of sibling rivalry with the young
            woman that this son, our hero, will become attracted to and
            repelled by. These are shadowy matters, and it is too soon to speak
            of "allusions" or of any other very definite relation to a so-
            called source. But it seems clear to me that if one were convinced
            of Hamlet in the background of North by Northwest, say to the
            extent that one is convinced that Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History
            is in the background of Hamlet, then one would without a qualm take
            the name Leonard as a successor to the name Laertes.
            Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of Must We Mean What We Say?, The Senses of Walden, The
            World Viewed, The Claim of Reason, and Pursuits of Happiness. His
            previous contributions to  are "On Makajev On
            Bergman" (Winter 1979) and "A Reply to John Hollander" (Summer
            1980).
Erwin Panofsky
         The Concept of Artistic Volition
         Objections arise to the concept of artistic intention based upon
            the psychology of a period. Here too we experience trends or
            volitions which can only be explained by precisely those artistic
            creations which in their own turn demand an explanation on the
            basis of these trends and volitions. Thus "Gothic" man or the
            "primitive" from whose alleged existence we wish to explain a
            particular artistic product is in truth the hypostatized impression
            which has been culled from the works of art themselves. Or it is a
            question of intentions and evaluations which have become conscious
            as they find their formulation in the contemporary theory of art or
            in contemporary art criticism. Thus these formulations, just like
            the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves,
            can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products
            of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation.
            Here again this parallel phenomenon would, in its entirety,
            represent an extraordinarily interesting object of humanistic
            investigation, but it would be incapable of defining in detail a
            methodologically comprehensible volition. So, too, the view of art
            which accompanies a period's artistic output can express the
            artistic volition of the period in itself but cannot put a name to
            it for us. This view can be of eminent significance when we are
            seeking a logical explanation for the perception of tendencies
            dominating at a given time and thus also for the judgment of
            artistic volition at that time, which must also be interpreted.
            Erwin Panofsky, the renowned art historian, was professor at the
            Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, until his death
            in 1968. Among his many books and articles are Meaning in the
            Visual Arts, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Renaissance and
            Renascenes in Western Art. Kenneth Northcott is professor of German
            and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and the
            translator of Arnold Hauser's Sociology of Art(forthcoming). Joel
            Snyder is chairman of the committee on general studies in the
            humanities at the University of Chicago.
Jerome J. McGann
         The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner
         What does "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" mean? This question, in
            one form or another, has been asked of the poem from the beginning;
            indeed, so interesting and so dominant has this question been that
            Coleridge's poem now serves as one of our culture's standard texts
            for introducing students to poetic interpretation. The question has
            been, and still is, an important one, and I shall try to present
            here yet another answer to it. My approach, however, will differ
            slightly from the traditional ones, for I do not believe that we
            can arrive at a synthetic answer until we reflect upon the meaning
            of the question itself. I will begin, therefore, by reconsidering
            briefly the history of the poem's criticism. . . . A poem like the
            "Rime" encourages, therefore, the most diverse readings and
            interpretations. Since this encouragement is made in terms of the
            Christian economy, the interpretations have generally remained
            within the broad spiritualist terms, "heathen" terms, in Newman's
            view, which Coleridge's mind had allowed for. The historical method
            of the "Rime," however, had also prepared the ground for a
            thoroughly revisionist view of the poem, in which the entire
            ideological structure of its symbolist procedures would finally be
            able to be seen in their special historical terms.
Donald Wesling
         Difficulties of the Bardic: Literature and the Human_Voice
         Speech, like sound, "exists only when it is passing out of
            existence."1 Although confounded with the very breath of life,
            speech dies on the lips that give it form. This undulation of air,
            whose speechprint is so personal that we have not been able to
            build machines to recognize it, is born in the body but effaces,
            forgets the body. This quality of speech, that it takes support
            form the body but does not reside there, has evoked a debate about
            the role of voice which was doubtless begun earlier but has never
            been so sharply discussed, I think, as in the present generation:
            Must voice and the concept of the speaking subject be defined as a
            unity? Can we validate a definition of the self and what it means
            to be human through a physiology of voice or a metaphysics of
            voice? The logical and chronological priority of empirical speech,
            of utterances seemingly unplanned and unwritten, is what is at
            issue in this debate.2
            ·  1. Walter J. Ong, "The Word in Chains," In the Human Grain(New
            York, 1967), p. 53.
            ·  2. Spontaneous utterances are the subject matter of speech-act
            philosophy and sociolinguistics, disciplines that stress the social
            and communicative context which helps condition personal speaking.
            Such a privileging of voice also occurs in modern poetic theory,
            for example in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and in statements
            by Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, but usually
            these writers show to what degree the oral must always remain a
            fiction in our era.
            Donald Wesling is professor of English at the University of
            California, San Diego. The author of The Chances of Rhyme: Device
            and Modernity, he is currently writing a critique of modern
            metrical theory, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and
            Interpretation.
Roy Harvey Pearce
         Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1855
         Whitman was not one to be troubled about the solution of the
            problem of knowledge in particular, much less in general, nor for
            that matter was Emerson. Their way was to postulate solutions to
            problems just before they encountered them. My point, however, is
            that Whitman, with Emerson, did encounter a problem, the Diltheyan
            solution to which has tempted philosophers of history into our own
            time. If quoting Dilthey as a gloss on Emerson I would seem to want
            to involve Whitman in philosophical issues beyond his ken, then
            instead I would recall an earlier, quite fundamental statement of
            the mood, rather than one of the mode: "That which hath been is
            now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth
            that which is past." The King James version of these words from
            Revelations 3:16 is perhaps clarified in the Revised Standard
            version: "That which is, already has been; that which is to be,
            already has been , and God seeks what has been driven away."
            Roy Harvey Pearce is a professor of American literature at the
            University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The
            Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind;
            The Continuity of American Poetry; and Historicism Once More:
            Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar.
Harold Beaver
         Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)
         Just consider, for sheer paranoia, the range of synonyms when the
            mask is ripped, the silence broken, the deferment brutally
            concluded: angel-face, arse-bandit, auntie, bent, bessie, bugger,
            bum-banger, bum boy, chicken, cocksucker, daisie, fag, faggot,
            fairy, flit, fruit, jasper, mincer; molly, nancy boy, nelly, pansy,
            patapoof, poofter, cream puff, powder puff, queen, queer, shit-
            stirrer, sissie, swish, sod, turd-burglar, pervert. For
            Aristophanes, as for Norman Mailer and Mary Whitehouse, buggery
            equaled coprophagy: a corrupt, destructive, hypocritical,
            excremental, urban scatology. Heterosexuality equalled the fecund,
            rural norm. Aristophanes' diet for a giant dung beetle was turds
            from a buggered boy: "he says he likes them well kneaded."1
            To this day degeneracy often seems to be just another code word for
            homosexuality, as does perversion and decadence; this very essay
            will seem to many a "decadent" project. Nor would I balk at the
            term as long as it is interpreted in the French sense: intent on
            fulfilling Baudelaire's program of transforming the erotically
            passive to the intellectually active, the voluptuous to rational
            self-mastery.
            ·  1.Literally, "a hetairekos boy": male prostitute, or boy-friend
            (Aristophanes Peace 11).
            Harold Beaver, reader of American literature at the University of
            Warwick, was recently elected to the new chair of American
            literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely
            on American literature and is currently completeing a collection of
            his articles, The Great American Masquerade
Nelson Goodman
         Routes of Reference
         Yet while all features of reality are dependent upon discourse, are
            there perhaps some features of discourse that are independent of
            reality the differences, for example, between the ways two
            discourses may say exactly the same thing? The old and ugly notion
            of synonomy rattles a warning here: Can there ever be two different
            discourses that say exactly the same thing in different ways, or
            does every difference between discourses make a difference in what
            is said? Luckily, we can pass over that general question here. We
            are concerned only with the specific question whether organization
            into referential chains and levels is purely conventional,
            independent of everything beyond discourse. And the plain answer is
            that such organization of discourse participates notably in the
            organization of a reality. A label in any nonnull application,
            literal or metaphorical, marks off entities of a certain kind, and
            even where the denotation is null, the label marks off labels of a
            certain kind that apply to that label. Just such marking off or
            selection of entities and relevant kinds makes them such as
            distinguished from the results of alternative organizations.
            Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard
            University and the author of, among other works, The Structure of
            Appearance, Ways of Worldmaking, and Problems and Projects, is
            currently working on projects in the performing arts and on a new
            collection of essays. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "The Status of Style' (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and
            Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer
            1981).
Alexander Nehamas
         The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative_Ideal
         The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to
            capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix
            suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found
            again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption.
            Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the
            significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear.
            Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of
            developments occurring long after its composition. And though the
            fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact
            that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the
            writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.
            Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of
            Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy,
            literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann.
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Elaine Showalter
         Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness
         Until very recently, feminist criticism has not had a theoretical
            basis; it has been an empirical orphan in the theoretical storm. In
            1975, I was persuaded that no theoretical manifesto could
            adequately account for the varied methodologies and ideologies
            which called themselves feminist reading or writing.1 By the next
            year, Annette Kolodny had added her observation that feminist
            literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable
            strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation."2
            Since then, the expressed goals have not been notably unified.
            Black critics protest the "massive silence" of feminist criticism
            about black and Third-World women writers and call for a black
            feminist aesthetic that would deal with both racial and sexual
            politics. Marxist feminists wish to focus on class along with
            gender as a crucial determinant of literary production. Literary
            historians want to uncover a lost tradition. Critics trained in
            deconstructionist methodologies with to "synthesize a literary
            criticism that is both textual and feminist." Freudian and Lacanian
            critics want to theorize about women's relationship to language and
            signification.
            ·  1. See my "Literary Criticism," Signs 1 (Winter 1975): 435-60.
            ·  2. Annette Kolodny, "Literary Criticism," Signs 2 (Winter 1976):
            420.
            Elaine Showalter is professor of English at Rutgers University. The
            author of A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from
            Bronte to Lessing, she is currently completing The English Malady,
            a study of madness, literature, and society in England.
Mary Jacobus
         The Question of Language: Men of Maxims and_The_Mill_on_the_Floss
         A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a
            biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address
            itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours,
            subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only
            by scientific discourse (Freudian theory, for instance), not only
            by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of
            discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific
            practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to
            relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the
            repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for
            which the other (woman) must be reduced to the economy of the Same
            (man).
            Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's
            studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on
            Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist
            criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is
            at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on
            Romantic poetry and prose.
Margaret Homans
         Eliot, Wordsworth, and the Scenes of the Sisters'_Instruction
         Despite criticism's collusion with Eliot, there are a number of
            incongruities between Wordsworth's ideas and Eliot's texts that do
            not seem to be simply differences, scenes and passages that Eliot
            invites her readers to find Wordsworthian while she indicates a
            significant pattern of divergence from Wordsworthian prototypes.
            The brotherly instructions that Eliot is most generally concerned
            at once to follow and to deny are contained in Wordsworth's wish,
            in the verse "Prospectus" to The Recluse, to see "Paradise, and
            groves/Elysian" be "A simple produce of the common day" (ii. 47-48,
            55). But when she follows this wish literally, her "common day,"
            the intensely social world of her novels, tests far more
            strenuously the adaptability of the paradisal vision than does
            anything Wordsworth wrote. The generic incompatibility between a
            poet's vision and the form of the novel may account for some of the
            obvious differences, yet, as I will try to suggest later, it may be
            that Eliot's choice of the realistic novel as the form for her
            vision is in part an effect, not a cause of her ambivalent
            divergences from Wordsworth (for example, a series of her sonnets
            articulates these concerns as much as do the novels).
            Margaret Homans, an assistant professor of English at Yale
            University, is the author of Women Writers and Poetic Identity:
            Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, and Emily Dickinson. She is
            currently at work on a book of feminist criticism of Romanticism
            and Victorian fiction.
Susan Gubar
         "The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female_Creativity
         Woman is not simply an object, however. If we think in terms of the
            production of culture, she is an art object: she is the ivory
            carving or mud replica, an icon or doll, but she is not the
            sculptor. Lest this seem fanciful, we should remember that until
            very recently women have been barred from art schools as students
            yet have always been acceptable as models. Both Laura and Beatrice
            were turned into characters by the poems they inspired. A poet as
            sensitive as Chaucer to this reification of the female allowed
            Criseyde to recognize and lament her own dilemma: "Allas, of me,
            unto the worldless ende,/Shall neyther ben ywritten nor ysonge/No
            good word; for these bokes wol me shende" (bk. 5, st. 152). Like
            the words written about her, she fears she will be "rolled on many
            a tongue!"6
            ·  6. I am indebted for this view of Criseyde to Marcelle
            Thiebaux's "Foucault's Fantasia for Feminists: The Woman Reading"
            (paper delivered at the MMLA Convention, Indianapolis, 8 November
            1979).
            Susan Gubar, associate professor of English at Indiana University,
            is coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
            Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and coeditor of
            Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, both with
            Sandra M. Gilbert. They are currently working on No Man's Land:
            Feminism and Modernism, the sequel to their book.
Nancy J. Vickers
         Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme
         The import of Petrarch's description of Laura extends well beyond
            the confines of his own poetic age; in subsequent times, his
            portrayal of feminine beauty became authoritative. As a primary
            canonical text, the Rime sparse consolidated and disseminated a
            Renaissance mode. Petrarch absorbed a complex network of
            descriptive strategies and then presented a single, transformed
            model. In this sense his role in the history of the interpretation
            and the internalization of woman's "image" by both men and women
            can scarcely be overemphasized. When late-Renaissance theorists,
            poets, and painters represented woman's body, Petrarch's verse
            justified their aesthetic choices. His authority, moreover,
            extended beyond scholarly consideration to courtly conversation,
            beyond the treatise on beauty to the after-dinner game in
            celebration of it. The descriptive codes of others, both ancients
            and contemporaries, were, of course, not ignored, but the
            "scattered rhymes" undeniably enjoyed a privileged status: they
            informed the Renaissance norm of a beautiful woman.1
            ·  1. On this "thoroughly self-conscious fashion," see. Elizabeth
            Cropper, "On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the
            Vernacular Style," Art Bulletin 58 1976): 374-94.
            Nancy Vickers is an assistant professor of French and Italian at
            Dartmouth College. She has published articles on Dante and Petrarch
            and has recently completed a book, The Anatomy of Beauty: Woman's
            Body and Renaissance Blazon.
Nina Auerbach
         Magi and Maidens: The Romance of the Victorian_Freud
         It is commonly assumed that Victorian patriarchs disposed of their
            women by making myths of them; but then as now social mythology had
            an unpredictable life of its own, slyly empowering the subjects it
            seemed to reduce. It also penetrated unexpected sanctuaries. If we
            examine the unsettling impact upon Sigmund Freud of a popular
            mythic configuration of the 1890's we witness a rich, covert
            collaboration between documents of romance and the romance of
            science. Fueling this entanglement between the clinician's proud
            objectivity and the compelling images of popular belief is the
            imaginative power of that much-loved, much-feared, and much-lied-
            about creature, the Victorian woman.
            Nina Auerbach, associate professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is the author of Communities of Women: An Idea in
            Fiction as well as articles on Victorian women and culture. The
            present essay is an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Woman and
            the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, a mythography of Victorian
            Womanhood
Froma I. Zeitlin
         Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae
         Three of Aristophanes' eleven extant comedies use the typical comic
            device of role reversal to imagine worlds in which women are "on
            top." Freed from the social constraints which keep them enclosed
            within the house and silent in the public realms of discourse and
            action, women are given a field and context on the comic stage.
            They issue forth to lay their plans, concoct their plots, and
            exercise their power over men.
            The Lysistrate and the Ecclesiazousae stage of the intrusion of
            women into the public spaces of Athens, the Acropolis and Agora,
            respectively, as an intrusion into the political and economic life
            of the city. The Thesmophoriazousae, however, resituates the battle
            of the sexes in another domain, that of aesthetics, and, more
            precisely, that of theatre itself. Instead of the collective
            confrontation of men and women, the play directs the women's
            actions against a single male target, the tragic poet, Euripides.
            Froma I. Zeitlin, an associate professor of classics at Princeton
            University, is the author of several articles on Greek tragedy and
            on the ancient novel. Her monograph, Under the Sign of the Shield:
            Language, Structure, and the Son of Oedipus in Aeschylus' "Seven
            against Thebes," is forthcoming, and she is presently completing
            The Divided World: Gender and System in Aescylean Drama.
Annette Kolodny
         Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A_Feminist_Exercise_in
            Practical Criticism
         My purpose here, then, is to reexamine a form which has already
            attracted considerable attention and, more particularly, by
            utilizing precisely that same mythopoetic analytic grid established
            by Fielder and Slotkin to reread on of its most popular
            incarnations, only adding to it a feminist perspective. My reading
            will thus avoid the unacknowledged and unexamined assumption which
            marks their work: the assumption of gender. Nonfeminist critics,
            after all, tend to ignore the fact (and significance) of women as
            readers as much as they tend to ignore the potentially symbolic
            significations of gender within a text. Fiedler, for example,
            obviously focuses on a male audience when he asserts that
            "westering, in America, means leaving the domain of the female"
            (pg. 60). And Slotkin, in making the same mistake, ignores the fact
            that women, too, required imaginative constructs through which to
            accommodate themselves to the often harsh realities of the western
            wilderness.
            Annette Kolodny, the author of The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as
            Experience and History in American Life and Letters, has recently
            completed the first volume of Westering Women, a projected
            multivolume analysis of women's imaginative responses to the
            successive American frontiers. She is presently working on Dancing
            through the Minefield, a study of the theoretical political, and
            methodological concerns of feminist literary criticism.
Judith Kegan Gardiner
         On Female Identity and Writing by Women
         During the past few years, feminist critics have approached writing
            by women with an "abiding commitment to discover what, if anything,
            makes women's writing different from men's" and a tendency to feel
            that some significant differences do exist.4 The most common answer
            is that women's experiences differ from men's in profound and
            regular ways. Critics using this approach find recurrent imagery
            and distinctive content in writing by women, for example, imagery
            of confinement and unsentimental descriptions of child care. The
            other main explanation of female difference posits a "female
            consciousness" that produces styles and structures innately
            different from those of the "masculine mind." The argument from
            experience is plausible but limited in its applications: the
            argument from a separate consciousness is subject to mystification
            and circular evidence. In both cases, scholars tend to list a few
            characteristics of writing by women without connecting or
            explaining them.
            ·  4. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary
            Criticism"", 2 (Autumn 1975): 78.
            Judith Kegan Gardiner is an associate professor of English and a
            member of the women's studies program at the University of Illinois
            at Chicago Circle. The author of Craftmanship in Context: The
            Development of Ben Johnson's Poetry as well as articles on Robert
            Burton, feminist literary criticism, and contemporary women
            writers, she is currently working on a study of twentieth-century
            fiction by women.
Catharine R. Stimpson
         Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English
         The "Kinsey Report" suggests the existence of such a mentality. Of
            142 women with much homosexual experience, 70 percent reported no
            regrets. This consciousness has manifested itself in literature in
            two ways. First, in lesbian romanticism: fusions of life and death,
            happiness and woe, natural imagery and supernatural strivings,
            neoclassical paganism with a ritualistic cult of Sappho, and modern
            beliefs in evolutionary progress with a cult of the rebel. At its
            worst an inadvertent parody of fin de siecle decadence, at its best
            lesbian romanticism ruthlessly rejects a stifling dominant culture
            and asserts the value of psychological autonomy, women, art, and a
            European civilization of the sensuous, sensual, and voluptuous.
            Woolf's Orlando is its most elegant and inventive text, but its
            symbol is probably the career of Natalie Barney, the cosmopolitan
            American who was the prototype of Valerie Seymour.23
            ·  23. See Rubin, introduction to Vivien's A Woman Appeared to Me,
            and George Wickes, The Amazon of Letters: The Life and Loves of
            Natalie Barney (New York, 1976).
            Catherine R. Stimpson, professor of English at Rutgers University,
            is the former editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
            Society. The author of both critical essays and fiction, she
            recently co-edited, with Ethel Spector Person, Women, Sex and
            Sexuality.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         "Draupadi" by Mahasveta Devi
         I have suggested elsewhere that, when we wander out of our own
            academic and First-World enclosure, we share something like a
            relationship with Senanayak's doublethink.2 When we speak for
            ourselves, we urge with conviction: the personal is also political.
            For the rest of the world's women, the sense of whose personal
            micrology is difficult (though not impossible) for us to acquire,
            we fall back on a colonialist theory of most efficient information
            retrieval. We will not be able t speak to the women out there if we
            depend completely on conferences and anthologies by Western-trained
            informants. As I see their photographs in women's studies journals
            or on book jackets, indeed, as I look in the glass, it is Senanayak
            with his anti-Fascist paperback that I behold. In the inextricably
            mingling historico-political specificity with the sexual
            differential in a literary discourse, Mahasveta Devi invites us to
            begin effacing that image.
            ·  2. See my "Three Feminist Readings: McCullers, Drabble,
            Habermas," Union Seminary Quarterly Review 1-2 (Fall-Winter 1979-
            80), and "French Feminism in an International Frame."
            Mahasveta Devi teaches English at Bijaygarh College in Jadavpur,
            India, an institution for working-class women. She has published
            over a dozen novels, most recently Chotti Munda ebang Tar Tir, and
            is a prolific journalist, writing on the struggle of the tribal
            peasant in West Bengal and Bihar. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is
            professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. The
            translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie, she has published
            essays on Marxist meminism, deconstructive practice, and
            contemporary literature and is currently completing a book on
            theory and practice in the humanities.
Robert von Hallberg
         Donald Davie and "The Moral Shape of Politics"
         I have suggested that, despite his polemics on behalf of rightist
            attitudes, Davie is deeply committed to the liberalism of his
            generation of intellectuals. This commitment makes itself felt
            indirectly; it is in fact not fully expressed in the patently
            political poems. The poems that are frankly political, in terms of
            their content, are often rightist, but these poems, as I have
            indicated, do not show Davie's accomplishment; his poetic power
            lies elsewhere. In far better poems, Davie shows what I take to be
            a deeper allegiance, one that rests neither on his ideological
            beliefs nor on his class origins 22 but on certain habits of mind
            that derive from the liberal tradition. Although they operate
            throughout Davie's poetry, regardless of the particular subjects
            being treated, these habits always retain an almost silent gesture
            toward liberal ideals. Davie is often most deeply political when he
            seems to be least so. Of course one should not link away his
            rightist avowals; nor should one think of his rightism as deriving
            from the current critical perspective on liberal aspirations. His
            liberalism is nothing if not critical, and his righitst opinions
            express more desire than conviction. As I will try to show, below
            the level of content Davie as a poet shares the liberal
            presuppositions of his generation, and his rightism develops
            largely from a lack of faith in his audience.
            22. In answer to Hamburger, Davie makes a point of his still strong
            bond to his family, which he refers to as "undeniably and proudly
            proletarian; and they include Labour Party activists" ("A Mug's
            Game?" p. 18).
            Robert von Hallberg, associate professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, is the author of Charles Olson: The
            Scholar's Art and a coeditor of .
Paul Alpers
         What is Pastoral?
         Pastoral seems a fairly accessible literary concept; most critics
            and readers seem to know what they mean by it, and they often seem
            to have certain works in mind that count as pastorals. But when we
            look at what has been written about pastoral in the last decades -
            - when it has become one of the flourishing light industries of
            academic criticism -- we find nothing like a coherent account of
            either its nature or its history. We are told that pastoral "is a
            double longing after innocence and happiness"; that its universal
            idea is the Golden Age; that it is based on the antithesis of Art
            and Nature; that its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life;
            that its "central tenet" is "the pathetic fallacy"; that it
            expresses the ideal of otium; that it is "the poetic expression par
            excellence of the cult of aesthetic Platonism" in the Renaissance
            or of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic world; that it is "that mode
            of viewing common experience through the medium of the rural
            world."1 It sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of
            pastoral as there are critics who write about it.
            […]
            A definition of pastoral must first give a coherent account of its
            various features formal, expressive, and thematic and
            second, provide for historical continuity or change within the
            form. The basis of such a definition is provided by what Kenneth
            Burke calls a "representative anecdote":
            Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of
            reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are
            selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in
            certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar
            as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it
            has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its
            scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology,
            or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is
            designated to calculate.
            Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of
            a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a
            "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity with
            which the vocabulary is constructed.6
            Burke uses "anecdote" and not a more philosophically respectable
            term (like "instance" or "example") in order to emphasize the
            contingencies inherent in all such intellectual choices. Anecdote
            implies that they are inseparable from the stuff of reality with
            which they deal and that of their selection does not escape the
            conditions of ordinary accounts of our lives. (On the other hand,
            the term does not carry its normal implications of a story, as the
            examples cited in the next paragraph will show.) "Representative,"
            as Burke uses it here, has a double meaning. An anecdote is
            representative in that (1) it is a typical instance of an aspect of
            reality and (2) by being typical it serves to generate specific
            depictions or representations of that reality.
            1. The allusions are to the following: "double longing" (Renato
            Poggioli, The Oaten Flute [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], p. 1, all
            further references to this work will be included in the text);
            Golden Age (W.W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama [1906;
            New York, 1959], p. 5); Art and Nature (English Pastoral Poetry,
            ed. Frank Kermode [1952; New York, 1972], all further references to
            this work will be included in the text; and Leo Marx, The Machine
            in the Garden [New York, 1967]); hostility to urban life (K.W.
            Gransden, "The Pastoral Alternative," Arethusa 3 [1970]: 103-21,
            177-96; see also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
            [London, 1973]); "pathetic fallacy" (E.W. Tayler, Nature and Art in
            Renaissance Literature [New York, 1964], p.154); otium (Hallett
            Smith, Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge, Mass., 1952], p. 2),
            "aesthetic Platonism" (Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind
            [Oxford, 1969], p. 6); Epicureanism (Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The
            Green Cabinet [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969]; "viewing common
            experience" (John Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost [New
            Haven, Conn., 1960], p.9).
            6. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1969), p. 59. This is the beginning of the section entitled "Scope
            and Reduction."
            Paul Alpers is professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, and is the author of The Poetry of "The
            Faerie Queene" and The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian
            Pastoral. The present essay is part of a larger study entitled
            "Pastoral Poetics."
             
James K. Chandler
         Romantic Allusiveness
         Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the
            texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the author of
            what Reuben Brower calls "the poetry of allusion."5 We envision
            Romantic poets carrying on their work in reaction to these
            Augustans and in mysterious awe, whether fearful or admiring, of
            most other poets sometimes even of each other. No self-
            respecting Romantic, it is usually assumed, will deliberately send
            his reader elsewhere for a meaning to complement the effect of his
            own words. If a reader's mind wanders to an earlier poem, that is
            not the Romantic poet's fault but a matter of accident or perhaps
            of cruel destiny. The Romantic wants to keep the poem an intimate
            affair just the two of us and does what he can to keep
            his reader's attention on himself.
            […]
            What follows is an effort to test the applicability of Wasserman's
            Augustan hypothesis to the poetic mode of high Romanticism. This
            effort should not be taken to imply either that the Romantics
            simply continue in the allusive mode of the Augustans or that the
            assumptions that lead Bloom and others to read Romantic poetry as
            they do are utterly mistaken. I will in fact be arguing quite
            otherwise. Nor must there be any confusion about Wasserman's
            conception of the Augustan mode. Some of the language of his
            summary, for example where he speaks of "the rich interplay between
            the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses,"
            might lead one to liken his work to the criticism now associated
            with the notion of "intertextuality." For the practitioners of this
            criticism, as Jonathan Culler explains, "to read is to place a work
            in a discursive space, relating it to other texts and to other
            codes of that space, and writing is a similar activity."8 Writing
            and reading a poem are in this account both acts of "intertextual
            location," if you will, but the reader of the poem need not concern
            himself with the aims and circumstances of its writer's "similar
            activity." The decisive difference between this view and the one
            Wasserman offers for the Augustans is that Wasserman's is
            intentionalist and historicist. This shows plainly in his
            exegetical commentary on the Rape, where his characteristic claim
            follows the formula: "Pope [expects, invites, prods, wants] his
            (contemporary) reader to [discover, exercise his wit on, recognize,
            see] X in his allusion to such-and-such a text." And to support his
            claim he repeatedly brings his historicist scholarship to bear on
            questions about "the kind of ready knowledge Pope demands of his
            reader" and what "facts [were] known to any serious reader" of the
            time.9
            5. See Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion
            (Oxford, 1959), esp. pp. 1-14.
            8. Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," MLN 91
            (1976): 1382-3; Culler refers primarily to the work of Roland
            Barthes and Julia Kristeva but notes that Bloom himself
            occasionally sounds curiously like an intertextualist critic.
            9. Wasserman, "Limits of Allusion," pp. 427, 429. For a response to
            Wasserman less sympathetic than mine, see Irvin Ehrenpreis,
            Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville, Va., 1974),
            pp. 12-15.
            James K. Chandler, an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, has published work on Wordsworth's poetry
            and politics and is currently completing a book on the subject.
Stanley Corngold
         Error in Paul de Man
         The power of literature to resist "totalization," to divide and
            oppose whole meaning, to separate Being from the word, or to name
            Being as itself divided this is de Man's oldest and best-
            defended idea. Behind its deconstructionist and semiological
            variations in the recent work is a long genealogy of such
            insistence.6 This "genealogy" (the metaphor is abhorrent to de Man)
            contains instructive continuities and aberrations. The continuities
            tend to show de Man to an extraordinary degree the captive of his
            beginnings. The aberrations pose a threat to the very criterion of
            rigor which he makes the touchstone of his position. I will
            restrict myself here to an account of what is coherent and what is
            incoherent in de Man's treatment of the category of error.
            […]
            Error is not mistake. The concept of the mistake is usable,
            perhaps, within the restricted teleology of pragmatic acts or
            within the quasi-rigorous language of scientific description.
            Mistakes (or what de Man sometimes calls "mere error" [see, e.g.,
            BI, p. 109]) are without true value: trivial, in principle
            corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error
            implies a truth. Furthermore, the concept of error supplies to the
            categories of blindness and insight as much coherence as they are
            able to achieve. As we shall see, it brings together the
            constituents of the essential ambivalence of all literary and at
            least some philosophical language (see BI, p. viii).
            6. In 1956, for instance, in a review of Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ère
            du Soupçon, de Man offered his reading of "the central moment of
            Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Stephan
            Dedalus": it "indicates, surely, the total impossiblity of any
            contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested
            love" (Monde Nouveau 11 [June 1956]:59; my translation).
            Stanley Corngold, professor of German and comparative literature at
            Princeton University, is the author of books and articles on Kafka,
            including The Commentator's Despair and an annotated translation of
            The Metamorphosis. A volume of his essays on the question of the
            self in Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Mann, and
            Heidegger is forthcoming.
Paul de Man
         A Letter
         Whenever a binary pair is being analyzed or "deconstructed," the
            implication is never that the opposition is without validity in a
            given empirical situation (no one in his right mind could maintain
            that it is forever impossible to tell night from day or hot from
            cold) but only that the figure of opposition involved in all
            analytical judgments is not reliable, precisely because it allows,
            in the realm of language to which, as figure, it belongs, for
            substitutions that cannot occur in the same manner in the world of
            experience. When one moves from empirical oppositions such as night
            and day to categorical oppositions such as truth and falsehood, the
            epistemological stakes increase considerably because, in the realm
            of concepts, the principle of exclusion applies decisively. The
            critical function of deconstruction is not to blur distinctions but
            to identify the power of linguistic figuration as it transforms
            differences into oppositions, analogies, contiguities, reversals,
            crossings, and any other of the relationships that articulate the
            textual field of tropes and of discourse. Hence the distinctively
            critical, in the not necessarily benign Kantian sense, function of
            texts, literary or other, with regard to aesthetic, ethical,
            epistemological, and practical judgements they are bound to
            generate. These judgements are never merely contingent mistakes or
            merely preordained errors, nor can they be kept in abeyance between
            the two mutually exclusive alternatives. As Pascal said with regard
            to the coercive choice between dogmatism and skepticism, the
            refusal to decide between them, since it is itself a conceptual
            rather than a contingent decision, is always already a choice for
            error over mistake. Conversely, any decision one makes with regard
            to the absolute truth or falsehood value of a text always turns out
            to be a mistake. And it will remain one unless the perpetrator of
            the mistake becomes critically aware of the abusive schematization
            that caused his mistake and thus transforms the mistaking of error
            (for mistake) into the error of mistaking.
            Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories
            of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled
            The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976) and "The
            Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978).
Françoise Meltzer
         Laclos' Purloined Letters
         The role of the reader is central to the epistolary genre because
            the letters anticipate a reader within the novel's framework. There
            is the letter's intended recipient (destinataire), the occasional
            interceptor, the invented publisher and/or editor who organize(s)
            the collected correspondence, and the extrafictional reader who
            reads the collection in its entirety, including the disclaiming or
            condemning prefaces which precede it. The epistolary form, however,
            with so many layers of readers, considerably complicates the issue
            of reader response. If we share, for example, Stanley Fish's
            assumption that "literature is in the reader," the epistolary novel
            apparently reverses the formula: the reader is in the literature.
            And yet it is in the novel of letters that the reader, the
            fictional reader, most clearly creates the text. Let us return to
            Merteuil's admonishment to Cécile: "Voyez donc à soigner davantage
            votre style…. Vous voyez bien que, quand vous écrivez à quelqu'un,
            c'est pur lui et non pas pour vous: vous devez donc moins chercher
            à lui dire ce que vous pensez, que ce qui lui plaît davantage."2 If
            a reader's response to a given sentence is colored by the previous
            one, the epistolary novel achieves the same effect within a larger
            unit: each letter is determined by the one which precedes it. In
            this sense the letter is a grammatical unit, a larger sentence.
            Moreover, a letter-novel presents the possibility of an
            architectural as well as conceptual interruption. That is, whereas
            insufficiencies in a first-or third-person narrative must consist
            of circumlocutions, repetitions, and exclusions of information, the
            letter-novel can create a concrete insufficiency by a lost,
            suppressed, stolen, or interrupted letter. In such cases the letter
            must function without its precedent since the destinataire remains
            empty-handed. Thus, the epistolary novel has a great capacity for
            mise en abîme.
            Both inside and outside the narrative, there always is a
            destinataire; and even if he is the wrong one in the context of the
            récit he is the intended one for the histoire.3 In any case, the
            extrafictional reader is the final destinataire and holds a
            privileged position. And yet, he too is subject to interruptions:
            here the editor rears his head by claiming in footnotes that a
            letter is lost, too damaged to decipher, or so boring or obscene
            that he has seen fit to exclude it; these footnotes are the only
            "letters" addressed to and meant for us. At this point the editor
            removes his mask but remains on stage. Apart from such tricks,
            however, we do read every letter available, each of which is
            addressed to another reader, a system of the once removed or of the
            "letter in suffrance." Or, loosely interpreting Jacques Lacan, a
            purloined letter means that a letter always arrives at its
            destination.4
            2. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons dangereuses (Paris 1961),
            letter 105, p. 247; all subsequent quotations are taken from this
            edition and will be identified by letter and page number in the
            text. "Therefore attend more to your style....You must well know
            that, when you write to someone, it is for him and not for you: you
            must therefore seek less to tell him what you think, than what
            pleases him more"; here and elsewhere my translation.
            3. I am using the French terms of Gérard Genette to avoid confusion
            caused by English equivalents. "Récit is often translated as
            discourse, plot, narrative, subject, narration; histoire as story,
            events, myth, and so forth.
            4. See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on'The Purloined Letter,'" trans.
            Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72; all further
            references to this work, abbreviated as "SPL," will be included in
            the text. The final sentence reads as follows: "Thus it is that
            what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in suffrance' means
            is that a letter always arrives at its destination." What Lacan
            means by this statement has to do with the language of the
            unconscious, or of unconscious Desire. Each individual sends his
            own message of "truth" of identity. Earlier in this passage Lacan
            says: "The sender, we tell you , receives from the receiver his own
            message in reverse form." ("Lettre" has for Lacan two meanings:
            epistle and typographical character.)
            Françoise Meltzer is an associate professor of Romance language and
            literatures and of comparative literature at the University of
            Chicago. Her previous contributions to  are "Color
            as Cognition in Symbolist Verse" (Winter 1978) and the translation
            of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" (Summer 1977). She is
            presently working on the relationship between rhetoric and
            psychoanalytic terminology.
Jean Ricardou
         Proust: A Retrospective Reading
         Deliberately employing rather vague terms, let us postulate a
            literature of the past and a literature of today.
            Two very simple ways of bringing them into relation are
            conceivable. One might adopt a prospective attitude, which would
            consider today's literature in the light of the past's. Or one
            might adopt a retrospective attitude, which would consider the
            literature of the past in the light of today's. The two positions
            are not equivalent. The prospective attitude is threatened with
            sterility: it may well find itself mainly seeking in today's
            literature the trace of that which was active in the literature of
            the past, that is, the persistence of something which is now
            perhaps fading away. The retrospective attitude, on the other hand,
            has a good chance of proving fruitful: what it tends to seek in the
            literature of the past is a foreshadowing of that which is alive in
            the modern text, that is, the beginnings of what is now in effect.
            In short, the former tends to minimize the innovations of today's
            text; the latter tends to stress the innovations in the text of the
            past.
            Clearly, this does not mean that today's text has a metaphysical
            role that of containing a truth which would illuminate its
            inarticulate beginnings in the text of the past. Rather, today's
            text has an operative role that of an instrument with which
            to analyze the text of the past. And this retrospective analysis is
            threefold: it detects the way the text works; it explains the way
            the text works; it specifies the way the text works. In the first
            two operations, detection and explanation, the resemblances between
            a highly active process in a recent text and a less intense one in
            an old text are turned to account. In the third operation,
            specification, the differences between the two are stressed.
            If we subject Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to a
            retrospective analysis in the light of the recent literary movement
            that has been named the New Novel, we immediately perceive, in
            Proust's work, a highly significant process. We are, in fact,
            witness to the beginnings of a monumental metamorphosis: a famous
            linguistic operation, metaphor, undergoes a radical change in
            function. It used to be mainly expressive or representative; with
            Proust, it becomes productive. Let's see how.
            Jean Ricardou is the author of many works of fiction and criticism.
            His most recent critical works are Nouveau problèmes du roman and
            the forthcoming Le théâtre des métamorphoses. His previous
            contributions to  are "Birth of a Fiction" (Winter
            1977) and "Composition Discomposed" (Autumn 1976). 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.
Carolyn Burke
         Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle_of_Female
            Friendship
         For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human
            relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions.
            Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal
            life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise
            them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality
            came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. (1903), when she
            grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional
            impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular
            affair, "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does
            itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine
            such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to
            study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in
            Fernhurst(1904), Three Lives (1905-6), and The Making of Americans
            (1906-11). But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles,
            the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less
            powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional
            structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple
            began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein
            composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their
            relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein
            applied her general theory of relationships to the particular
            puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that
            women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex
            involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in
            distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must
            examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from
            which her portraits emerged.2
            Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds
            seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself
            in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the
            narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know
            ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also
            rethink the place of biography generally dismissed by New
            Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as
            "mere" biography in feminist critical projects. If it is true
            that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake,"
            then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the
            biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these
            activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and
            biography, raise important questions about the ways in which
            biographical information can justify our suspicion that female
            writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male
            writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted
            psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female
            characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness
            between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to
            speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries
            that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very
            different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues
            in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she
            preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know
            it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her
            qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring
            principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from
            her own perspective.
            1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon
            Katz (New York, 1971), p. 67.
            2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 444.
            For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see
            Abel, "(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in
            Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The
            (US)es of (I)dentity: a Response to Abel on '(E)Merging
            Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs (pp. 413-35, 436-42).
            3. Gardiner, "The (US)es of (I)dentity," p. 442.
            4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The
            Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 (Summer 1981): 271.
            See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension
            between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes'
            later work ("Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of
            Writing," in the same issue of The Georgia Review, p. 381).
            5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.
            6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman,
            Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 78.
            Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on
            Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French
            feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now
            completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be
            explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography.
Gary Tomlinson
         Music and the Claims of Text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini,_and_Marino
         The composer of vocal music writes as poet and scholiast. His
            message is autonomous but not wholly his own. He sets to work with
            a preexistent artwork before him a poem or passage of prose,
            often written without thought of musical setting and fashions
            his song under its constraints. He welcomes to his work a second,
            distinct language, one which corresponds to his own at most only
            partially in syntax and significance.
            The composer's unique act of accommodation, structuring his setting
            after certain requisites of his text, may have far-reaching
            implications for his musical style implications too often
            ignored in today's musical analysis and criticism. Which particular
            textual characteristics the composer chooses to emphasize will
            depend on much beyond the text itself: on his view of the nature
            and capabilities of musical discourse, shaped internally by musical
            procedures developed from the canon of his predecessors, externally
            by general expectations and aspirations of his culture; and on his
            equally rich conception of the tradition behind his text. The text-
            music interface is therefore a provocative area of exploration for
            critic and historian alike. It points to the expressive aims of a
            composer in a given work, and it elucidates broader cultural
            assumptions concerning the nature of musical and poetic discourse.
            Gary Tomlinson, assistant professor of music history at the
            University of Pennsylvania, is the author of articles on
            Monteverdi, early opera, and Verdi. He is currently writing a book
            on Monteverdi and late-Renaissance culture.
Hans Robert Jauss
         Poiesis
         Historically, the productive aspect of the aesthetic experience can
            be described as a process during which aesthetic practice freed
            itself step by step from restrictions imposed on productive
            activity in both the classical and the biblical tradition. If one
            understands this process as the realization of the idea of creative
            man, it is principally art which actualizes this idea.1 First, when
            the poietic capacity is still one and undivided, it asserts itself
            subliminally; later, in the competition between technical and
            artistic creation, it explicitly claims to be a production of a
            special kind. It is in that history of the concepts labor and work
            that the restrictions become most palpable.2 In the Greek
            tradition, all producing (poiesis) remains subordinate to practical
            action (praxis). As the activity of slaves who are rigorously
            excluded from the exercise of the virtues, poiesis occupies the
            lowest rank in social life. In the Christian tradition, handiwork
            is cursed, which means that man is meant to maintain himself only
            by toiling against a resistant nature ("cursed is the ground for
            thy sake" [Gen. 3:17]); salvation can only be found beyond his
            activity in this world. But in both the classical and the Christian
            conceptual fields relating to labor, we already encounter
            ambivalent definitions which could introduce and justify an upward
            revaluation of man's labor.
            1. See Hans Blumenberg, "'Nachahmung der Natur': Zur Vorgeschichte
            des schöpferischen Menschen," Studium Generale 10 (1957): 266-83,
            still unexcelled. I also base my discussion on Jürgen Mittelstrass,
            Neuzeit und Aufklårung; Studien zur Entstehung der neuzeitlichen
            Wissenchaft und Philosophie (Berlin, 1970), and to the results of
            two seminars at Constance held jointly and to which I owe essential
            insights.
            2. See Werner Conze, "Arbeit," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:
            Historiches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland,
            ed. Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck, 4 vols.
            (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:154-215, and Walther Bienert, Die Arbeit nach
            der Lehre der Bibel (Stuttgart, 1954); an abbreviated version
            appears in Bienert's "Arbeit," Die Religion in Gescheichte und
            Gegenwart (Tübingen, 1957).
            Hans Robert Jauss is professor of literary criticism and Romance
            philology at the University of Constance. He is the author of many
            books and articles, including two works forthcoming in English,
            Toward an Aesthetic of Receptionand Aesthetic Experience and
            Literary Hermeneutics, from which the present essay is taken.
            Michael Shaw has translated many works, among them Max Horkheimer's
            Dawn and Decline.
W.J.T. Mitchell
          and the Ideology of Pluralism
         The criterion of "arguability" has tended to steer 
            away from the kind of pluralism which defines itself as neutral,
            tolerant eclecticism toward a position which I would call
            "dialectical pluralism." This sort of pluralism is not content with
            mere diversity but insists on pushing divergent theories and
            practices toward confrontation and dialogue. Its aim is not the
            mere preservation or proliferation of variety but the weeding out
            of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and
            the clarification of fundamental and irreducible differences. The
            goal of dialectical pluralism is not liberal toleration of opposing
            views from a neutral ground but transformation, conversion, or, at
            least, the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at
            stake in any critical conflict. A good dramatization of Critical
            Inquiry's editorial ideal would be the dialogue of the devil and
            angel in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an exchange in which
            each contestant enters into and criticizes the metaphysics of his
            contrary and which ends happily with the angel transformed into a
            devil.
             
Michael Fried
         Painter into Painting: On Courbet's After Dinner at_Ornansand
            Stonebreakers
         In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by
            Gustave Courbet (1819-77): the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps
            begun in the small town of the title (the artist's birthplace) but
            certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the
            Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later.
            The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of
            large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans
            (1949-50) and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair
            (1850) that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but
            his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking
            crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those
            works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first
            becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most
            interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode
            that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate
            his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context
            of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation
            of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At
            the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing
            it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance
            the primordial convention that paintings are made to be
            beheld that he contrive in one way or another to establish
            the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist,
            that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze
            through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and
            through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing
            figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states
            of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single
            comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as
            absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as
            oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of
            describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting (or
            this tradition) by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic
            as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably
            theatrical that the array of conventions that once had served
            to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now
            seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence.
            1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in
            progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing
            social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave
            Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (Ph.D. diss., New York
            University, 1963; rpt. New York, 1976); T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois
            Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111
            (April-May 1969): 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave
            Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 (Greenwich, Conn.,
            1973); Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (New York,
            1973); Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die
            Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei (Frankfurt am Main, 1978);
            Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique
            sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 (1978): 94-122; and
            James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and
            Proudhon (Princeton, N.J., 1980).
            2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my
            Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
            Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), as well as the essays on
            Courbet cited in n. 3.
            Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at
            the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and
            Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
            Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet.
Robert L. Carringer
         Orson Welles and Gregg Toland: Their Collaboration on_Citizen_Kane
         Though he has worked almost exclusively in collaborative mediums
            like radio and film, Orson Welles has always tended to think of
            himself as an individual author. "Any production in any medium is a
            one-man production," he said to me. On the question of sharing
            creative responsibility for the works that bear his name, he is
            deeply ambivalent. His insistence on multiple billings for himself
            is legendary. As I can well testify, the very mention of the term
            collaboration at a wrong moment can be enough to send him into a
            rage. The controversy over who scripted Citizen Kaneinitiated by
            Pauline Kael hurt him very deeply. That the wound still festers to
            this day is evident in the rancor with which he speaks of former
            associates like John Houseman. Yet in quieter moments he will fully
            concede how indispensable his principal collaborators have been to
            him and will openly discuss the nature and extent of their
            contributions. He is especially full of praise for cinematographers
            with whom he has worked over the years, such as Gregg Toland,
            Russell Metty, and, more recently, Gary Graver. On Citizen Kane,he
            singles out four individuals whom he thinks deserve special
            recognition: writer Herman Mankiewicz, art director Perry Ferguson,
            composer Bernard Herrmann, and Toland. Of these, he says, Toland's
            contribution to the film was the greatest, second in importance
            only to his own. In this essay I deal with the history and nature
            of Welles' collaboration with Toland on Citizen Kane what
            brought them together, their working relationship, and the
            characteristics and rationale of the visual plan they created for
            the film. As we shall see, Toland brought a largely pre-conceived
            visual plan to Citizen Kanewhich he had been working out in his
            previous films. Welles accepted Toland's plan so readily because he
            recognized how dramatically appropriate it was to the story
            material. Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kanealso left a major
            legacy to Hollywood films of the 1940s.
            Robert L. Carringer, is associate professor of English and cinema
            studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This
            essay is excerpted from his book in progress, The Road through
            Xanadu. His most recent contribution to was "The
            Scripts of Citizen Kane" (Winter 1978).
Jacques Derrida
         The Linguistic Circle of Geneva
         Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of
            linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of
            their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes
            with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of
            linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language
            cease to be proscribed (as they had been from the end of the
            nineteenth century) and when a certain geneticism or a
            certain generativism comes back into its own. One could show
            that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activity is no
            longer elaborated solely at the margins of scientific practice, and
            its results are already being felt. In particular, we are no longer
            at the stage of the prejudice according to which linguistics as a
            science was born of a single "epistemological break" a
            concept, called Bachelardian, much used or abused today and
            of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think,
            as does Maurice Grammont, that "everything prior to the nineteenth
            century, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several
            lines."1 Noam Chomsky, in an article announcing his Cartesian
            Linguistics,which presents in its major lines the concept of
            "generative grammar," states: "My aim here is not to justify the
            interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its
            procedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it
            takes us back to a tradition of ancient thought, rather than
            constituting a new departure or a radical innovation in the domain
            of linguistics and psychology."2
            If we are to set ourselves down in the space of this "curious
            detour," we could not help encountering the "linguistics" of Jean-
            Jacques Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what
            ways Rousseau's reflections on the sign, on language, on the origin
            of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, and so
            on announce (but what does "announce" mean here?) what we are so
            often tempted to consider as the very modernity of linguistic
            science, that is, modernity aslinguistic science, since so many
            other "human sciences" refer to linguistics as their particular
            model. And we are all the more encouraged to practice this detour
            in that Chomsky's major references, in Cartesian Linguistics,are to
            the Logi cand General and Reasoned Grammarof Port-Royal, works that
            Rousseau knew well and held in high esteem.3 For example, on
            several occasions Rousseau cites Duclos' commentary on the General
            and Reasoned Grammar. The Essay on the Origin of Languageseven
            closes with one of these citations. Thus Rousseau acknowledges his
            debt.
            1. Maurice Grammont, cited by Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics
            (New York, 1966), p. 1.
            2. Chomsky, "De quelques constantes de la théory linguistique,"
            Diogène, no. 51 (1965); my italics. See also Chomsky, Current
            Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague, 1964), p.15 ff. There is an
            analogous gesture in Jakobson, who refers not only to Peirce and,
            as does Chomsky, to Humboldt but also to John of Salisbury, to the
            Stoics, and to Plato's Cratylus: see Jakobson, "A la recherche de
            l'essence du langage," Diogène, no. 51 (1965).
            3. "I began with some book of philosophy, like the Port-Royal
            Logic, Locke's Essay, Malebranch, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." (Jean-
            Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Confessions [Paris,
            1959], p. 237).
            Jacques Derrida, professor of the history of philosophy at the
            Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology,and Marges de la
            philosophie,from which the present essay is taken. His previous
            contribution to ,"The Law of Genre," appeared in
            the Autumn 1980 issue. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, has published
            essays on deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Stanley E. Fish
         With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on_Austin_and
            Derrida
         In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques
            Derrida's Of Grammatology to a class at the School of
            Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and
            presented itself for interpretation. It read:
                            WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR
            Immediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in
            the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning
            and the intention (they are the same thing) of the utterance but in
            the special sense (or so it might seem) occasioned by the fact that
            I didn't know who the author named or, rather, not named by
            the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met,
            but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida's
            translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who
            might well have put me on the publisher's list. Or it might
            have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University
            Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence
            (a key word) of any explicit identification, I found myself a very
            emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or
            etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were
            cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present
            intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my
            perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to-
            face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to
            communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by
            a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of
            origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it
            certainly was a message found in a book.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         Against Theory
         By "theory" we mean a special project in literary criticism: the
            attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing
            to an account of interpretation in general. The term is sometimes
            applied to literary subjects with no direct bearing on the
            interpretation of individual works, such as narratology,
            stylistics, and prosody. Despite their generality, however, these
            subjects seem to us essentially empirical, and our argument against
            theory will not apply to them.
            Contemporary theory has taken two forms. Some theorists have sought
            to ground the reading of literary texts in methods designed to
            guarantee the objectivity and validity of interpretations. Others,
            impressed by the inability of such procedures to produce agreement
            among interpreters, have translated that failure into an
            alternative mode of theory that denies the possibility of correct
            interpretation. Our aim here is not to choose between these two
            alternatives but rather to show that both rest on a single mistake,
            a mistake that is central to the notion of theory per se. The
            object of our critique is not a particular way of doing theory but
            the idea of doing theory at all.
            Theory attempts to solve or to celebrate the impossibility of
            solving a set of familiar problems: the function of authorial
            intention, the status of literary language, the role of
            interpretive assumptions, and so on. We will not attempt to solve
            these problems, nor will we be concerned with tracing their history
            or surveying the range of arguments they have stimulated. In our
            view, the mistake on which all critical theory rests has been to
            imagine that these problems are real. In fact, we will claim such
            problems only seem real--and theory itself only seems possible or
            relevant when theorists fail to recognize the fundamental
            inseparability of the elements involved.
            The clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical
            problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is
            the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention
            and the meaning texts. Some theorists have claimed that valid
            interpretations can only be obtained through an appeal to authorial
            intentions. This assumption is shared by theorists who, denying the
            possibility of recovering authorial intentions, also deny the
            possibility of valid interpretations. But once it is seen that the
            meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended
            meaning, the project of grounding meaning in intention becomes
            incoherent. Since the project itself is incoherent, it can neither
            succeed nor fail, hence both theoretical attitudes toward intention
            are irrelevant. The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine
            the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the
            author's intended meaning) to a second term (the text's meaning),
            when actually the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed
            nor fail in deriving one term from the other, since to have one is
            already to have them both.
            In the following two sections we will try to show in detail how
            theoretical accounts of intention always go wrong. In the fourth
            section we will undertake a similar analysis of an influential
            account of the role interpretive assumptions or beliefs play in the
            practice of literary criticism. The issues of belief and intention
            are, we think, central to the theoretical enterprise; our
            discussion of them is thus directed not only against specific
            theoretical arguments but against theory in general. Our examples
            are meant to represent the central mechanism of all theoretical
            arguments, and our treatment of them is meant to indicate that all
            such arguments will fail and fail in the same way. If we are right,
            then the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and
            should be abandoned.
John Paul Russo
         I.A. Richards in Retrospect
         I. A. Richards ushered the spirit of Cambridge realism into
            semantics and literary criticism. When he arrived as an
            undergraduate in 1911, Cambridge was in the midst of its finest
            philosophical flowering since the Puritanism and Platonism of the
            seventeenth century. The revolution of G. E. Moore and Bertrand
            Russell against Hegelian idealism had already occurred; the Age of
            Principia was under way. There was a reassertion of native
            empiricism and a new interest in philosophical psychology, and the
            whole discussion was marked increasingly by a preoccupation with
            language. Richards, too, would break with the past, with the
            history of criticism in the previous two generations, gather
            psychological ideas to establish an empirical semantics and
            aesthetics, and center his attention on language. Although Romantic
            and late-Victorian values inform his theories, Richards set down an
            original criticism on first principles, not on tradition. Many of
            his books' titles show this rationalist strains: The Foundations of
            Aesthetics (1921), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Principles of
            Literary Criticism (1924), Basic Rules of Reason (1933), and The
            Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). The originality and influence of
            Richards' criticism can be shown by the number of terms he put into
            circulation, terms which became the currency of debate for almost
            half a century: close reading, tone, pseudostatement, stock
            response, tension, equilibrium, tenor and vehicle of metaphor,
            emotive and referential language.
            John Paul Russo is a professor and chairman of the English
            department at the University of Miami. He is the editor of I. A.
            Richards' Complementarities: Uncollected Essays and the author of
            Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity and an annotated
            bibliography of Richards' works. He is currently completing a
            critical biography of Richards. "A Study in Influence: The Moore-
            Richards Paradigm," his previous contribution to ,
            appeared in the Summer 1979 issue.
Paul de Man
         Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics
         We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopediaon memory,
            from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art
            of Memoryand much closer to Augustine's advice about how to
            remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the
            learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it
            can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription,
            or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is
            forced to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in
            other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the
            material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a
            mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as
            can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from
            the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words
            and of thought
            […]
            No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aestheticsturns out to be a double
            and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and
            the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the
            elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start.
            Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently
            historical and the properly theoretical components of the work.
            This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's
            readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the
            past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some
            rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or
            borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two
            statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful
            is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the
            same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather
            than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather
            than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than
            recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in
            Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the
            past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the
            interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to
            the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets,
            its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the
            Aestheticsoccurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable
            philosophical category. What the Aestheticscalls the beautiful
            terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we
            associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.
            Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, is the author of Blindness and Insightand Allegories of
            Readingand is currently completing a book tentatively titled The
            Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiryare "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976), "The
            Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978), and "A Letter" (Spring
            1982).
Michel Foucault
         The Subject and Power
         I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new
            economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more
            directly related to our present situation, and which implies more
            relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the
            forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting
            point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance
            as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations,
            locate their position, and find out their point of application and
            the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of
            view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power
            relations through the antagonism of strategies.
            […]
            Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a
            way in which certain actions may structure the field of other
            possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a
            relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions.
            That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social
            nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary
            structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In
            any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action
            upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society
            without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it
            said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the
            analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical
            formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the
            conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish
            others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power
            relations is not to say either that those which are established are
            necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the
            heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I
            would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into
            question of power relations and the "agonism" between power
            relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent
            political task inherent in all social existence.
            […]
            In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of
            struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a
            perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may
            become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the
            relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment,
            give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power.
            The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the
            same events and the same transformations either from inside the
            history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power
            relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of
            the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of
            intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric,
            and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In
            fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings
            which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination"
            which are present in a large number of human societies.
            Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since
            1970. His works include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth
            of the Clinic (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of
            Sexuality (1976), the first volume of a projected five-volume
            study.
Edward W. Said
         Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community
         I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural
            situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies
            Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred
            back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a
            particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not
            merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of
            thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era.
            Moreover, I think, "criticism" and the traditional academic
            humanities have gone through a series of developments over time
            whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross
            claims that I make for my argument.
            A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully
            aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment
            is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst.
            But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in
            which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a
            totality felt to be benign (free, apolitical, serious),
            uncharacterizable as a whole (it is too complex to be described in
            general and tendentious terms) and somehow outside history. Thus it
            seems to me that one thing to be tried out of sheer critical
            obstinacy is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind
            of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the
            present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from
            the start.
            It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make
            invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist
            between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the
            world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military
            force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for
            example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive (as
            opposed to an implicit or passive) doctrine of noninterference
            among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general
            public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions
            affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists
            who talk about their specialty only, and to use the word
            first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public
            Opinion and The Phantom Public "insiders," people (usually
            men) who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how
            things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.
            1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century
            (Boston, 1980), pp. 180-85 and 212-6.
Donald A. Davie
         Poet: Patriot: Interpreter
         If patriotism can thus be seen as an incentive or as an instigation
            even in such a recondite science as epistemology, how much more
            readily can it be seen to perform such functions in other studies
            more immediately or inextricably bound up with communal human life?
            I pass over instances that occur to me for instance, the
            Victorian Jesuit, Father Hopkins, declaring (too shrilly tor modern
            susceptibilities) that every good poem written by an Englishman was
            a blow struck for England--and profit instead, if I may, by the
            presence among us of Edward Said. I do not know, and it is none of
            my business to know, what passport Said presents at the
            international frontier. But it is surely common knowledge among us
            that he has deep and feelingful and intimate allegiances to the
            state of Lebanon. Who of us has failed to connect this with his
            books Orientalism and The Question of Palestine? The point is that,
            having made this connection, none of us thinks the worse of Said.
            On the contrary, we recognize that he has a special stake in such
            topics and therefore speaks on them with a special authority.
            Unless I am mistaken, that stake and that authority are, in a
            perhaps extended sense, patriotic. And whatever our speculative
            objections to the idea and the principle of patriotism, in practice
            we recognize it and we honour it.
            What I am questioning, it will now be plain, is the principle of
            "disinterest." "The disinterested pursuit of knowledge" it is
            what in our distinct disciplines all of us have paid lip-service
            to, and perhaps more than lip-service. But when we come right down
            to it, is it what we believe? The honest patriot declares an
            interest; and if we are wise, we take note of the declaration,
            making allowances and reserving doubts accordingly. But what are we
            to make of the scholar who declares no interest, who claims
            implicitly to be truly disinterested. Can we believe him? And if we
            cannot, what guidance do we have as to what reservations to make,
            what doubts to entertain? I am of one mind with my Marxist
            colleagues who, from a political position very far from mine, warn
            us to be especially suspicious of the scholar who claims to have no
            axe to grind. We, all of us, have axes to grind; the crucial
            distinction is between those who know this about themselves and
            those who don't.
            Let me make myself clear. When I urge that the terms "patriotism"
            and "patriotic" be reinstated in our discourse, and particularly in
            those forms of our discourse that may be called "interpretation," I
            do not imply that patriotism is a nobler, a more elevated
            instigation than sundry others, mostly ideological, of which we are
            more aware. The point is precisely that of these others we are
            aware because we share a vocabulary which acknowledges them,
            whereas "patriotic" has been banished from our vocabulary, and so
            the reality which the word represents is left out of our
            calculations. Let me admit for the sake of argument what I do not
            in fact believe-- that patriotism is a concept and a sentiment so
            besmirched by the unholy uses made of it that, if mankind is to
            survive, patriotism will have to be eradicated. Even if that were
            the case, it remains true that patriotic interest and incitement
            are very far from having been eradicated from the world that we in
            fact inhabit, and try to interpret, here and now; and if we try to
            work within a vocabulary that pretends otherwise, we condemn
            ourselves to producing interpretations that are drastically partial
            and perhaps disastrously misleading. The point is not whether
            patriotism is a good thing or a bad thing but simply that it is; it
            exists, as powerful factor which we all in our hearts acknowledge
            even as our vocabulary refuses to. And when we speak in this
            context of "the world," we certainly include in that world
            ourselves, who offer to interpret it. Every one of our
            interpretations is coloured by the fact that we, the several
            interpreters, are British or American, French or Italian or Russian
            or whatever. If we think otherwise, we deceive ourselves; and yet
            where, in any of our currently acceptable vocabularies, determined
            as all of them are by the glib rationalism of the Enlightenment, do
            we find that momentous fact about ourselves acknowledged? Where is
            it acknowledged, for instance, in the vocabulary of feminism that
            "woman," as conceived by an American writing about Italians, cannot
            help but be significantly different from "woman" as conceived by an
            Italian looking at Americans? Or again, an Italian woman may well,
            we must suppose, be an Italian patriot; but where, in the current
            vocabulary of feminists, is that dimension of her "woman-ness"
            allowed for? Let it be acknowledged only so as to be deplored; but
            let it in any event be acknowledged. At the moment, it isn't.
            Donald A. Davie, the distinguished poet, is Andrew W. Mellon
            Professor of the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and honorary
            fellow of Saint Catharine's College, Cambridge and of Trinity
            College, Dublin. He has edited The New Oxford Book of Christian
            Verse, and his Collected Poems 1950-1970 appeared in 1972. His
            latest publications are Dissentient Voice and These the Companions;
            Recollections.
Wayne C. Booth
         Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of_Feminist
            Criticism
         In turning to the language of freedom, I am not automatically freed
            from the dangers of reduction and self-privileging. "Freedom" as a
            term is at least as ambiguous as "power" (or as "politics" or
            "interpretation"). When I say that for me all questions about the
            politics of interpretation begin with the question of freedom, I
            can either be saying a mouthful or saying nothing at all, depending
            on whether I am willing to complicate my key term, "freedom," by
            relating it to the language of power. The best way to do that is to
            get power in from the beginning, by making a distinction taken for
            granted by many earlier thinkers and too often ignored today:
            freedom from as contrasted with freedom to; freedom fromexternal
            restraints and the power of others to inhibit our actions, and
            freedom to act effectively when restraints disappear.
            All the freedom from in the world will not free me to make an
            intellectual discovery or to point a picture unless I have somehow
            freed myself to perform certain tasks. Such freedoms are gained
            only by those who surrender to disciplines and codes invented by
            others, giving up certain freedoms from. Nobody forbids by
            interpreting the original text of Confucius' Analects or the
            Principia Mathematica, yet I am not free to do so, lacking the
            disciplines having not been disciplined to do so. The
            distinction can lead to troublesome complexities, but in its simple
            form here it cuts through some of the problems that arise in power
            language.
            Every critical revolution tends to speak more clearly about what it
            is against than about what it seeks. The historicists against
            impressionism, the New Critics against historicism, the new new
            critics against intentionalism and the authority of canons, the
            feminists against misogynous art and criticism clearly one
            could write a history of modern criticism as a glorious casting off
            of errors. But it is rightly a commonplace among intellectual
            historians that all revolutionaries depend on their past far more
            than they know. Revolutionary critics are enslaved by a nasty law
            of nature: I can say only what I can say, and that will be largely
            what I have learned to say from the kings I would depose.
            Everyone who tries to forge any kind of ideological criticism must
            struggle with these complexities. Nobody ever knows just what
            powers have been rejected and what voices heard. But at the moment
            it seems clear that what follows here, both in its emerging
            clarities and remaining confusions, results from my somewhat
            surprised surrender to voices previously alien to me: the "Mikhail
            Bakhtin" who speaks to me, muffled by my ignorance of Russian, and
            the feminist criticism" that in its vigor and diversity and
            challenge to canonic views has belatedly,
            belatedly forced me to begin listening.
            Wayne C. Booth's most recent work, Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism, won the Laing Prize in 1982. He is
            working on a book about ethical and political criticism of
            narrative. A new edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction will appear in
            1983.
Julia Kristeva
         Psychoanalysis and the Polis
         The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now
            was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps
            American university discourse in particular, possesses an
            extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the
            key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a
            fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States,
            though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a
            fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian
            Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian "deconstructivism"
            though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to
            analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through
            contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems
            consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness:
            psychoanalysis not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to
            implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as
            that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic
            decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of
            language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring
            here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and,
            perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event (après
            coup).
            For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed
            throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as
            strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same
            preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and
            "revolutionaries" in all cases, jealous guardians of their
            academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into
            question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would
            therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:
            1. There are political implications inherent in the act of
            interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation
            bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the
            interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give
            meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is
            perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological
            attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning.
            This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the
            speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his
            identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the
            apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.
            2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a
            fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and
            dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs
            to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an
            uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a
            situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget
            that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic
            intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an
            antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to
            become our modern religion: the final explanation.
            3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two
            powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel
            to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as
            well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a
            meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that
            context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts
            insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an
            example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.
            Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris
            VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the
            author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and
            Art and About Chinese Women.
            Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia
            University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du
            langage poétique.
Stephen Toulmin
         The Construal of Reality: Criticism in Modern and_Postmodern
            Science
         The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a
            service by directing our attention to the role of critical
            interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us
            a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role
            for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply
            separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1
            Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of
            hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false
            interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have
            had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are
            crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they
            have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which
            difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such
            goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural
            sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall
            be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic
            method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its
            rhetorical misuse.
            Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to
            adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed
            more than once during the historical development of that science.
            Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the
            commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the
            contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover
            just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to
            interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular
            standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific
            objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we
            are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction
            there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that
            whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to
            that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a
            result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical
            realms whether moral or aesthetic, political and
            intellectual have been too hastily surrendered.
            The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and
            hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a
            century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind
            that the interpretive element in natural science was far less
            evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world
            from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick
            Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of
            "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile
            the rational claims that have always been central to the natural
            sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability.
            1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the
            natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but
            the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and
            their successors I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen
            Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl I an
            impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers
            have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or
            the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one
            or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual
            purposes and at different stages in their historical development.
            Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought,
            the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the
            University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works,
            Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and
            Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding.
            His previous contribution to , "The Inwardness of
            Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue.
Hayden White
         The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-
            Sublimation
         The politics of interpretation should not be confused with
            interpretive practices such as political theory, political
            commentary, or histories of political institutions, parties, and
            conflicts that have politics itself as a specific object of
            interest. In these other interpretive practices, the politics that
            informs or motivates them "politics" in the sense
            of political values or ideology is relatively easily
            perceived and no particular meta-interpretive analysis is required.
            The politics of interpretation, on the other hand, arises in those
            interpretive practices which are ostensibly most remote from
            overtly political concerns, practices which are carried out under
            the aegis of a purely disinterested search for the truth or inquiry
            into the natures of things which appear to have no political
            relevance at all. This "politics" has to do with the
            kind of authority the interpreter claims vis-à-vis the established
            political authorities of his society, on the one side, and vis-à-
            vis other interpreters in his own field of study or investigation,
            on the other, as the basis of whatever rights he conceives himself
            to possess and whatever duties he feels obligated to discharge as a
            professional seeker of truth. This politics which presides over
            interpretive conflicts is difficult to identity because
            traditionally, in our culture at least, interpretation is thought
            to operate properly only as long as the interpreter does not have
            recourse to the one instrument which the politician per vocationem
            utilizes as a matter of course in his practice the appeal to
            force as a means of resolving disputes and conflicts.1
            1. I have followed the lead of Max Weber in defining the phrase
            "politics of interpretation." In "Politics as
            Vocation," Weber wrote that " &lsquo;politics'
            means for us striving to share power or striving to influence the
            distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a
            state" (From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,ed. and trans. H.
            H. Gerth and C. W. Mills [New York, 1958], p. 78). Rather than
            discuss the age-old problem of the professional interpreter's
            political responsibilities, I will consider that politics which is
            endemic to the pursuit of truth the striving to share power
            amongst interpreters themselves. The activity of interpreting
            becomes political at the point where a given interpreter claims
            authority over rival interpreters. As long as this claim is not
            reinforced by appeal to the power of the state to compel conformity
            of belief or conviction, it is "political" only in a
            metaphorical sense. Of course, interpretation becomes political
            when a given point of view or finding is taken as orthodoxy of
            belief by those holding political power, as in the Soviet Union,
            Germany under Hitler, or any number of religiously puritanical
            regimes. But these are the easy cases. It is much more difficult to
            determine the political nature of interpretive practices which, as
            in literary criticism or antiquarian scholarship, appear to have no
            bearing upon political policies or practices.
            Hayden White is a professor and director of the program in the
            history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa
            Cruz. He is coeditor of Representing Kenneth Burke (forthcoming
            this fall) and is currently working on a book on the rhetoric of
            realism. His previous contributions to  are "The
            Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (Autumn
            1980) and "The Narrativization of Real Events" (Summer 1981).
T. J. Clark
         Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art
         It is not intended as some sort of revelation on my part that
            Greenberg's cultural theory was originally Marxist in its stresses
            and, indeed in its attitude to what constituted explanation in such
            matters. I point out the Marxist and historical mode of proceeding
            as emphatically as I do partly because it may make my own procedure
            later in this paper seem a little less arbitrary. For I shall fall
            to arguing in the end with these essay's Marxism and their history,
            and I want it understood that I think that to do so is to take
            issue with their strengths and their main drift.
            But I have to admit there are difficulties here. The essays in
            question ["Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Towards a Newer Lacoön"]
            are quite brief. They are, I think, extremely well written: it was
            not for nothing the Partisan Review described Clement Greenberg,
            when he first contributed to the journal early in 1939, as "a young
            writer who works in the New York customs house" fine,
            redolent avant-garde pedigree, that! The language of these articles
            is forceful and easy, always straightforward, blessedly free from
            Marxist conundrums. Yet the price paid for such lucidity, here as
            so often, is a degree of inexplicitness certain amount of
            elegant skirting round the difficult issues, where one might
            otherwise be obliged to call out the ponderous armory of Marx's
            concepts and somewhat spoil the low of the prose from one firm
            statement to another. The Marxism, in other words, is quite largely
            implicit; it is stated on occasion, with brittle and pugnacious
            finality, as the essay's frame of reference, but it remains to the
            reader to determine just how it works in the history and theory
            presented what that history and theory depend on, in the way
            of Marxist assumptions about class and capital or even abase and
            superstructure. That is what I intend to do in this paper: to
            interpret and extrapolate from the texts, even at the risk of
            making their Marxism declare itself more stridently than the "young
            writer" seems to have wished. And I should admit straight away that
            there are several point in what follows where I am genuinely
            uncertain as to whether I am diverging from Greenberg's argument or
            explaining it more fully. This does not worry me overmuch, as long
            as we are alerted to the special danger in this case, dealing with
            such transparent yet guarded prose, and as long as we can agree
            that the project in general pressing home a Marxist reading
            of texts which situate themselves within the Marxist
            tradition is a reasonable one.2
            2. This carelessness distinguishes the present paper from two
            recent studies of Greenberg's early writings, Serge Guilbaut's "The
            New Adventures of the Avant-Garde in America," October 15 (Winter
            1980), and Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock's "Avant-Gardes and
            Partisans Reviewed," Art History 3 (September 1981) I am indebted
            to both these essays and am sure that their strictures on the
            superficiality not to say the opportunism of
            Greenberg's Marxism are largely right. (Certainly Mr. Greenberg
            would not now disagree with them.) But I am nonetheless interested
            in the challenge offered to most Marxist, and non-Marxist, accounts
            of modern history by what I take to be a justified though extreme,
            pessimism as t the nature of established culture since 1870. That
            pessimism is characteristic, I suppose, of what Marxists call an
            ultraleftist point of view. I believe, as I say, that a version of
            some such view is correct and would therefore with to treat
            Greenberg's theory as if it were a decently elaborated Marxism of
            an ultraleftist kind, on which issues in certain mistaken views
            (which I criticize) but which need not so issue and which might
            still provide, cleansed of those errors, a good vantage for a
            history of our culture.
            T. J. Clark, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the
            author of The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France,
            1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848
            Revolution. His book on impressionist painting and Paris is
            forthcoming.
Stanley Cavell
         Politics as Opposed to What?
         In my essay on Austin I did not specify what I took the politics of
            my own discourse to be, but the institutional pressures on it, in
            particular the pressures of the professionalization of American
            philosophy, were in outline clear enough. I was more and more
            galled by the mutual shunning of the continental and the Anglo-
            American traditions of philosophizing, and I was finding more and
            more oppressive the mutual indifference of philosophy and
            literature to one another, especially, I suppose, of American
            philosophy and American literature, and especially philosophy's
            indifference to the literary conditions of its own existence. (I
            understand this to imply not an interdisciplinary wish but rather a
            wish for philosophy to take a further step toward itself.) I was
            still near the beginning of what is turning out to be a lifelong
            quarrel with the profession of philosophy. One of its recent
            manifestations has been the question put to me by certain
            professional colleagues whether I do not take satisfaction from the
            newer literary theory and criticism, especially as that has been
            inspired by developments over the past fifteen or so years in
            French intellectual life. This would seem to answer my plea at one
            stroke for both continental philosophy and for an understanding
            with literary matters. The fact is that my ambivalence toward these
            developments has been so strong, or anyway periodic, that I have
            found it difficult to study in any very orderly way.
            The reason for my difficulty is contained in what I mean by my
            quarrel with the profession of philosophy. That this is a quarrel
            means that I recognize the profession to be the genuine present of
            the impulse and the history of philosophy, so far as that present
            takes its place in our (English-speaking) public intellectual life.
            This is what makes my quarrel with it a part of what I take my
            intellectual adventure to be. My point in the quarrel is that I can
            recognize no expression of mine to be philosophical which simply
            thinks to escape my profession's paradigms of comprehensibility; so
            that the invocations of the name of philosophy in current literary
            debate are frequently not comprehensible to me as calls upon
            philosophy. It may be that I should care less about this than I do,
            even less than my ambivalence asks. I mean to bear this in mind as
            I go on to spend the bulk of my time here considering in a
            practical way some passages from the writing of two literary
            theorists who have recourse to the work of Austin. In the case of
            the passages from Stanley Fish, it may be that my efforts will just
            amount to clearing up some unnecessarily confusing terminology;
            some passages from Paul de Man I find more troubling.
            Stanley Cavell, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of, among other works, Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of Walden, The Claim of Reason, and most recently Pursuits
            of Happiness. His previous contributions to  are
            "On Makavejev On Bergman" (Winter 1979), "A Reply to John
            Hollander" (Summer 1980), and "North by Northwest" (Summer 1981).
Ronald Dworkin
         Law as Interpretation
         The puzzle arises because propositions of law seem to be
            descriptive they are about how things are in the law, not
            about how they should be and yet it has proved extremely
            difficult to say exactly what it is that they describe. Legal
            positivists believe that propositions of law are indeed wholly
            descriptive: they are in fact pieces of history. A proposition of
            law in their view, is true just in case some event of a designated
            law-making kind has taken place, and other wise not. This seems to
            work reasonably well in very simple cases. If the Illinois
            legislature enacts the words "No will shall be valid without three
            witnesses, "then the proposition of law, that in Illinois will
            needs three witnesses, seems to be true only in virtue of that
            historical event.
            But in more difficult cases the analysis fails. Consider the
            proposition that a particular affirmative action scheme (not yet
            tested in the courts) is constitutionally valid. If that is true,
            it cannot be so just in virtue of the text of the Constitution and
            the fact of prior court decisions, because reasonable lawyers who
            know exactly what the constitution says and what the courts have
            done may yet disagree whether it is true. (I am doubtful that the
            positivist's analysis holds even in the simple case of the will;
            but that is a different matter I shall not argue here.)
            What are the other possibilities? One is to suppose that
            controversial propositions f law, like the affirmative action
            statement, are not descriptive at all but are rather expressions of
            what the speaker wants the law to be.
            Another is more ambitious: controversial statements are attempts to
            describe some pure objective or natural law, which exits in virtue
            of objective moral truth rather than historical decision. Both
            these projects take some legal statements, at least, to be purely
            evaluative as distinct from descriptive: they express either what
            the speaker prefers his personal politics or what he
            believes is objectively required b the principles of an ideal
            political morality. Neither of these projects is plausible because
            someone who says that a particular untested affirmative action plan
            is constitution does mean to describe the law as it is rather than
            as he wants it to be or thinks that, by the best moral theory, it
            should be. He might, indeed, say that the regrets that the plan is
            constitutional and thinks that, according to the best moral theory,
            it ought not to be.
            There is a better alternative: propositions of law are not simply
            descriptive of legal history, in a straightforward way, nor are
            they simply evaluative in some way divorced from legal history.
            They are interpretive of legal history, which combines elements of
            both description and evaluation but is different from both. This
            suggestion will be congenial, at least at first blush, to many
            lawyers and legal philosophers. They are used to saying that law is
            a matter of interpretation; but only, perhaps because they
            understand interpretation in a certain way. When a statute (or the
            Constitution) is unclear on some point, because some crucial term
            is vague or because a sentence is ambiguous, lawyers say that the
            statute must be interpreted, and they apply what they call
            "techniques of statutory construction." Most of the literature
            assumes that interpretation of a particular document is a matter of
            discovering what its authors (the legislators, or the delegates to
            the constitutional convention) meant to say in using the words they
            did. But lawyers recognize that on many issues the author had no
            intention either way and that on others his intention cannot be
            discovered. Some lawyers take a more skeptical position. They say
            that whenever judges pretend they are discovering the intention
            behind some piece of legislation, this is simply a smoke screen
            behind which the judges impose their own view of what the statute
            should have been.
            Ronald Dworkin, professor of jurisprudence at Oxford University, is
            the author of Taking Rights Seriously and editor of The Philosophy
            of Law.
Garry Wills
          (Kritik) in Clausewitz
         1.Wechselwirkung
            Suppose that A is standing at a bar with his friend B and tells B,
            "I'll give you a dollar to fight the man on the side of
            you"(C). B, naturally, answers: "Are you crazy? Even if
            I win, I'll probably tear my clothes, or mess them up. A
            dollar wouldn't even cover the dry-cleaning bill." B is
            very sensible.
            But then C starts to pick up B's change on the
            bar about a dollar's worth. "You can't do
            that," B assures him, emphatically. C says, "Who
            says?" "Oh yeah?"s get traded, then shoulders
            pushed in rotation and before you know it, B is fighting for
            a dollar after all.
            But now, B will assure us, the money does not matter, it's
            the principle of the thing. What principle? "That no one can
            steal from me, no matter what the amount." But the man
            picking up the change thought it was his; no principle about
            stealing existed in his mind. "Well, I don't want the
            idea to get around that anyone can take things from me." So C
            is suffering proleptically for all the people who might feel
            tempted to engage in C-like activities (the deterrence theory of
            punishment). But what if C's calamity does not get around to
            all the bars? What, that is, if future Cs do not know about the
            educational improvements B has effected on C's nose?
            "They might not know, but I would." B, it appears, can
            have no pride in himself unless he fights over one-dollar
            misunderstandings.
Joel Weinsheimer
         "London" and the Fundamental Problem of Hermeneutics
         In the preface to the Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's poems,
            the editors remark that "for a modern reader who can recreate
            the situation in which ["London"] was written, it may
            still be exciting enough. But to one with less imaginative capacity
            or historical knowledge, its appeal lies in Johnson's
            skillful handling of the couplet."2 To assist us in re-
            creating the milieu of 1738, the editors supply the usual notes
            identifying various historical personages and events which are no
            longer in the domain of common knowledge. In this respect they
            follow Johnson's lead. "London" is manifestly an
            occasional poem; and its occasion in part, Walpole's
            timidity abroad and corruption at home like all occasions,
            passed.3 Indeed it passed so quickly that Johnson himself felt
            called upon in the fifth edition (1750) to annotate, for instance,
            his mention of "the Gazetteer": "the paper which
            at that time contained apologies for the Court." By 1750
            Walpole was long out of court, the Gazetteer extinct, and
            "London" as outdated as yesterday's newspaper.
            For poems like "London" whose contents are neither au
            courant nor immortal but rather historical or simply dead, the Yale
            editors suggest two avenues of resuscitation: the reader may either
            restore the background by means of historical imagination or,
            failing that, admire Johnson's couplet art, which perhaps has
            a better chance at perennial appeal. Either content or form, either
            history or art both options require a sacrifice on our part,
            and that sacrifice is our occasion, our need. Even assuming that
            the poem's context could be exhumed and that we could
            participate once again in all the rage of the "patriot"
            opposition to Walpole, Why would we want to? The problem is that
            not only "London" but the Walpole regime itself is now
            defunct. Yet the same question must be asked of the poem's
            art, even and especially if it is eternal. Why are we interested in
            the aesthetic knowledge of couplets that have been drained of all
            substance? Is understanding "London" in either case an
            end in itself? The pure content of the poem is too concrete, its
            pure form too abstract, to answer our occasions. Thus to understand
            the poem as either history or art demands a leisure that has no
            exigencies and is therefore free for the bygone and ethereal.4
            2. E.L. McAdam, Jr. and George Milne, eds., Poems, vol. 6, The Yale
            Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1964), p.
            xvii.
            3. For a detailed exposition of the social and political background
            of "London," see Donald Greene, The Politics of Samuel
            Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1960), pp. 88-92, and James Clifford,
            "London," Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), pp. 175-
            94.
            4. John Locke explains the infinite leisure we can take in
            understanding the obscurities of ancient authors in An Essay
            Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2
            vols. (New York, 1955), 2:110:
            There being no writings we have any great concernment to be very
            solicitous about the meaning of, but those that contain either
            truths we are required to believe, or laws we are to obey, and draw
            inconveniences on us when we mistake or transgress, we may be less
            anxious about the sense of other authors; who, writing but their
            own opinions, we are under no greater necessity to know them, than
            they to know ours. Our good or evil depending not on their decrees,
            we may safely be ignorant of their notions: and therefore in the
            reading of them, if they do not use their words with a due
            clearness and perspicuity, we may lay them aside.
Arnold Krupat
         An Approach to Native American Texts
         Recent developments in post-structuralist hermeneutical theory,
            whatever their effect on the reading of Western literature, have
            had an enormously salutary effect on the reading of Native American
            literature. With the reexamination of such concepts of voice, text,
            and performance, and of the ontological and epistemological status
            of the sign, has come a variety of effective means for specifying
            and demonstrating the complexity and richness of Native American
            narrative. The movement away from structuralism's binary
            method necessarily rejected Claude Lévi-Strauss' opposition
            of the "myth" to the "poem," the one
            infinitely translatable, the other virtually untranslatable. In
            Lévi-Strauss' work, anything that might be considered the
            literature of the "primitive" people always appeared as
            myth, its "content" available for transformation into
            abstract pairs while its "form," its actual language,
            was simply ignored or dismissed.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
         Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel
         Dickens' famous satire of complacency and chauvinism entails
            a peculiarly English fiction about the innocence of girls. The
            "Podsnappery" chapter of Our Mutual Friend is in fact
            devoted to a dinner party in honor of Georgiana Podsnap's
            eighteenth birthday, though "it was somehow understood…that
            nothing must be said about the day"1 the generation of
            Miss Podsnap being one of those disagreeable facts that Mr. Podsnap
            simply refuses to admit. But if Miss Podsnap's birth is
            unmentionable, her existence is crucial: Podsnappery very much
            depends upon the presence of a daughter. What Mr. Podsnap cannot
            dismiss as "Not English!" starving Englishmen,
            for instance can always be removed as subjects unsuited to
            the female young. The "cheek of the young person"
            becomes the test of knowledge over a wide field.
            1. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill
            (Harmondsworth, 1971), bk. 1, chap. 11, pp. 181-82; all further
            references to this work will be included parenthetically in the
            text with only book and chapter numbers for the convenience of
            those using other editions.
Elizabeth Langland
         Society as Formal Protagonist: The Examples of Nostromo_and
            Barchester Towers
         Usually a novel's subject is the individual in action. That
            individual must confront a set of social expectations and norms
            which define and limit him. In such novels the revelation of social
            expectations constitutes a central element in the artist's
            depiction. The degree to which society limits the hero's
            action, of course, varies widely. We can imagine a continuum along
            which the influence of society is arranged. Sociological/
            naturalistic novels, in which a social order is depicted as
            destructive, define one extreme of that continuum. The protagonists
            in their suffering reveal this society's destructive force.
            At the opposite extreme, society's values and norms may be
            important in guiding and evaluating a protagonist's movement
            toward his fate without society itself becoming an obstacle to his
            progress. We think, for instance, of Jane Austen's novels. In
            the broad middle range of the continuum, protagonists struggle to
            realize their potential within social limitations, and their
            successes are usually partial. In assessing their triumphs, we must
            evaluate the obstacles they have encountered both in their own
            natures and in the natures of their social milieu.
            To make society the protagonist of a novel upsets the expectations
            of readers, first because the novel as a genre usually depicts the
            growth or change of protagonists moving from complications to
            stability, and second because the novel customarily concludes in
            some alteration of the protagonist's external state and in
            some expansion of his understanding. With society as his
            protagonist, a writer commits himself to engaging our primary
            interest in the life of an abstraction or set of principles. Here,
            too, action is crucial. This kind of novel differs from a utopian
            novel, however, which focuses on ideas about society and whose
            principal end is to criticize or espouse a particular social order,
            not to engage us in working out instabilities through action. In
            novels in which society is protagonist, we are involved with the
            fate of an entire social order, and it is one about which we are
            made to care. The principal purpose is to present a society moving
            from a state of instability toward a qualitatively defined fate
            analogous to the movement of an individual hero.
            To achieve this end, characters become agents through which a
            social order realizes its fate. This function of character entails
            no simple inversion of the usual relationships between individuals
            and society, because characters can never be reduced to a backdrop
            the way society can, and society cannot easily achieve the
            particularity of definition and identity the way a character can.
            In attempting to discover narrative terms for realizing the fate of
            a society, a novelist faces an enormous technical challenge. He
            must make us care as much about a social order as he would about a
            particular individual, and yet he cannot write directly about
            ideas he must record the actions of humans. Because his plot
            will focus on no single individual but on abstract processes and
            social hopes, he must constantly minimize individual fates and
            aspirations and make them clearly a function of society's
            larger turmoil. Our empathy must rest firmly with the social
            principles being threatened rather than with any single character.
            With this end in view, a clearly defined, circumscribed arena for
            action becomes necessary. Literal battles, or scenes in which
            battles operate as a principal metaphor, frequently appear in such
            novels. By bringing many of the major characters together, defining
            and creating allegiances, and pitting opposing social principles,
            such battles provide an important context for measuring the
            progress of those values with which we empathize.
Marshall Brown
         The Classic is the Baroque: On the Principle_of_Wölfflin's_Art
            History
         In the chapter on multiplicity and unity, the affective or
            anthropological motifs are both more complex and more interesting.
            Wölfflin's initial distinction is between "the
            articulated system of forms of classic art and the (endless) flow
            of the baroque" (PAH, p. 158). Imagery of fluidity pervades
            the chapter, for water, according to Wölfflin, "was the
            period's favourite element" (RB, p. 154). "Now,
            and now only," he says, "the greatness of the sea could
            find its representation"(PAH, p. 178), and as if to inculcate
            this affinity he places the reproduction of a baroque seascape by
            Jan van Goyen at the head of the introduction to the book and a
            riverscape by Peter Brueghel at the head of this chapter, even
            though neither painting is discussed where it is reproduced. In
            fact it is worth observing that Wölfflin does not discuss any water
            paintings in this chapter, though of course he does so elsewhere.
            Where fluidity becomes the meaning of his category, it is absent
            from the contents of the paintings. Wölfflin's procedure, as
            I have argued, is both objectively analytical and subjectively
            interpretive, and in this chapter he seems careful to preserve the
            distance between the forms he describes and the significances he
            reveals. Were he to treat water paintings here, he would obscure
            the fact that his analyses are always the prelude to translations.
            Though he conceals the fact, Wölfflin has here effected a
            translation of the baroque into itself, of water painting (and
            fountain architecture) into fluidity. Baroque art has declared its
            true meaning, which is to be an art of flux of time and,
            throughout this chapter, of momentariness. Suddenly here the
            baroque comes into its own, with a surprising reversal in
            Wölfflin's categories. Until now he has associated the
            baroque with lawlessness and confusion, and classicism with the
            unifying force of symmetrical organization around a center. Unity
            is repose the equation had been made explicitly in the
            discussion in Classic Art of Michelangelo's Medici Madonna
            (see p. 194) and clearly in Principles of Art History
            Wölfflin seems to say that the unification achieved in
            Leonardo's Last Supper was later lost Tiepolo's
            version.21 As Wölfflin says in the first sentence of chapter 4,
            "The principle of closed form of itself presumes the
            conception of the picture as a unity." But as the baroque now
            comes into its own, it appears that the unity of classicism is an
            illusory, "multiple unity," whereas the true or
            "unified unity" actually pertains to the baroque. It is
            the usurping baroque, rather than the deposed classic, that now has
            "a dominating central motive." And So Wölfflin returns
            in this chapter to the two Last Suppers in order to rescind his
            earlier position. He still claims that Leonardo's painting is
            unified, but he offers Tiepolo's version to illustrate the
            "possibility of surpassing this unity" (PAH, pp. 189,
            174). In becoming itself, baroque art has overthrown classicism.
            21. "Tiepolo composed a Last Supper which, while it cannot be
            compared with Leonardo as a work of art, stylistically presents the
            absolute opposite. The figures do not unite in the plane, and that
            decides" (PAH, p. 88).
Berel Lang
         Looking for the Styleme
         Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that
            means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle
            for the mind has been found in the atom that irreducible unit
            which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate
            access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential
            likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable
            imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal
            of atomism is to find one entity, a building block which then in
            multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All
            that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of
            transformational rules and everything comes to life that has
            been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history,
            even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has
            been, is, will be.
             
            The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for
            structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede
            the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all
            structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to
            be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in
            the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and
            Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth-
            century physics (although by now the proliferation of quarks and
            the thirty-odd other particles might cause the most ardent atomist
            to long for an unatomic whole that exerted some prior restraint).
            It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude
            Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky and their descendent structuralists;
            but here, too, atomic units of linguistic or social discourse are
            claimed as blind first causes of the sighted and complex structures
            allegedly derived from them. And if the followers of even these
            contemporary advocates find themselves still waiting for the
            promises of atomism to be kept, the imaginative turns of those
            promises the binary code, the rules of an innate
            grammar keep old expectations alive.
             
            In contrast to this general ideological assertion, the search for
            artistic atoms by poetics and aesthetic theory has lagged
            noticeably. We can see this disparity in the characteristic
            resistance to fragmentation by works of art; for many writers, the
            will of artistic appearance to exhibit itself as a whole, to insist
            on an undivided surface rather than on the elements within or
            beneath it, is precisely what distinguishes the structures of art
            from others. Even where a craftsmanlike impulse breaks into the
            surface of artistic unity (for example, when Aristotle itemizes the
            "parts" of tragedy), the pieces are usually counted
            teleologically: they matter as contributions to an effect,
            retrospectively. The artist himself, it is implied, deployed them
            in the first place to anticipate the unified surface; we (audience,
            critics, theorists), in turn, then understand them only in terms of
            that whole, not with the atomist by conjuring a unity
            from the earlier accidental joining of what then become accidental
            parts.
Marjorie Perloff
         Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New_Poetry
         Whatever we choose to call Beckett's series of disjunctive
            and repetitive paragraphs (sixty-one in all), Ill Seen Ill Said
            surely has little in common with the short story or the novella.
            Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where
            Beckett's piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently
            thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is
            punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a
            "real" poem, Harold Brodkey's "Sea
            Noise" (see fig. 1). Notice that the reader immediately
            knows or is supposed to know that Brodkey is a poet and
            Beckett a fiction writer, not only because "Sea Noise"
            is designated a poem in the issue's table of contents, but
            also because its placement on the page, framed by white space,
            distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in
            standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure
            of Brodkey's poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is,
            if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett
            "prose." The four stanzas are of irregular line length
            (9, 6, 9, 7); the stress count ranges from one ("and
            cúrsive") to five ("ínterlócutóries [baritone]"); rhyme
            occurs only once, at the end of the poem ("lie"/
            "reply"); and alliteration and assonance are not
            marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer
            decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to
            call "Sea Noise" a poem because it is built around a
            single extended metaphor (the witty analogy of sea:shore =
            professor:class), there is no rationale for the classification the
            New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4
            The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it
            represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature
            textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the
            United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like
            the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some
            negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to
            drama and fiction. As such, we don't teach Beckett in our
            poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry
            and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject say,
            Robert Pinsky's The Situation of Poetry will bear this
            out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly
            using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example
            of Beckett's astonishing "lyrics of
            fiction" to use Ryby Cohn's apt term5 or,
            as I shall call them, his "associative monologues."
            Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of
            canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an
            example.
            4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for
            the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate
            verse and hence implicitly the poem with lineation. For
            example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in
            Prosody (Princeton, N.J., 1980), observes that, difficult as it is
            to define the word "poetry" "rigorously and
            permanently," verse can be distinguished from prose quite
            readily:
            Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This
            is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the
            only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse
            from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic
            perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the
            requirements. [P.11]
            But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what
            looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The
            "basic perceptual difference" between the two is surely
            not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a
            somewhat different angle in "The Linear Fallacy,"
            Georgia Review 35 (Winter 1981): 855-69.
            5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton, N.J., 1973), chap. 5,
            "Lyrics of Fiction."
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
         Contingencies of Value
         One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit
            evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible
            acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by
            default, established evaluative authority. It is worth noting that
            in none of the debates of the forties and fifties was the
            traditional academic canon itself questioned, and that where
            evaluative authority was not ringingly affirmed, asserted, or self-
            justified, it was simply assumed. Thus Frye himself could speak
            almost in one breath of the need to "get rid of…all casual,
            sentimental, and prejudiced value-judgments" as "the
            first step in developing a genuine poetics" and of "the
            masterpieces of literature" which are "the materials of
            literary criticism" (AC, pp. 18, 15). The identity of those
            masterpieces, it seemed, could be taken for granted or followed
            more or less automatically from the "direct value-judgment of
            informed good taste" or "certain literary values…fully
            established by critical experience" (AC, pp. 27, 20).
            In a passage of particular interest, Frye wrote:
            Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid
            when silent ones, from critical practice…The critic will find soon,
            and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet
            than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he
            will want to waste belaboring the point. [AC, p. 25]
            In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence
            (comparable, to some extent, to Wimsatt's discreet
            "intimations" of value), two other aspects of
            Frye's remarks here repay some attention. First, in claiming
            that it is altogether obvious that Milton, rather than Blackmore,
            is "a more rewarding and suggestive poet [for the critic] to
            work with," Frye begged the question of what kind of work the
            critic would be doing. For surely if one were concerned with a
            question such as the relation of canonical and noncanonical texts
            in the system of literary value in eighteenth-century England, one
            would find Blackmore just as rewarding and suggestive to work with
            as Milton. Both here and in his repeated insistence that the
            "material" of criticism must be "the masterpieces
            of literature" (he refers also to a "feeling we have
            all had: that the study of mediocre works of art remains a random
            and peripheral form of critical experience" [AC, p. 17]),
            Frye exhibits a severely limited conception of the potential domain
            of literary study and of the sort of problems and phenomena with
            which it could or should deal. In this conceptual and
            methodological confinement, however (which betrays the conservative
            force of the ideology of traditional humanism even in the
            laboratories of the new progressive poetics), he has been joined by
            just about every other member of the Anglo-American literary
            academy during the past fifty years.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smithis University Professor of English and
            communications and director of the Center for the Study of Art and
            Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the
            author of, among other works, Poetic Closure and On the Margins of
            Discourse. Her previous contribution to ,
            "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," appeared in
            the Autumn 1980 issue. The present essay is part of a full-length
            study of literary and aesthetic value and evaluation.
Charles Altieri
         An Idea and an Ideal of a Literary_Canon
         It is unfortunately a lot easier to raise an arch eyebrow than it
            is to describe critical terms that might account for the values in
            idealization while preserving a pluralistic sense of possible
            canons and their uses. Instead of facing the challenge directly, I
            shall rely on what I call a contrastive strategy. Were I simply to
            assert a traditional psychology with its attendant values, I would
            expose myself to a host of suspicious charges about my pieties and
            delusions. So I shall begin by concentrating on the limitations I
            take to be inherent in the empiricism of the critical
            historicists' position. If, by deflating idealization, their
            arguments prove reductive, they should provoke us to ask what it is
            they reduce. We will find ourselves forced back within the circle
            of literary and existential expectations I suspect most of us still
            share. But now we might appreciate the force and possible uses of
            that training when we measure it against all we cannot do if we
            accept an alternative stance. That we can measure at all, of
            course, may emerge as the most significant consequence of this
            experiment in using contrastive strategies.
            The subject of self-interest provides us with a clear test among
            these competing positions, and it establishes some of the
            psychological concepts we will need if we are to describe the
            cultural functions canons can serve. Critical historicism
            concentrates on two basic aspects of self-interest the desire
            for power over others and the pursuit of self-representations that
            satisfy narcissistic demands. Out of these aspects, ideologies are
            generated and sustained. But this is hardly an exhaustive account
            of needs, motives, and powers. I propose that at least two other
            claims seem plausible, each with important consequences for our
            understanding of the canon that some people can understand
            their empirical interests to a degree sufficient to allow them
            considerable control over their actions and that a basic motive for
            such control is to subsume one's actions under a meaning the
            self can take responsibility for.4
             
            4. I use the term "empirical interests" in what I take
            to be a Kantian sense. "Empirical" refers to interests
            one simply accepts as preferences, without any need for
            justification. These interests invite ideological analysis, since,
            for Kant, they come essentially from outside as heteronomous rather
            than autonomous features of a subject's life. The opposite of
            "empirical," in this sense, is interests one tries to
            rationalize on principles that, at some level, have criteria not
            selected by the agent and also applicable to some other agents. For
            a historical account of the concept of interests, see Albert O.
            Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
            Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977). For a clear
            conceptual analysis of problems in attributing all motives to self-
            interest, see Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction
            (Belmont, Calif., 1978), chap. 3.
             
            Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature
            at the University of Washington. He is the author of Act and
            Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding
            (1981) and Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry
            (forthcoming) and is presently working on value in ethics and
            esthetics. His previous contributions to Critical
Lawrence Lipking
         Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment
         In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a
            woman's literary criticism in Western tradition, or more
            accurately the first miscarriage of a woman's criticism,
            occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of
            suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful
            of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy significantly, the
            matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She
            comes down the stairs to protest.
                        "Phêmios, other spells you know, high deeds
                        of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them;
                        let these men hear some other, while they sit
                        silent and drink their wine. But sing no more
                        this bitter tale that wears my heart away.
                        It opens in me again the wound of longing
                        For one incomparable, ever in my mind 
                        His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos."
            It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate
            brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus.
                        "Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel
                        Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead?
                        Poets are not to blame, but Zeus
            who gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men.
            Here is no reason for reproof: to sing
            the news of the Danaans! Men like best
            a song that rings like morning on the ear.
            But you must nerve yourself and try to listen.
            Odysseus was not the only one at Troy
            never to know the day of his homecoming.
            Others, how many others, lost their lives!"9
            Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so
            personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her
            son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep.
            Telemachus' words do not seem very much to the point.
            Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to
            sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some
            other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that
            others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as
            well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason
            for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her
            husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying
            "Odysseus." By proclaiming his own indifference to
            pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point.
            The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He
            proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by
            rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman.
            Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors.
             
            Lawrence Lipkingis Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at
            Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative
            literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts
            in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won
            the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous
            contributions to  are "The Marginal
            Glass" (Summer 1977) and "Arguing with Shelly"
            (Winter 1979). The present essay was originally given as a lecture
            at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is
            part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to
            appear in 1984.
James E. G. Zetzel
         Re-creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian_Past
         The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at
            the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not
            preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and
            for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal
            context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical
            poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part
            of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions
            and performed by its citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had
            altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an
            astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of
            the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of
            Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot
            community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and
            bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what
            was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of
            early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian
            poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a
            childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a
            rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more
            manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of
            Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a
            mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was
            impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer,
            lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria
            admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was
            incomparable and inimitable, to be studied but not to be
            copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable
            scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric,
            epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and
            unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the
            grandeur of the past.
             
            James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton
            University and editor of the Transactions of the American
            Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual
            Criticism in Antiquity (1981) and, with Anthony T. Grafton and
            Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf's
            Prolegomena ad Homerum (forthcoming).
Joseph Kerman
         A Few Canonical Variations
         Since the idea of a canon seems so closely bound up with the idea
            of history, there should be something to be learned from the
            persistent efforts that have been going on for nearly two hundred
            years to extend the musical repertory back in time. What is
            involved here is nothing less than a continuous effort to endow
            music with a history. From the workings of this process in the
            nineteenth century, we learn that where the ideology is right the
            past can indeed yield up a canon of works and even a canon of
            performance.
             
            Bach, to take the most weighty example, would appear to have
            entered the canon Hoffman's canon before entering
            the repertory. The history of the nineteenth-century Bach revival
            begins as a triumph of ideology over practice. Only after J. N.
            Forkel, in his famous biography, canonized Bach as the archetypal
            German master was The Well-tempered Clavier published for the first
            time and if any one work of music deserved to be called
            canonic, it would have to be The Well-tempered Clavier.14 (But when
            did it really enter the repertory? Not really until the formation
            of a new repertory, the repertory of the modern harpsichord, in our
            own time.) Gradually other Bach works, works which fitted better
            into nineteenth-century concert life, did enter various nineteenth-
            century repertories; Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew
            Passion is a famous landmark, and various piano transcriptions and
            orchestral arrangements, not to speak of Gounod's "Ave
            Maria," followed in due course. Bach was made to sound like a
            premature Romantic. There was as yet no call for historical
            "authenticity." But I do not think it was Bach that
            Hood was thinking of when he complained of musical traditions of
            the past whose "real identities are gone." The skeleton
            may not have been bodied out with authentic flesh and blood, but it
            was made into a handsome waxwork which was quite real enough for
            the nineteenth century.
             
            14. This point is made by Crocker, "Is There Really a
            &lsquo;Written Tradition'?"
             
            Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California,
            Berkeley, is the author of Opera as Drama, The Beethoven Quartets,
            The Masses and Motets of William Byrd,and (with Alan Tyson) The New
            Grove Beethoven. He is also coeditor of Beethoven Studiesand
            Nineteenth-Century Music and is presently working on a concise
            study of modern musical scholarship. "How We Got into
            Analysis, and How to Get Out," his previous contribution to
            , appeared in the Winter 1980 issue.
Jerome J. McGann
         The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti
         I want to argue…that to read Rossetti's religious poetry with
            understanding (and therefore with profit and appreciation) requires
            a more or less conscious investment in the peculiarities of its
            Christian orientation, in the social and historical particulars
            which feed and shape the distinctive features of her work. Because
            John O. Waller's relatively recent essay on Rossetti,
            "Christ's Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the
            Premillenarianist William Dodsworth," focuses on some of the
            most important of these particulars, it seems to me one of the most
            useful pieces of scholarship ever written on the poet. The essay
            locates the special ground of Rossetti's religious poetry in
            that peculiar Adventist and premillenarian context which flourished
            for about fifty years in mid nineteenth-century culture. In point
            of historical fact and it is a historical fact which has
            enormous significance for the aesthetic character of
            Rossetti's poetry her religious verse is intimately
            meshed with a number of particular, even peculiar, religious
            ideas.18 From the vantage of her strongest poetry, the most
            important of these ideas (along with the associated images and
            symbols they helped to generate) were allied to a once powerful
            religious movement which later toward the end of the
            century slipped to a marginal position in English culture.
            The whole question [of premillenarianism] was overshadowed first
            and last by the Tractarian Movement, Anglo-Catholicism, and the
            resulting Protestant reaction. And we can see in retrospect that
            all through the years [1820-1875] the theological future actually
            belonged to liberal, or Broad Church, principles. By the middle
            1870s, apparently [the issues raised through the premillenarian
            movement] were no longer very alive.19&shy;&shy;
            In this context we may begin to understand the decline of
            Rossetti's reputation after the late nineteenth century, when
            she was still regarded as one of the most powerful and important
            contemporary English poets. Her reputation was established in the
            1860s and 1870s, when Adventism reached the apogee of its brief but
            influential career. Thereafter, the availability of religious
            poetry was mediated either through the Broad Church line (which
            stretches from Coleridge and the Cambridge Apostles and Arnold, to
            figures like Trilling and Abrams in our own day) or through the
            High Church and Anglo-Catholic line (which was defined backwards
            from certain influential twentieth-century figures like Eliot to
            include the Noetics, Hopkins, and various seventeenth-century
            religious writers). The premillenarian and evangelist enthusiasm
            which supported Rossetti's religious poetry had been moved to
            the periphery of English culture when the canon of such verse began
            to take shape in the modern period.
            To read Rossetti's poetry, then, we have to willingly suspend
            not only our disbelief in her convictions and ideas but also our
            belief in those expectations and presuppositions about religious
            poetry which we have inherited from those two dominant ideological
            lines Broad Church and High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Waller
            has drawn our attention to the general premillenarian content of
            her work, and I should like to follow his lead by emphasizing
            another crucial and even more particular doctrinal feature of her
            poetry.
             
            19. Waller, "Christ's Second Coming," p. 477. For
            a general discussion of millenarianism in the early nineteenth
            century, see J. E. Harrison, The Second Coming, Popular
            Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London, 1979).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of
            Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His two most
            recent books are The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation
            (1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His
            previous contributions to  are "Formalism,
            Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again"
            (Spring 1976) and "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner"
            (Autumn 1981).
Arnold Krupat
         Native American Literature and the Canon
         Although not exactly continuous, the Native American challenge to
            the canon, as I have tried to show, has been of comparatively long
            standing. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Native American literary
            production and Euramerican writing influenced by it have only
            barely begun to enter the courses in and the anthologies of general
            American literature, that challenge cannot be said to have been
            effective as yet. No doubt it will take more time for poets and
            teachers to recognize what Native American literatures aboriginally
            were and, to some extent, still are; to recognize when and if the
            influence of these literatures is present in work by Native and
            non-Native writers. It is only since the 1950s and 1960s that
            philological and structural work has begun to make this recognition
            possible in any case.
            It is only more recently still that an adequately sophisticated
            criticism for these literatures has begun to develop, with the
            publication of Abraham Chapman's basic and eclectic
            collection of essays, Literature of the American Indians: Views and
            Interpretations (1975); Karl Kroeber's uneven but valuable
            introduction to the subject, Traditional Literatures of the
            American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (1981); and Hymes'
            "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native
            American Ethnopoetics (1981), a collection of Hymes' seminal
            and indispensable work. The broadest and most sophisticated
            collection of essays gathering work by Hymes, Tedlock,
            Toelken, Kroeber, and others has only just appeared: Smooting
            the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (1982) is
            edited by Brian Swann, a poet and translator of Mative American
            song.61 These developments are encouraging for Native American
            literatures. As American society continues to move away from
            anthropocentrism and textual authority, the Native tradition may
            for the first time effectively assert its claim upon the canon of
            American literature.
             
            61. For his translations, see, for example, Swann's Song of
            the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems (forthcoming).
            Swann works from texts, not performances, from English language
            versions, not transcriptions of Native languages; as a result, he
            has made a point of insisting, "These poems of mine are not
            translations" but instead "versions" of Native
            American poetry. Although he has given up specific claims to
            authenticity, Swann has nonetheless shown how much can be done by
            the non-Native poet and scholar responding to the Native tradition
            as a powerful source.
             
            Arnold Krupat is a member of the literature faculty at Sarah
            Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of the University of Nebraska
            Press' Native American Autobiography Series and is currently
            completing an anthology of Native American autobiographies, Indian
            Lives. His previous contribution to , "An
            Approach to Native American Texts," appeared in the December
            1982 issue.
John Guillory
         The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and_Cleanth_Brooks
         Nostalgia is only the beginning of a recognizably ideological
            discourse. The way through to the ideological sense of
            Tennyson's "failure," beneath the phenomenal glow
            of Eliot's nostalgia, lies in the entanglement of minority in
            this complex of meanings, the determination that Tennyson is
            properly placed when seen as a "minor Virgil." The
            diffusion of a major talent in minor works suggests that what
            Tennyson or Eliot might have been was another Virgil, and for Eliot
            that means simply a "classic." In "What Is a
            Classic?," we are told that English literature has no classic
            poet who would exalt, as Virgil or Dante did, the truths of his
            age.14 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an individual
            failure but rather the absence of a universal truth, which has been
            hidden in the minor works. Here is the reason both for the
            ambivalence Eliot expresses about the fact of minority (a valuing
            of the right things and yet a deferral of greatness) and for the
            peculiar, and certainly not necessary, association of poetic
            minority with a marginal elite.15
            It is the latter point to which I now want to turn. If it has been
            shown that the canon Eliot legislated in his early career was not
            merely an arbitrary set of aesthetic preferences, we have not yet
            fully evinced the ideological sense of Eliot's canonical
            principle. We have only determined that one way to reconstruct
            Eliot's canon would be to list those "minor"
            poets. But the essential quality of their minority, what drives
            them away from the "mainstream" of English literature,
            is what Eliot approved as their fidelity to
            "tradition." Such a concept of tradition must be
            exclusive as well as revisionary, because it implies that the major
            poets of English literary history cannot also be
            "traditional." Eliot finally understood that his
            canonical principle was the literary reflection of a more
            fundamental evaluative norm, extrinsic to literature, which he
            identified as "orthodoxy." So he tells us in After
            Strange Gods that he is rewriting "Tradition and the
            Individual Talent" by substituting "orthodoxy"
            for "tradition," and this is unquestionably an
            ideological correction.16 In the same way, the canon of minor
            writers is established retrospectively as determined by the rule of
            orthodoxy. Neither they nor the young Eliot need be orthodox
            Christians for this rule to have enabled their productions. It is
            precisely Eliot's meaning that these elite, like the
            "elect" before them, may come at some point to a
            conviction of their election, yet they were always the elect. In
            this sense, Eliot's conversion to Christianity was the
            recognition that he already belonged to a marginal elite, whose
            membership had been polemically foreshadowed by the construction of
            an alternative canon.
             
            14. The whole argument of "What Is a Classic?" is
            interesting in this respect. Eliot's standard of classical
            value is "universality," which is opposed to the
            "provincial." The closest English literature comes to a
            classical age is in the eighteenth century, and this too fails
            because its "restriction of religious sensibility itself
            produces a kind of provinciality: the provinciality which indicates
            the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and
            a common culture" (OPP, pp. 61-62).
            15. But at least a hint about how to make this connection is given
            in Eliot's "The Classics and the Man of Letters,"
            To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965): "The continuity of
            literature is essential to its greatness; it is very largely the
            function of secondary writers to preserve this continuity, and to
            provide a body of writings which is not necessarily read by
            posterity, which plays a great part in forming the link between
            those writers who continue to be read" (p. 147).
            16. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York,
            1933), p. 22.
             
            John Guillory, assistant professor of English at Yale University,
            is the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary
            History (1983). He is currently working on a study of canon-
            formation.
Richard Ohmann
         The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975
         Categorical names such as "The English Novel,"
            "The Modern American Novel," and "American
            Literature" often turn up in catalogs as titles of college
            courses, and we know from them pretty much what to expect. They
            also have standing in critical discourse, along with allied terms
            unlikely to serve as course titles: "good writing,"
            "great literature," "serious fiction,"
            "literature" itself. The awareness has grown in recent
            years that such concepts pose problems, even though we use them
            with easy enough comprehension when we talk or write to others who
            share our cultural matrix.
            Lately, critics like Raymond Williams have been reminding us that
            the categories change over time (just as "literature"
            used to mean all printed books but has come to mean only some
            poems, plays, novels, etc.) and that at any given moment categories
            embody complex social relations and a continuing historical
            process. That process deeply invests all terms with value: since
            not everyone's values are the same, the negotiating of such
            concepts is, among other things, a struggle for
            dominance whether between adults and the young, professors
            and their students, one class and another, or men and women. We
            don't usually notice the power or the conflict, except when
            some previously weak or silent group seeks a share of the power:
            for example, when, in the 1960s, American blacks and their
            supporters insisted that black literature be included in school and
            college curricula, or when they openly challenged the candidacy of
            William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner for inclusion in
            some eventual canon.1 But the gradual firming up of concepts like,
            say, postwar American fiction is always a contest for cultural
            hegemony, even if in our society if is often muted carried on
            behind the scenes or in the seemingly neutral marketplace.
             
            1. See John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner:
            Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston, 1968).
             
            Richard Ohmannis professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is
            the author of English in America and is presently working on
            studies in mass culture.
Gary Saul Morson
         Who Speaks for Bakhtin?: A Dialogic Introduction
         The more we spoke, the more we discovered disagreement behind our
            agreements and envisaged different implications for the
            same or were they the same ideas. "I suppose
            that's what Bakhtin meant when he wrote that agreement, not
            just disagreement, is a dialogic relationship," she
            reflected. "Agreement is never identity. It always
            presupposes or becomes the occasion for differences which I
            guess may be one reason why it can be so profitable to
            agree." I could detect Kuhn's concept of a scientific
            consensus here but agreed anyway.
            It turned out, in fact, that I had hidden disagreements with all
            the contributors to the collection. I had undertaken the project
            with the evidently quixotic hope that we could create, in imitation
            of Bakhtin's eccentric circle of linguists, Marxists,
            Christians, biologists, and literary theorists, a circle of our
            own. "You want to be a living allusion," she would say.
            By the end of that afternoon, however, neither she nor I were
            confident that we could despite all the views we did
            share ever sign both our names to the same introduction.
            "Not to be a Formalist," she interrupted,
            "perhaps it's a question of form…"
            Moi: …You know, the most appropriate form for an article
            introducing Bakhtin would be a dialogue, since dialogue is his
            central concept.
            Elle: Of course, if you can speak of a center in a writer so
            eccentric. How would it begin?
            Moi: Well, like Notes from Underground, on an ellipsis…That would
            illustrate his idea that all speech is a response to words that
            have been uttered before, that we never confront a linguistically
            virgin world, that each utterance is a response to other utterances
            and is formulated in expectation of a response to it all that
            might be developed later on in the dialogue. Moi could explain it
            all to Elle.
             
            Gary Saul Morson, associate professor and chairman of Slavic
            languages at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of
            Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a
            Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. His previous
            contribution to , "Tolstoy's Absolute
            Language," appeared in the Summer 1981 issue.
Caryl Emerson
         The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky,_and_the
            Internalization of Language
         Both Bakhtin and Vygotsky, as we have seen, responded directly or
            indirectly to the challenge of Freud. Both attempted to account for
            their data without resorting to postulating an unconscious in the
            Freudian sense. By way of contrast, it is instructive here to
            recall Jacques Lacan who, among others, has been a
            beneficiary of Bakhtin's "semiotic
            reinterpretation" of Freud.17 Lacan's case is
            intriguing, for he retains the unconscious while at the same time
            submitting Freudian psychoanalysis to rigorous criticism along the
            lines of Bakhtin. By focusing attention on the dialogic word, he
            encourages a rereading of Freud in which the social element (the
            dynamics between doctor and patient) is crucial. As Lacan opens his
            essay "The Empty Word and the Full Word":
            Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of formation,
            or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single
            intermediary: the patient's Word….And every word calls for a
            reply.
            I shall show that there is no word without a reply, even if it
            meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor: this
            is the heart of its function in psychoanalysis.18
            The word is conceived as a tool not only in the external world but
            also of an autonomous internal world as well. And what emerges, it
            would seem, is a reinterpretation of the role of dialogue in the
            painful maturational process of the child. For Vygotsky, the
            child's realization of his separateness from society is not a
            crisis; after all, his environment provides both the form and the
            content of his personality. From the start, dialogue reinforces the
            child's grasp on reality, as evidenced by the predominantly
            social and extraverted nature of his earliest egocentric speech.
            For Lacan, on the contrary, dialogue seems to function as the
            alienating experience, the stade du miroir phase of a child's
            development. The unconscious becomes the seat of all those problems
            that Bakhtin had externalized: the origin of personality, the
            possibilities of self-expression. The je-moi opposition in the
            mirror gives rise to that permanent for "a locus where there
            is constituted the je which speaks as well as he who has it
            speak."19 And consequently, the Word takes on an entirely
            different coloration: it is no longer merely an ideological sign
            but a potent tool for repressing knowledge of that gap, the face in
            the mirror, the Other. Lacan's celebrated inversion of
            Saussure's algorithm, with the line between signifier and
            signified representing repression, created a powerful but ominous
            new role for language. The child is released from his alienating
            image only through discovering himself as Subject, which occurs
            with language; but this language will inevitably come to him from
            the Other. Thus speech is based on the idea of lack, and dialogue,
            on the idea of difference.
             
            17. See Ivanov, "The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin's
            Ideas," p. 314.
            18. Jacques Lacan, "The Empty Word and the Full Word,"
            in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony
            Wilden (Baltimore, 1981), p. 9.
            19. Lacan, from "La Chose freudienne" (1955), quoted in
            Wilden, "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," in
            Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. 266.
             
            Caryl Emerson, assistant professor of Russian literature at Cornell
            University, has translated (with Michael Holquist) The Dialogic
            Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (forthcoming
            1984). She is currently at work, on a study of Boris Godunov in
            Russian cultural history
Susan Stewart
         Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics
         According to Bakhtin, the reason that literature is the most
            ideological of all ideological spheres may be discovered in the
            structure of genre. He criticizes the formalists for ending their
            theory with a consideration of genre; genre, he observes, should be
            the first topic of poetics. The importance of genre lies in its two
            major capacities: conceptualization and "finalization."
            A genre's conceptualization has both inward and outward
            focus: the artist does not merely represent reality; he or she must
            use existing means of representation in tension with the subject at
            hand. This process is analogous to the dual nature of the
            utterance, its orientation simultaneously toward its past contexts
            and its present context. "A particular aspect of reality can
            only be understood in connection with the particular means of
            representing it" (FM, p. 134).Genre's production of
            perception is not simply a matter of physical orientation; it is
            also a matter of ideology: "Every significant genre is a
            complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and
            finalization of reality" (FM, p. 134). According to Bakhtin,
            nonideological domains are "open work," not subject to
            an ultimate closure; but one goal of works of art is precisely to
            offer closure, a "finalization" that accounts for their
            ideological power and their capacity to produce consciousness. In
            the particular finalization of genre, we see a continual tension
            between tradition and situation.25 As Terry Eagleton suggests in
            Criticism and Ideology, "A power-loom, for one thing, is not
            altered by its products…in the way that a literary convention is
            transformed by what it textually works."26 Analogously,
            Bakhtin writes that "the goal of the artistic structure of
            every historical genre is to merge the distance of space and time
            with the contemporary by the force of all-penetrating social
            evaluation" (FM, p. 158). It is perhaps because of this
            purported goal that Bakhtin himself seemed to prefer the novel,
            which he viewed as a meta-genre incorporating at once all domains
            of ideology and all other literary genres. Finally, we must
            emphasize that Bakhtin's model of genre rests upon his
            insistence that literary evolution is not the result of device
            reacting against device, as Viktor Shklovsky believed, but rather
            of ideological, and ultimately socioeconomic, changes.
             
            25. For a discussion of the tension between genre and performance,
            and between tradition and situation, in folkloric performances, see
            Hymes, "Folklore's Nature and the Sun's
            Myth,"Journal of American Folklore 88 (Oct.-Dec. 1975): 345-
            69.
            26. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 73.
             
            Susan Stewart is associate professor of English at Temple
            University. She is the author of a book of poetry, Yellow Stars and
            Ice (1981), and two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of
            Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1979) and On Longing:
            Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the
            Collection (forthcoming 1984).
Michael André Bernstein
         When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections Upon_the
            Abject Hero
         For Bakhtin the "gradual narrowing down" of the
            carnival's regenerative power is directly linked to its
            separation from "folk culture" and its ensuing
            domestication as "part of the family's private
            life." Nonetheless, Bakhtin's faith in the inherent
            indestructibility of "the carnival spirit" compels him
            to find it preserved, even if in an interiorized and psychological
            form, in the post-Renaissance literary tradition, and he
            specifically names Diderot, along with Molière, Voltaire, and
            Swift, as authors who kept alive the subversive possibilities of a
            Saturnalian laughter (pp. 33, 34). But, of course, as Bakhtin
            himself recognizes, much more has changed in both the nature and
            the effects of that laughter than merely its locus of action. The
            crucial difference, according to Bakhtin, is a new sense of terror
            felt at the heart of the post-Renaissance carnival grotesque:
            The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the
            grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a
            series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque
            and medieval and Renaissance grotesque…The world of Romantic
            grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying word, alien to
            man…Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual
            and secure. [Pp. 38-39]
            Directly linked to this burden of terror, of laughter as a response
            to dread, not exuberance, is a change in the literary function of
            madness:
            Other specific traits are linked with the disappearance of
            laughter's regenerating power…. The theme of madness is
            inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at
            the world with different eyes, not dimmed by "normal,"
            that is by commonplace ideas and judgments. In folk grotesque,
            madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow
            seriousness of official "truth." It is a
            "festive" madness. In Romantic grotesque, on the other
            hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual
            isolation. [P. 39]
            Bakhtin's typology of laughter, for all its richly textured
            local insights, is haunted, from its inception, by a wistfully
            nostalgic longing for a realm of pure and ahistorical spontaneity,
            a rite of universal participation whose essentially affirmative
            character is guaranteed by its very universality. The most
            characteristic feature of such a carnival is, in fact, its
            abolition of all distinctions between participant and viewer:
            Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not
            acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators.
            Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights
            would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle
            seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates
            because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival
            lasts, there is no other life outside it…. It has a universal
            spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the
            world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. [P. 7]
            Yet as soon as the question of representation arises, whether in
            Rabelais or in his successors, the "footlights" which
            separate actor and spectator, reader and character, come into
            being, introducing the very divisions the work's themes deny.
            Belatedness, the knowledge of coming after the festival has already
            been fragmented, is thus not limited to a post-Rabelaisian,
            bourgeois culture; it is itself a condition of every Saturnalian
            text, and what has changed is not the inclusiveness of the carnival
            per se but the literary consequences of acknowledging that
            belatedness.
             
            Michael AndréBernstein, associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione, a volume of verse. He is
            currently at work on a book about the Abject Hero and literary
            genealogy.
Michael Holquist
         Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin's Trans-Linguistics
         All of Mikhail Bakhtin's work stands under the sign of
            plurality, the mystery of the one and the many. Unlike the third
            eye of Tibetan Buddhism, which gives those who possess it a vision
            of the secret unity holding creation together, Bakhtin seems to
            have had a third ear that permitted him to hear differences where
            others perceived only sameness, especially in the apparent
            wholeness of the human voice. The obsessive question at the heart
            of Bakhtin's thought is always "Who is talking?"
            It was his sense of the world's overwhelming multiplicity
            that impelled Bakhtin to rethink strategies by which heterogeneity
            had traditionally been disguised as a unity. In his several
            attempts to find a single name for the teeming forces which jostled
            each other within the combat zone of the word whether the
            term was "polyphony," "heteroglossia," or
            "speech communion" Bakhtin was at great pains
            never to sacrifice the tension between identity and difference that
            fueled his enterprise. He always sought the minimum degree of
            homogenization necessary to any conceptual scheme, feeling it was
            better to preserve the heterogeneity which less patient thinkers
            found intolerable and to which they therefore hurried to
            assign a unitizing label.
            Bakhtin's metaphysical contrariness has the effect of making
            at times appear to be indiscriminate, as when he refused to
            recognize borders between biography and autobiography or, more
            notoriously, between speaking and writing. But, as I hope to show,
            these apparently cardinal distinctions are for Bakhtin only local
            instances of unity that participate in and are controlled by a fare
            more encompassing set of oppositions and differences. All this
            places an extra burden on those who seek an overarching design in
            Bakhtin's legacy: the apparently unitizing term
            "Bakhtin" proves to be as illusory or more
            illusory in its ability to subsume real distinctions as any
            other, if we submit it to a Bakhtinian analysis.
             
            Michael Holquist is professor and chairman of the department of
            Slavic languages and literatures a Indiana University. With his
            wife, Katerina Clark, he has just completed Mikhail Bakhtin, a
            study of Bakhtin's life and works, forthcoming in the autumn
            of 1984. He is currently working in Moscow.
Christine Froula
         When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy
         There are, of course, many important differences between the
            deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second-
            century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The
            editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek
            to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their
            principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church
            fathers'. But the literary academy and its institutions
            developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a
            derivative, secular version of its social and cultural authority.
            Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been
            described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion,
            not only by outsiders Woolf's woman "divining the
            priest" but by insiders who continue to employ the
            stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J.
            Hillis Miller's credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin:
            "I believe in the established canon of English and American
            literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts.
            I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or
            Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the
            truth, to read Virginia Woolf."9 Such rhetoric suggests that
            the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely
            figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious
            figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay " &lsquo;The
            Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Susan
            Gubar cites as some of the "many parables in an ongoing
            revisionary female theology" Florence Nightingale's
            tentative prophecy that "the next Christ will perhaps be a
            female Christ," H. D.'s blessed Lady carrying a
            "Bible of blank pages," and Gertrude Stein's
            celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female
            theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters
            the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature.
            The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator
            revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast
            to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical,
            Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal
            preoccupations of literary "theology." These voices,
            like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now
            being heard in chorus; and Pagels' study of "the
            gnostic feminism" (as the New York Review of Books labeled
            it) helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority
            predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices.
             
            Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale
            University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound's
            "Selected Poems"and of the forthcoming "To Write
            Paradise": Syle and Error in Pound's Cantos. She is
            currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce
            and Virginia Woolf.
Stanley Fish
         Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary
            Studies
         It might seem at this point that I am courting a contradiction: If
            antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior and if
            professional behavior covers the field (in the sense that anything
            one might urge will be a manifestation of it), then how can I fault
            Bate for using antiprofessionalism to further a professional
            project? By collapsing the distinction (on which
            antiprofessionalism runs) between activity that is professionally
            motivated and activity motivated by a commitment to abstract and
            general values, have I not deprived myself of a basis for making
            judgments, since one form of activity would seem to be no different
            from or better than any other? The answer is no, because the
            consequence of turning everything into professionalism is not to
            deny value but to redistribute it. One deconstructs an opposition
            not by reversing the hierarchy of its poles but by denying to
            either pole the independence that makes the opposition possible in
            the first place. If my argument that there can be no literary
            criticism or pedagogy that is not a form of professionalism, it is
            also that there can be no form of professionalism that is not an
            extension of some value or set of values. Whereas before one was
            asked to choose between professionalism and some category of pure
            value (which, significantly, could only be named in the vaguest
            terms), the choice can now be seen as a choice between different
            versions of professionalism, each with its attendant values. To say
            that antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior (and is
            therefore in a philosophical sense incoherent) is not to have
            closed the discussion but to have identified the basis on which it
            can continue by identifying the questions that should now be asked:
            What kind of professional behavior is antiprofessionalism? and What
            are its consequences? The answer is that, at least in its literary
            form, it urges impossible goals (the breaking free or bypassing of
            the professional network) and therefore has the consequence of
            making people ashamed of what they are doing. The psychological
            distress that marks this profession, the fact that so many of its
            members exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that
            enables their labors, is in part attributable, I think, to literary
            antiprofessionalism, which is, as a form of professional behavior,
            almost always damaging.
             
            Stanley Fish's most recent work is "Wrong Again: A
            Reply to Ronald Dworking," Texas Law Review (August 1973).
            His previous contributions to  include "With
            the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and
            Derrida" (Summer 19820 and "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982).
Walter Jackson Bate
         To the Editor of 
         II. Without mentioning what most of the article is about, Fish
            plucks out some remarks from a small part of it and condemns me as
            being antiblack, antifeminist, and so forth. It seems to me that
            Fish, after removing a few sentences from context
            (forgivable we all do it; there's a limit to the amount
            one can naturally quote), then does three other things: (1) he
            summarizes or rephrases these remarks in such a way as to turn them
            into a polemical statement; (2) he makes an inference all his
            own; and (3) he then attacks the inference he has made. In his
            second paragraph, speaking unfavorably of the old-fashioned hope of
            finding universal values, he states: "It follows, then, …
            that works which advocate or have their origin in particular
            attitudes, strategies, sectarian projects, or political programs do
            not qualify as literature and should not be treated as such by
            literary scholars" (p. 350; my emphasis). It by no means
            "follows," except perhaps in Fish's mind. It
            follows merely that some of these concerns if pursued in
            isolation from other contexts and in a spirit of
            propaganda are not, by themselves, an adequate substitute, or
            replacement, for approaches (broadly historical, sociological,
            moral, stylistic) that may provide a center from which to move to
            the subjects Fish mentions. I certainly have no wish to exclude
            these subjects from the curriculum. In fact, I have probably
            devoted as much of my teaching to some of them, especially
            political writing, as has Fish. I realize that for Fish himself our
            reactions in reading are inevitably subjective and that no text can
            be viewed as a settled thing. But I must plead that the reader,
            before condemning me because of Fish's remarks, judge me by
            what I said rather than by what he inferred or magnified. I said
            only that, facing a decline in numbers of students, English
            departments found it more tempting than ever to provide courses on
            subjects often removed from larger contexts and treated in
            comparative isolation rather than to require more general study of
            history, philosophy, sociology, or psychology. I should like to
            repeat that I was not condemning departments for doing this. I felt
            it was rather sad that what Fish calls the "market,"
            and the fondness of so many students now for propagandistic
            approaches, should force us to jettison much that was more rigorous
            and demanding therefore less popular.
             
            Walter Jackson Bate is the Kingsley Porter University Professor of
            English at Harvard University. Among his many books are John Keats
            (1963) and Samuel Johnson (1975), both of which were awarded the
            Pulitzer Prize.
Edward W. Said
         Response to Stanley Fish
         At one point Fish says that a profession produces no
            "real" commodity but offers only a service. But surely
            the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has
            made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of
            Fish's position on professionalism is not that it is
            something done or lived but something produced and reproduced,
            albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are,
            Fish doesn't say. Then again he makes the rather telling
            remarks that he is "turning everything into
            professionalism" (p. 361) an instance of overstating
            and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for
            can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn
            "everything" into professionalism is to strip
            professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define
            professionalism and the particular values associated with
            it there is very little value in going on about the
            incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the
            reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what
            is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only
            the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable
            to antiprofessionalism.
            On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed,
            that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are
            contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of
            observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete,
            put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that
            professions are not natural objects but concrete, political,
            economic, and social formations playing very defined, although
            sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the
            lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical
            actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its
            existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary
            professionals "exist in a shamefaced relationship with the
            machinery that enables their labors" is because of their
            damaging antiprofessionalism (pp. 361-62), he is making an
            observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological
            since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor
            specifies "machinery" and "labors" with any
            precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of
            reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish
            does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession
            with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish's
            important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in
            fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities,
            and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making
            that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary
            profession is concerned, "the profession" is the
            context to which "everything" can be related.
             
            Edward W. Said's most recent work is The World, the Text, and
            the Critic. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions"
            (Summer 1978) and "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and
            Community" (September 1982).
Leonard B. Meyer
         Innovation, Choice, and the History of Music
         Before going further, it will be helpful to consider briefly the
            notion that novelty per se is a fundamental human need. Experiments
            with human beings, as well as with animals, indicate that the
            maintenance of normal, successful behavior depends upon an adequate
            level of incoming stimulation or, as some have put it, of
            novelty.2 But lumping all novelty together is misleading. At least
            three kinds of novelty need to be distinguished. (1) Some novel
            patterns arise out of, or represent, changes in the fundamental
            rules governing the organization of musical processes and
            structures. By significantly weakening our comprehension of the
            musical relationships presented undermining not only our
            understanding of what is past but our ability to envisage what is
            to come such systemic change seriously threatens our sense of
            psychic security and competent control. Far from being welcome, the
            insecurity and uncertainty thus engendered is at least as
            antipathetic, disturbing, and unpleasant as stimulus privation. (2)
            Novel patterns may also result from the invention of a new strategy
            that accords with prevalent stylistic rules. Though they may
            initially seem to threaten existing competencies, the function and
            significance of novel strategies within the larger set of stylistic
            constraints can usually be grasped without too much delay or
            difficulty. For a while the tensions produced by strategic
            innovation may seem disturbing. But in the end, when our grasp of
            the principles ordering events is confirmed and our sense of
            competency is reestablished and control is reinforced, tension is
            resolved into an elation that is both stimulating and enjoyable.
            (3) Most novel patterns original themes, rhythms, harmonic
            progressions, and so forth involve the innovative
            instantiation or realization of an existing strategy or schema (see
            examples 1-3 below).3 Novelties of this kind not only enhance our
            sense of control a feeling that we know how things really
            "work" but provide both the pleasure of
            recognition and the joy of skillfully exercising some competency.
            We enjoy novelty the stimulation of surprise, the tension of
            uncertainty as long as it can be accommodated within a known
            and understandable set of constraints. When the rules governing the
            game are abrogated or in doubt when comprehension and control
            are threatened the result is usually anger, anguish, and
            desperation.
            These responses to novelty are consequences of fundamental and
            poignant verities of the human condition: the centrality of choice
            in human behavior. Because only a minute fraction of human behavior
            seems to be genetically specified, choice is inescapable.
            While in lower organisms, behavior is strictly determined by the
            genetic program, in complex metazoa the genetic program becomes
            less constraining, more "open" as Ernst Mayr puts it,
            in the sense that it does not lay down behavioral instructions in
            great detail but rather permits some choice and allows for a
            certain freedom of response. Instead of imposing rigid
            prescriptions, it provides the organism with potentialities and
            capacities. This openness of the genetic program increases with
            evolution and culminates in mankind.4
            The price of freedom is the imperative of choice. Human beings must
            choose were to sow and when to reap, when to work and where to
            live, when to play and what to build. Intelligent, successful
            choices are possible only if alternative courses of action can be
            imagined and their consequences envisaged with reasonable accuracy.
             
            2. For further discussion, see my Music, the Arts, and Ideas
            (Chicago, 1967), p. 50.
            3. Rules are transpersonal but intracultural constraints for
            instance, the pitch/time entities established in some style, as
            well as grammatical and syntactic regularities. Strategies are
            general means (constraints) for actualizing some of the
            possibilities that are potential in the rules of the style. The
            rules of a style are relatively few, while the number of possible
            strategies may, depending upon the nature of the rules, be very
            large indeed. The ways of instantiating a particular strategy are,
            if not infinite, at least beyond reckoning.
            4. François Jacob, The Possible and the Actual (New York, 1982), p.
            61. See also Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York, 1977),
            p. 257.
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty
         Experiments in Philosophic Genre: Descartes' Meditations
         It would be pretty to think that Descartes' Meditations is
            itself a structured transformation of the meditational mode,
            starting with the dominance of an intellectual, ascensional mode,
            moving through the penitential form, and ending with the analytic-
            architectonic mode. Unfortunately the text does not sustain such an
            easy resolution to our problems. Instead, we see that different
            modes seem dominant at different stages; their subterranean
            connections and relations remain unclear.
            We could try to construct a nesting of mask, face, and skeleton in
            Descartes' use of these distinct traditions. He might have
            unselfconsciously inherited a Stoic skeletal structure, fleshed it
            with the weight of his analytic-architectonic meditation, and
            masked it with a penitential meditation for the sake of safety in
            orthodoxy. But the penitential mode provides essential structural
            support it cannot be unmasked. And, as we have seen, the
            analytic-architectonic flesh does not always conform to the Stoic
            skeletal structure.
            The problem is that the various readings subtly undermine one
            another. It is as if the Meditations were composed like a Francis
            Bacon painting. There are plenty of good solid clues for how to
            read the composition of the work in fact there are too many.
            The work we see when using some of those clues is quite different
            from the work we see when following others.
            Did Descartes do this deliberately? An extremely chartable reading
            would turn him into a new sort of Socrates, constructing puzzles to
            force us to examine the truth of his arguments dialectically. But
            whatever Descartes may be, he is not Socrates, any more than he is
            Hume. He is defensive as well as devious, proud as well as prickly;
            and he is not funny.
Menachem Brinker
         Farce and the Poetics of the Vraisemblable
         French theorists have recently proposed a theory which describes
            all literature in terms of the probable, the vraisemblable.6 This
            poetics of the probable commences with a purely relativistic claim.
            What is probable not only changes in accordance with the
            audience's concept of reality but also changes in accordance
            with the needs of the story and with the narrative possibilities
            open to various genres. It includes all of the norms and models
            making a given text understandable to the reader, however
            outlandish and eccentric it may be. Various levels of the
            vraisemblable are distinguished from each other, and the
            vraisemblable based upon models of the world or the world view
            prevalent in a given culture is scrupulously separated from types
            of the vraisemblable that are based upon literary, generic models.
            However, as Tzvetan Todorov gladly admits, "the two notions
            tend to melt into each other."7 He and other theorists see
            the literary genre itself as one of the models
            "probabilizing" a given text, at times in direct
            contradiction with "natural" models of the world. Still
            others see the world, or the prevalent world view, as the universal
            text which probabilizes other texts.
            […]
            Rather than how this new concept of the vraisemblable, of
            probability, fares in relation to farce in films, theater, and
            literature, I prefer to ask how farce fares in relation to it. I
            think that it doesn't do well. Farce shows that it is a
            mistake to unify the possibilities for understanding a text and the
            possibilities for understanding its fictional world within a single
            integrated concept. It is a further mistake to term such a concept
            "probability." When dealing with the fantastic or the
            marvelous, for instance, probabilizing the text and probabilizing
            the work's fictional world may legitimately be unified under
            a single principle or concept. If we agree to change or suspend a
            fundamental belief about the world, we will be able to perceive as
            logical and probable not only the texts but also the fictional
            worlds of such works. Coleridge's "willing suspension
            of disbelief" excellently fits works that are written in
            these genres. Such works require that we temporarily forget
            ("for the moment," as Coleridge would have it) a
            certain general belief about the world. After we've agreed,
            as a result of this suspension, to include certain elements in the
            world (like fairies or witches), we may then rebuild the fictional
            world while using the rest of our beliefs along with this new
            assumption.
             
            Farce's incredibility creates a different situation. Before
            we have even begun to recover from an attack upon one probability
            principle, another is undermined. In farce the rules of probability
            are not neutralized in one specific realm of reality; their
            inversion operates constantly on all of reality's realms. The
            image of a seemingly real world, reminding us of our own world and
            of our own set of probabilities, is all we need to be constantly
            astonished by farce's persistently novel deviations from
            predictable probability. Here, in direct opposition to the
            marvelous, the new deviations must keep on coming from unexpected
            directions, because farce won't allow its incredibilities to
            consolidate and become new rules of probability. The fictional
            world of overt farce lacks a specific factor, the one that would
            have probabilized all of the other factors of this world. Such an
            Archimedean center might seem to be located in the genre's
            definition this genre, however, does not probabilize the
            incredible. Farce's definition does not make farce's
            world more intelligible in any sense of that word. At the very
            most, farce allows us to forgo such intelligibility without
            transgressing the established boundaries of art.
            6. For an excellent presentation of their views, see Jonathan
            Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the
            Study of Literature (London, 1975), pp. 131-60.
            7. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard
            (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), p. 83. See also his introduction to
            Communications 11 (1968): 2.
Neil Hertz
         A Reading of Longinus
         It became customary in the eighteenth century to praise Longinus in
            ways that mimicked one of his own favorite turns of
            thought to identify enthusiastically two elements that would
            more commonly be thought of as quite distinct. To say, with Boileau
            and Pope, that Longinus "is himself the great Sublime he
            draws," or to profess to doubt, as Gibbon did, "which
            is the most sublime, Homer's Battle of the Gods or
            Longinus' apostrophe…upon it," is knowingly to override
            certain conventional lines of demarcation between writers and
            their subject matter, between text and interpretation very
            much in the manner of Longinus overriding the distinction between
            Homer and his heroes, between sublime language and its author
            ("sublimity is the echo of a noble mind"), or between
            sublime poet and his audience ("we come to believe we have
            created what we have only heard").1 Longinus' admirers,
            struck by the force of the treatise, are usually willing to release
            him from the strictures of theoretical discourse and allow him the
            license of a poet; they are likely to appreciate his transgressions
            of conventional limits without ever calling them into question. It
            has been left to more skeptical readers, wary of Longinus'
            "transports," to draw attention to his odd movements of
            thought: W. K. Wimsatt, for example, is unsympathetic but acute
            when he accuses Longinus of "sliding" from one
            theoretical distinction to another, a slide "which seems to
            harbor a certain duplicity and invalidity."2 Wimsatt is
            right: something one might want to call a "slide" is
            observable again and again in the treatise, and not merely from one
            theoretical distinction to another. One finds in the treatise a
            rhetorician's argument conducted with great intelligence and
            energy, but one also discovers that it is remarkably easy to lose
            one's way, to forget which rhetorical topic is under
            consideration at a particular point, to find oneself attending to a
            quotation, a fragment of analysis, a metaphor some
            interestingly resonant bit of language that draws one into quite
            another system of relationships. I want to attempt to follow that
            movement here, to hold it in mind and to question its implications.
            I will look closely at a number of passages in which Longinus
            interweaves language of his own with that of the authors he
            admires for it is here, out of the play of text with
            quotation and of quotations with one another, that the most
            interesting meanings as well as the peculiar power of the treatise
            are generated.
            1. &lsquo;Longinus' On Sublimity, trans. D. A. Russell
            (Oxford, 1965), 9. 2, 7. 2; all further references to this work
            will appear in text, though I have changed a word or two of
            Russell's translation in the interests of a more literal
            rendering of the Greek. I am indebted to another recent
            translation, G. M. A. Grube's Longinus On Great Writing (New
            York, 1957), and more particularly to the ample and intelligent
            introduction and notes accompanying Russell's edition of the
            Greek text, &lsquo;Longinus' On the Sublime (Oxford, 1964).
            2. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A
            Short History (New York, 1957), p.101.
Gerald Graff
         The Pseudo-Politics of Interpretation
         Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or
            deconstructionism as "authoritarian" or
            "subversive" are committing a fallacy of
            overspecificity. To call Hirsch's theory authoritarian is to
            assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of
            political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To
            refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the
            present in order to recall that today's authoritarian
            ideology is often yesterday's progressive one, and vice
            versa. Indeed, there's considerable historical irony in the
            fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing
            idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of
            literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these
            alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought
            that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth
            reflected a totalitarian mentality. "Totalitarianism,"
            he wrote, "in the long run probably demands a disbelief in
            the existence of objective truth." He added that "the
            friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since
            absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a
            little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are
            biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics
            has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so
            that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar
            philistinism."10
            It's not that it hadn't occurred to Orwell that the
            notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the
            actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell's experience of
            Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the
            denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify
            oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various
            historical reasons, Orwell's insight is easily lost today.
            His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been
            compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be
            associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the
            ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of
            social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the
            epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is
            frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the
            menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with
            the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the
            concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and
            teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary
            ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could
            operate, in quite other ways.11
             
            10. George orwell, "The Prevention of Literature," The
            Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed.
            Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. (London, 1968), 4: 63-64.
            11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, "it is certainly the case
            that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of
            bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in
            different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a
            subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and
            only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural
            conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late
            capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a
            critical charge again" ("Conclusion," Aesthetics
            and Politics [London, 1977], p. 207).
Michael Fried
         The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at_Ornans
         The first thing to stress is that although the orientation of the
            grave implies a point of view somewhere to its left, the
            attenuation of illusion in the rendering of the grave makes that
            implication anything but conspicuous. Consequently, a beholder who
            approaches the Burial by centering himself before it (our natural
            impulse before an easel painting, and the Burial, for all its size,
            is simply that), and in so doing exposes himself to the full force
            of its solicitations toward merger (still more on those in a
            moment), will very likely not even notice that the grave is skewed
            relative to the picture plane (if it has been noticed, it
            hasn't been deemed worth mentioning). Furthermore, the fact
            that the point of view posited by the orientation of the grave lies
            opposite the most active and, at first glance, the most confusion
            portion of the composition also serves to forestall an awareness
            that such a point of view may be held to exist.
            Here it is useful to compare the finished painting with the
            preliminary drawing. In the latter the grave is at the far left; a
            single procession, to be joined by the pallbearers, makes its way
            across the sheet; and two figures, the crucifix-bearer and the
            hatless man at the center (and perhaps a third figure as well, the
            officiant in a conical hat slightly to the right of the crucifix-
            bearer), appear to gaze out of the drawing as if at a spectator
            centered before it. In the finished painting, on the other hand,
            various processional units are shown converging precisely there;
            and yet not only does no outward gaze place the beholder directly
            before the grave, it appears that a deliberate effort has been made
            to keep the center of the composition blank, as if to install at
            the ostensible heart of the painting a formal/ontological
            equivalent to the unemphatic emptiness lying open below it. Thus
            both the gravedigger and (an inspired touch) the dog turn their
            heads away from the vicinity of the grave; the mourner to the right
            of the gravedigger weeps facelessly into a handkerchief; and a
            barely modulated expanse of black pigment looms like a great blind
            spot ("Je travaille à l'aveuglette") between the
            gravedigger and the two veterans of '93. It is as though the
            Burial's curiously indeterminate affective atmosphere (Clark
            comments aptly on its "peculiar, frozen fixity of
            expression" and uses terms like "distraction,"
            "inattention," and "blankness" to
            characterize both the states of mind of the mourners and the
            overall mood of the image) comes to a head in this portion of the
            canvas, which as we have seen bears the principal burden of
            facilitating the merger of painting and beholder.47 And of course
            the avoidance of overt address to the beholder that such a strategy
            implies also helps to reduce the risk of conflict between the
            generally centering character of the composition as a whole and the
            slant orientation of the grave.
             
            47. Clark, Image of the People, p.81.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the_Sign_and_the
            Signifying Monkey
         Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from
            Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying
            Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the
            black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey he who dwells at
            the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever
            embodying the ambiguities of language is our trope for
            repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself,
            repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act.
            If Vico and Burke, or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are
            correct in identifying "master tropes," then we might
            think of these as the "master's tropes," and of
            signifying as the slave's trope, the trope of tropes, as
            Bloom characterizes metalepsis, "a trope-reversing trope, a
            figure of a figure." Signifying is a trope that subsumes
            other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,
            and irony (the "master" tropes), and also hyberbole,
            litotes, and metalepsis (Bloom's supplement to Burke). To
            this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis,
            all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.
            The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which
            we could readily identify with the typology of figures received
            from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his
            "maps of misprision." In black discourse
            "signifying" means modes of figuration itself. When one
            signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one "tropes-a-
            dope." The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying
            would include "marking," "loud-talking,"
            "specifying," "testifying," "calling
            out" (of one's name), "sounding,"
            "rapping," and "playing the dozens."4
             
            3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, "Hidden Man and Complex
            Fate: A Writer's Experience in the United States,"
            Shadow and Act (New York, 1964), p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar
            Baby (New York, 1981). On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean
            Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans.
            Beatrice Reynolds (1945; New York, 1966), p. 105; Aristotle
            Historia Animalium606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels (London,
            1677), pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
            Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols. (London, 1721), 2:53.
            4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then
            traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman's work,
            like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially
            significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and
            Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Boston, 1977), pp. 101-
            66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below.
Anne, Margaret, and Patrice Higgonet
         Façades: Walter Benjamin's Paris
         "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" juxtaposes
            elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of
            commodities in the economy of high capitalism. "Allegory in
            the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the
            inner world."32 Each of the exposé's six sections
            consists of two parts: "Fourier, or the Arcades,"
            "Daguerre, or the Panoramas," "Grandville, or the
            World Exhibitions," "Louis-Philippe, or the
            Interior," "Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,"
            "Haussmann, or the Baricades."33
            The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical starting
            point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of
            nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial
            but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of
            bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in
            the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the
            residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron
            "Pompeian" pillars, to offer in its enticing bay
            windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois
            merchandising. Fourier houses his "land of Cockaigne"
            in a "reactionary modification" of the arcade.34
            Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the
            lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David's
            pupils when they "draw from nature." Politically
            superior, the city still dreams of the country. "The
            panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to
            technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling
            about life."35 They drive a wedge between "plastic
            foreground" and "informational base." The worker
            in the literary panorama is "a trimming for an idyll."
            Technical innovations in photography (a simultaneously urban and
            commercial phenomenon) reduce the representational significance of
            painting. Now photography "is given the task of making
            discoveries": it explores the sewers and catacombs. It
            markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn
            transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism.
             
            32. "Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt
            geråumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln" (1:681).
            33. Adorno objects to the use of people's names in these
            titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore
            illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois
            interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is
            emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the
            "Louis-Philippe, or the Interior" section is the
            collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical:
            Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville
            at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the
            beginning.
            34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. "Das Schlaraffenland,"
            "ihre reaktionåre Umbildung" (5:47).
             
            Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a
            graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret
            Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the
            University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern
            literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French
            History at Harvard University. He has written on the French
            Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a
            forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France.
Garry Wills
         Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and Houdon
         Washington eludes us, even in the city named for him. Other leaders
            are accessible there Lincoln brooding in square-toed
            rectitude at his monument, a Mathew Brady image frozen in white,
            throned yet approachable; Jefferson democratically exposed in John
            Pope's aristocratic birdcage. Majestic, each, but graspable.
            Washington's faceless monument tapers off from us however we
            come at it visible everywhere, and perfect; but impersonal,
            uncompelling. Yet we should remember that this monument, unlike the
            other two, was launched by private efforts. When government
            energies were stalled, in the 1830s, subscriptions kept the project
            alive. Even when Congress took over the project, stones were added
            by the citizenry, those memorial blocks one can study while
            descending the long inner stairway. The classical control of the
            exterior hides a varied and spontaneous interior an image of
            the puzzle that faces us, the early popularity of someone lifted so
            high above the populace. The man we can hardly find was the icon
            our ancestors turned to most easily and often. We are distanced
            from him by their generosity, their willingness to see in him
            something more than human.
            The larger they made Washington, the less they left us to
            admire until, in Horatio Greenough's George Washington,
            he becomes invisible by sheer vastness. Greenough took for his
            model what the neoclassical period believed was the greatest statue
            ever created, by the greatest sculptor who ever lived the
            Elean Zeus of Phidias. Since that chryselephantine wonder was no
            longer extant, artists had to rely on the description given by
            Pausanias in the Description of Greece, and on coins of Elis that
            celebrated the work. Here is what Pausanias had to say.
            The seated god is himself fashioned from gold and ivory; the
            garland on his head appears to be real olive shoots. In his right
            hand he holds a Victory, also of gold and ivory, offering a ribbon,
            a garland on her head. In the god's left hand there is a
            scepter, encrusted with every kind of metal, and the bird on the
            tip is an eagle.1
             
            1. Pausanias Description of Greece 5. 11.
             
            Garry Wills, a prize-winning author and journalist, is Henry R.
            Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at
            Northwestern University. Among his many books are Nixon Agonistes
            (1970), Inventing America (1978), and The Kennedy Imprisonment
            (1982). His forthcoming book, Cincinnatus: George Washington in the
            Englightenment, will appear in June 1984. His previous contribution
            to  was " (Kritik) in
            Clausewitz" (December 1982).
Robert P. Morgan
         Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism
         It is frequently noted that a "crisis in language"
            accompanied the profound changes in human consciousness everywhere
            evident near the turn of the century. As the nature of reality
            itself became problematic or at least suspect, distrusted for
            its imposition of limits upon individual imagination so,
            necessarily, did the relationship of language to reality. Thus in
            the later nineteenth century, the adequacy of an essentially
            standardized form of "classical" writing was
            increasingly questioned as an effective vehicle for artistic
            expression: even though often in "elevated" form, such
            writing bore too close a connection to ordinary discourse. Indeed,
            it was precisely the mutually shared, conventional aspects of
            language that came to be most deeply distrusted for their failure
            to mirror the more subjective, obscure, and improbable
            manifestations of a transcendent reality or, rather,
            realities the plural reflecting an insistence upon the
            optional and provisional nature of human experience. Language in
            its normal manifestations with its conventionalized
            vocabulary and standardized rules for syntactical
            combination proved inadequate for an artistic sensibility
            demanding, in Friedrich Nietzsche's words, "a world of
            abnormally drawn perspectives."
            This dissatisfaction with "normal" language received
            its classic statement through Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Lord
            Chandos. Writing in 1902, Hofmannsthal conveys through the figure
            of the aristocratic Chandos the loss of an encompassing framework
            within which the various objects of external reality are connected
            with one another and integrated with the internal reality of human
            feelings. Chandos' world has become one of disparate,
            disconnected fragments, resistant to the abstractions of ordinary
            language. It is a world characterized by "a sort of feverish
            thought, but thought in a material that is more immediate, more
            fluid, and more intense than that of language." Chandos longs
            for a new language in which not a single word is known to me, a
            language in which mute objects speak to me and in which perhaps one
            day, in the grave, I will give account of myself before an unknown
            judge."2 The content and forms of art thus shifted away from
            exterior reality, which no longer provided a stable,
            "given" material, toward language itself to
            "pure" language in a sense closely related to the
            symbolists' "pure" poetry. "No artist
            tolerates reality," Nietzsche proclaimed.3 And Gustave
            Flaubert's farsighted advice to himself was that he should
            write "a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing
            external, which would be held together by the internal strength of
            its style."4
             
            2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, "Ein Brief," Gesammelte
            Werke, ed. Bernd Schoeller with Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols. (Frankfurt
            am Main, 1980), 7:471-72; my translation. All further translations
            are my own unless otherwise indicated.
            3. Friedrich Nitzsche, Complete Works, ed. Oscar Levy, 18 vols.
            (London, 1909-15), vol. 15, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M.
            Ludovici, p. 74.
            4. Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert to Louise Colet, 16 Jan. 1852, The
            Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830-1857, ed. and trans. Francis
            Steegmuller (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 154. Other passages in
            this letter are equally remarkable for their
            "modernist" tone. Flaubert argues that from the
            standpoint of l'Art pur, "one might almost establish
            the axiom that there is no such thing as subject style in
            itself being an absolute manner of seeing things" (p. 154).
            Further:
            The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the
            closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to
            coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the
            future of Art lies in this direction. I see it, as it has developed
            from its beginnings, growing progressively more ethereal …. Form,
            in becoming more skillful, becomes attenuated, it leaves behind all
            liturgy, rule, measure; the epic is discarded in favor of the
            novel, verse in favor of prose; there is no longer any orthodoxy,
            and form is as free as the will of its creator. This progressive
            shedding of the burden of tradition can be observed everywhere:
            governments have gone through similar evolution, from oriental
            despotisms to the socialisms of the future. [P. 154]
             
            Robert P. Morgan, professor of music at the University of Chicago,
            is currently writing a history of twentieth-century music and
            working on a study of form in nineteenth-century music. His
            previous contributions to  are "On the
            Analysis of Recent Music" (Autumn 1977) and "Musical
            Time/Musical Space" (Spring 1980).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures
         Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that
            Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic
            "claim to final and exclusive authority by means of
            writing" (pp. 38-390). Jeremiah's problem is political
            rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful
            than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand
            it and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As
            Blenkinsopp says, "Deuteronomy produced a situation in which
            prophecy could not continue to exist without undergoing profound
            transformations" (p. 39) that is, without ceasing to be
            "free prophecy," or prophecy unbound by any text,
            including its own. "It might be considered misleading or
            flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy,
            the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the
            Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for
            the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of
            historically oriented prophecy (Geshcichtsprophetie) represented by
            Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms
            of scribal prophecy" (pp. 38-39; see also pp. 119-20).
            It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical
            criticism a threshold that scholars, with their foundations
            in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and
            their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case,
            it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of
            prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from
            a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In
            The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book,
            Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the
            promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to
            literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the
            production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the
            work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected
            traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling
            to gain power."23
             
            23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New
            Interpretation (New York, 1971), p. 30; further references to this
            work will be included in the text.
             
            Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa.
            He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (1974)
            and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary
            History (1982). The present essay is from a work in progress,
            Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern.
James Chandler
         The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English_Canon
         To see what might be at stake in the question of Pope's place
            in the poetic canon in the question as such, before anything
            is said of critical theory we must understand that late
            eighteenth-century England was developing a different sort of canon
            from the one which Pope and the Augustans had in view. As everyone
            knows, Pope's classics were, well, classical. His pantheon
            was populated with poets of another place and time whose stature
            was globally recognized. One recalls the tribute to these
            "Bards triumphant" in An Essay on Criticism (1711):
                                    Still green with Bays each ancient Altar
            stands,
                        Above the reach of SacrilegiousHands,
                        Secure from Flames, from Envy'sfiercer Rage,
                        Destructive War, and all-involving Age.
                        See, from each Climes the Learn'd their Incense
            bring;
                        Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring!
                        In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be
            join'd,
                        And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind!14
            Pope's song of praise here forms just a part of
            mankind's "Gen'ral Chorus." These are poets
            for all climates and languages, and for all nations, even
            "Nations unborn" and "Worlds…that must not yet be
            found" (ll. 193-94). Although I want to place adequate stress
            on Pope's deep commitment to this universalized canon, it
            would be misleading to suggest that he was completely uninterested
            in the poetry of his own nation. He studied it an imitated it. He
            even sketched a plan for a possible history of poetry in England.
            It is to the point here, however, that this project remained only a
            sketch and that England would have no major overview of its
            national accomplishment until the 1770s and 1780s, when Thomas
            Warton issued the first three volumes of his pioneering History of
            English Poetry, and Johnson, his Lives of the English Poets.
            Building on the scholarship of René Wellek, Lawrence Lipking has
            offered a compelling account of the emergence of these great works
            at that time, buy reference to the "interested and demanding
            public" that called for them.15 What the public wanted and
            got, Lipking explains, "was a history of English poetry, or a
            survey of English poets, that would provide a basis for criticism
            by reviewing the entire range of the art. Warton and Johnson
            responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what English
            poets had achieved" (p. 238). Such terms are most useful,
            although "evaluation" connotes a greater degree of
            neutrality than even Lipking's own subsequent analysis
            permits. For example, among the public needs served by such work as
            Johnson's and Warton's, Lipking lists the
            "patriotic" and the "political" as primary.
            These needs are obviously related. The patriotic need expresses
            itself as a hunger for "a glorious national poetic
            pantheon" (p. 328); that is, for a specifically national
            rather than a global canon of classics. Such a canon would in turn
            serve political purposes that Lipking sees motivating "the
            poets" of mid-century, Thomson and Akenside and Collins and
            Gray and Mason and Smart," who all "wrote variations on
            the mythopolitical them of Milton: sweet Liberty, the nymph who had
            freed English pens to outstrip the cloistered conservative rule-
            bound verses of less favored nations." Politically, in other
            words, and this is the crucial point, "English literary
            history was shaped by the need for a definition of the superiority
            of the national character" (p. 329).
             
            James Chandler, assistant professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study
            of the Poetry and Politics (forthcoming this autumn). His previous
            contribution to  was "Romantic
            Allusiveness" (Spring 1982).
Michael Fried
         Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past_in_Baudelaire_and
            Manet
         Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire's Salon of
            1846 one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious
            essays in art criticism ever written the twenty-five-year-old
            author states that "the critic should arm himself from the
            start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and
            should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does
            not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments
            together and exalts the reason to fresh heights."1 It may be
            the emphasis on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every
            kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented
            commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a
            single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that
            criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a
            feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as
            much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of
            passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise?
            Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or
            (within limits) the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the
            contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of
            Baudelaire's early career and especially in recent years has
            received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have
            written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as
            Baudelaire's conception of nature, his vision of the creative
            process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics,
            that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns
            that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own
            manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of
            that manner the mixture of irony and seriousness in the
            opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations
            of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the
            argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the
            prose could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it
            would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product
            of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of
            individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also
            to bind together a number of diverse concerns pictorial,
            literary, political, philosophical in an intellectually
            coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant
            with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the
            Salonapostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of
            Baudelaire's undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope
            of the Comédie humaine.
             
            1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862:
            Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne
            (Ithaca, N.Y., 19810, p. 45; for the original French, see
            Baudelaire, Salon de 1846, "Curiosités esthétiques,"
            "L'Art romantique," et autres oeuvres
            critiques,ed. Henri Lemaître (Paris, 1971), pp. 101-2. All further
            references to the Salon of 1846 (the translation and the original,
            in that order) will be included parenthetically in the text
            (occasionally I have modified Mayne's renderings in the
            interest of greater exactness). I have also consulted the recent
            edition, Baudelaire: "Salon de 1846," ed. David Kelley
            (Oxford, 1975), which includes a useful introduction and
            bibliography.
            2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic (New
            York, 19430, pp. 3-54; Lucie Horner, Baudelaire, critique de
            Delacrois (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1955; Geneva, 1956),
            pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, "Les Esthétiques de
            Baudelaire: Le &lsquo;Système' des annés 1844-1847,"
            Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 (July-Sept. 1967) :
            481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature (Manchester, 1969), pp. 73-88;
            and Kelley, "Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La
            Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur," Forum for Modern
            Language Studies 5 (Oct. 1969) : 331-46, and introduction to
            Baudelaire:"Salon de 1846," pp. 1-114.
             
            Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University,
            is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality:
            Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at
            work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to
            , "The Structure of Beholding in
            Courbet's Burial at Ornans," appeared in the June 1983
            issue.
Quentin Bell
         A "Radiant" Friendship
         This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and
            for the record's sake to correct certain fashionable errors
            concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper,
            and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth
            had remained my only objet, I should have left these words
            unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small
            audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my sources, and
            there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and
            certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a
            friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded.
            I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting
            in itself but, just as Prince's Hal's "plain
            tale" is made livelier by being contrasted with
            Falstaff's "eleven buckram men," so too the
            simple facts are made more striking by the intentions of
            Virginia's recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a
            quotation from one of them.
            Volume I [of Virginia Woolf's Letters] has a rarely preserved
            portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely
            intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to
            write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly
            love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in
            female friendship all her life. Bloomsbury fades into
            insignificance as an "influence" next to the radiance
            of Woolf's relationships with Margaret Llewelyn Davies, head
            of the Cooperative Working Women's Guild, Janet Case, her
            Greek teacher, violet Dickinson, Madge Vaughan, and her aunt
            Caroline Stephen, the Quaker whom she called "Nun."1
            These words were written by Professor Jane Marcus, a person of
            great charm and ability, whose opinions are, I understand, accepted
            by a multitude of admirers. In those articles by her which I have
            read, she hardly disguises her contempt for me as a biographer.
            But, painful though it is to have incurred the disdain of so
            influential a personage, it much be allowed that, if the influence
            of Virginia Woolf's husband, her sister, and her closest
            friends "fades into insignificance" when compared with
            that of Miss Caroline Stephen and Mrs. W. W. Vaughan, then indeed I
            have gone sadly astray.
             
            Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works, Virginia Woolf: A
            Biography, Bloomsbury, Ruskin, and On Human Finery. His previous
            contributions to  include "Art and the
            Elite" (Autumn 1974) and "Bloomsbury and &lsquo;the
            Vulgar Passions' " (Winter 1979).
Ralph W. Rader
         The Logic of Ulysses; or, Why Molly Had_to_Live_in_Gibraltar
         "O, rocks!" Molly exclaims in impatience with
            Bloom's first definition of metempsychosis, "tell us in
            plain words" (p. 64). Looking forward, then, we remember that
            Bloom asks Murphy if he has seen the Rock of Gibraltar and (after
            receiving an ambiguous reply, which Bloom interprets affirmatively)
            asks further what year that would have been and if Murphy remembers
            the boats that plied the strait. "I'm tired of all them
            rocks in the sea," replies Murphy (here characterized as
            "the wily old customer" [p. 630]).
             
            Bloom's interest derives from Molly's connection with
            Gibraltar, and Molly herself in her monologue remembers the boats
            well and thinks of missing the boat at Algeciras (opposite from
            Europa point), just before the book ends with her thoughts of the
            awful deepdown torrent," the tide that moves like a river
            through the strait. Imaginatively she moves with that torrent,
            figuratively the torrent of time that plunges from the future to
            the past, which she accepts, with her yes, going deeply with the
            flow of life, and with her goes Murphy/Joyce, touching on Gibraltar
            at last. Molly remembers Ulysses S. Grant getting off a boat in
            Gibraltar, an occurrence that Adams sees as unduly stretching
            probability merely in order to bring Molly in incidental touch with
            a man named Ulysses.19 But remembering that Murphy is a "wily
            old customer," we may remember also that the Ulysses of
            Joyce's favorite Dante cannot rest with Penelope but, in
            search of knowledge and excellence, moves on through the two rocks
            of the straits of Gibraltar, the pillars of Hercules, to further
            adventure and also to destruction; and we may then think that with
            this reference, Joyce took pains to tell us that the Ulysses of
            this book here completes in hidden climax the design and purpose of
            his work, and sails on to oblivion, or rather to dispersion and
            reconstitution as everyone in the new adventure of Finnegans Wake.
             
            19. See Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 233.
             
            Ralph W. Rader, professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's
            "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. He is currently
            working on a theoretical study of form in the novel and other
            genres. His previous contributions to  include
            "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon
            Sacks" (Winter 1979) and "The Dramatic Monologue and
            Related Lyric Forms" (Autumn 1976).
Larzer Ziff
         Whitman and the Crowd
         On the night of 12 November 1958, Walt Whitman witnessed a meteor
            shower which he later described in his notebook. The lines never
            found their way into a published piece. But when he came to write
            his poem about the year 1859-60, the year in which Abraham Lincoln
            and Stephen Douglas contested the presidency, John Brown was hanged
            in Virginia, and the mighty British iron steamship the Great
            Eastern arrived in New York on its maiden voyage, he remembered the
            heavenly phenomenon of the year before and began his poem,
            "Year of meteors! brooding year!"1
            Brooding, indeed, because this poem, the first version of which was
            completed after the Civil War, is concerned with the year in which
            South Carolina seceded from the United States, thereby plunging the
            union of Whitman's celebrations into bloody divisiveness. Yet
            the onset of that event is never mentioned in the poem. Rather, its
            imminence is expressed in the meteor imagery the portent of
            human history written in the heavens, a fairly rare example of
            Whitman employing a traditional literary convention.
            Among the events of the "Year of meteors," and
            seemingly the least of them, certainly the one that appears most
            unconnected with the "brooding,"
            "transient," "strange" atmosphere invoked
            in the poem, is the visit Edward, Prince of Wales, paid to New York
            on 11 October 1860 (pp. 238, 239). Whitman saw the prince's
            procession, recorded it in his notebook, and introduced it,
            somewhat incongruously, into his poem, devoting three lines to it:
                        And you would I sing, fair stripling! Welcome
                                    to you from me, young prince of England!
                        (Remember your surging Manhattan's crowds as you
                                    pass'd with your cortege of nobles?
                        There in the crowds stood I, and singled you out
                                    with attachment;)
                                                                       [P. 239]
            1. Walt Whitman, "Year of Meteors (1859-60)," Leaves of
            Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York, 1973),
            p. 238; all further references to Whitman's poetry will be
            cited by page number from this edition and will included in the
            text.
             
            Larzer Ziff is Caroline Donovan Professor of English at the Johns
            Hopkins University. He has written several books on American
            culture, the most recent of which is Literary Democracy: The
            Declaration of Cultural Independence in America (1981).
David Marshall
         Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments
         In Smith's view, the dédoublement that structures any act of
            sympathy is internalized and doubled within the self. In
            endeavoring to "pass sentence" upon one's own
            conduct, Smith writes, "I divide myself, as it were, into two
            persons; and … I, the examiner and judge, represent a different
            character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined
            into and judged of" (p. 113). Earlier in his book, Smith
            claims that in imagining someone else's sentiments, we
            "imagine ourselves acting the part" of that person (p.
            75); here he pictures us trying to play ourselves by representing
            ourselves as two different characters. "The first,"
            writes Smith, "is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard
            to my own conduct I endeavour to enter into, by placing myself in
            his situation." The second character, according to Smith, is
            "the agent, the person whom I properly call myself, and of
            whose conduct, under the character of a spectator, I was
            endeavouring to form some opinion" (p. 113). In the version
            of this chapter that appeared in the first edition, Smith made
            these roles explicitly by stating that "we must imagine
            ourselves not the actors, but the spectators of our own character
            and conduct" (p. 11 n.2). In his final exposition, he makes
            it clear that we are both actors and spectators of our characters.
            We are actors not just because we appear before spectators played
            by ourselves but also because, as Smith describes, we personate
            ourselves in different parts, persons, and characters. The self is
            theatrical in its relation to others and in its self-conscious
            relation to itself; but it also enters the theater because
            "the person whom I properly call myself" must be the
            actor who can dramatize or represent to himself the spectacle of
            self-division in which the self personates two different persons
            who try to play each other's part, change positions, and
            identify with each others. Ironically, after founding his Theory of
            Moral Sentiments on a supposedly universal principle of sympathy,
            and then structuring the act of sympathy around the epistemological
            void that prevents people from sharing each other's feelings,
            Smith seems to separate the self from the one self if could
            reasonably claim to know: itself. In order to sympathize with
            ourselves, we must imagine ourselves as an other who looks upon us
            as an other and tries to imagine us. Indeed, calling the spectator
            within the self the person judged of, Smith writes, "but that
            the judge should, in every respect, be the same with the person
            judged of, is as impossible, as that the cause should in every
            respect, be the same with the effect" (p. 113). Thus the
            actor and spectator into which one divides oneself can never
            completely identify with each other or be made identical. Identity
            is itself undermined by the theatrical model which pictures the
            self as an actor who stands beside himself and represents the
            characters of both spectator and spectacle.14
             
            14. Smith's depiction of the impartial spectator and the
            relations it creates within the self suggest that he has been
            reading Shaftesbury. The characterization of the impartial
            spectator as the "man within the breast" (p. 130)
            recalls Joseph Butler's discussion of "the witness of
            conscience" in his sermons "Upon the Natural Supremacy
            of Conscience" (The Works of Joseph Butler, 2 vols.
            [Cambridge, Mass., 1827], 2:52, and see 2:47-65. Smith may or may
            not have read Butler; see Macfie, The Individual in Society, p.
            99). Hume discusses the moral value of considering how we appear in
            the eyes of those who regard us: "By our continual and
            earnest pursuit of a character, a reputation in the world, we bring
            our own deportment and conduct frequently in review, and consider
            how they appear in the eyes of those who approach and regard us.
            This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in
            reflection, keeps alive al the sentiments of right and wrong"
            (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, p. 276). It is
            Shaftesbury, however, who expounds a "doctrine of two persons
            in one individual self" as he presents his "dramatic
            method" ("Soliloquy or Advice to an Author," in
            Characteristics of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John M.
            Robertson, 2 vols. [Gloucester, Mass., 1963], 1:121) …. The terms
            and figures of theater are clearly inscribed within Smith's
            characterizations of sympathy and the impartial spectator but they
            are clearly informed by Shaftesbury's meditation on the
            dramatic character of the self and the problem of theatricality
            that threatens the self as it appears before the eyes of the world.
            This interpretation of Shaftesbury is developed at length in my The
            Figure of Theater.
             
            David Marshall, assistant professor of English and comparative
            literature at Yale University, has written on Rilke and
            Shakespeare. The present essay is adapted from a chapter of his
            forthcoming book, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam
            Smith, and George Eliot.
Anthony Newcomb
         Sound and Feeling
         I do not by any means with to take on the philosophy or aesthetics
            of music as a whole. In his review of Edward Lippman's
            Humanistic Philosophy of Music, Monroe Beardsley lists six areas in
            which an ideal philosophy of music ought to provide guidance: (1)
            an ontology of music, an answer to the question What is a musical
            work of art? (2) a taxonomy of music, a categorical scheme for the
            basic and universal aspects of music; (3) a hermeneutics or
            semiotics of music, an answer to the question What, if anything,
            can music refer to? (4) an epistemology of music; (5) a theory of
            music criticism, an answer to the question What makes one musical
            work better than another? (6) the foundations of a social
            philosophy of music.4 My subject here is the third item. I want
            most particularly to separate it from the fifth item, for to arrive
            at an interpretation of a particular piece is not to arrive at an
            evaluation of it. I shall also try, particularly in my discussion
            of Nelson Goodman's seminal Languages of Art, to avoid the
            first item.5 And I shall try throughout to avoid embroilment in the
            question of how the aesthetic experience can be separated from the
            nonaesthetic.
            My subject is in fact only a part of the third item above, namely,
            current theories of musical expression. "Expression" is
            not equivalent to "meaning"; I understand and shall use
            the word "expression" to indicate a kind of meaning
            that entails some kind of reference outside the internal syntax of
            the artwork itself. As Goodman remarks, "rather obviously, to
            express is to refer in some way to what is expressed."6 How
            this reference is made by the artwork is interaction with the
            listener, and what sort of purpose it serves these concerns
            will be the focus of this essay. To choose this focus is not to
            deny something of which I have no doubt, both from Peter
            Faltin's careful arguments and from my own experience: there
            is a kind of musical meaning that is purely syntactic, that
            operates without reference outside the internal operations or
            procedures of musical systems themselves.7 But through this may be
            ontologically the most fundamental kind of musical meaning, it is
            not the only kind. To listen for this alone is not the only way to
            approach music. Indeed, I should guess it is not the most
            fundamental way for many listeners.
             
            4. I paraphrase and abbreviate from Monroe C. Beardsley, review of
            A Humanistic Philosophy of Music by Edward A. Lippman, Musical
            Quarterly66 (Apr. 1980): 305.
            5. See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of
            Symbols(Indianapolis, 1968); all further references to this work,
            abbreviated LA, will be included in the text.
            6. Goodman, "Reply to Beardsley," Erkenntnis 12, pt. 1
            (Jan. 1978): 171; and see Edward T. Cone: "Expressive values
            in any art … cannot arise from analytical values alone. How could
            they? Unless one wishes to explain what it could possibly mean for
            a work of art to &lsquo;express itself,' then one must agree
            that expression, by its very definition, implies a relationship
            between the work of art and something else; while analytical values
            are derivable purely from internal structure" ("Beyond
            Analysis," Perspectives of New Music 6 [Fall-Winter 1967]:
            46).
             
            Anthony Newcomb, professor of music at the University of
            California, Berkeley, is the author of The Madrigal at Ferrara. He
            is currently at work on a book on musica ficta, Understood
            Accidentals in Renaissance Vocal Polyphony, 1450-1600, and a study
            of the relationship between structure and expression in nineteenth-
            century music.
Jonathan Beck
         Formalism and Virtuosity: Franco-Burgundian Poetry, Music, and
            Visual Art, 1470-1520
         Let us look first at poetry. It is well known that by the fifteenth
            century, lyric poetry had undergone a radical transformation; the
            early lyric fluidity and formal variability (the now famous
            mouvance of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries) had
            hardened into the nonlyric and even, some maintain, antilyric forms
            fixeswhich characterize the poetic formalism of late medieval
            France. Dispensing with the details of how and why this occurred,
            the essential point is that by the end of the Middle Ages, the poet
            in France and Burgundy saw himself as an artisan of words, not as a
            singer.6 He refers to himself as a craftsman (a facteur, faiseur,
            rhétoricien), and it is plain, sometimes painfully so, to anyone
            who reads the works that the rhétoriqueur is, indeed, an artisan of
            forms or, if you will, an architecte de la parole, a
            specialist in verbal matter. He works words, sounds, metric and
            strophic forms into intricate patterns and arranges his elaborate
            designs in blocks of exact and harmonious symmetry. He is, in fact,
            from Machaut on, a virtuoso of the verbal equivalent of the
            architectural art of carrelage ("Tile designs") which
            adorned the princely château in which he worked and lived. No one
            familiar with the period will avoid noticing the strikingly similar
            types of patters in the poet's works and in his surroundings.
            I have gathered elsewhere the visual documentation which bears out
            Zumthor's suggestions quoted above ("analogies of
            perception" and "proximity of design") with
            respect to the meticulously constructivist mentality of the Franco-
            Burgundian artisan. But the analogies I found are much more than
            perceptual. It is true that the elaborate designs on the walls,
            floors, ceilings, windows, woodwork, and so forth of the early
            Renaissance château are, indeed, composed of intricate blocks of
            material; but their function is not merely decorative (that is,
            analogously restricted to this simple plane when compared with
            contemporaneous poems), it is also narrative, with emblematic
            motifs and allegorical figures arrayed in linear patterns of
            "visual" discourse the invariable "discours
            de la gloire" (see ML, pp. 56-77) which silently proclaims
            the magnificence of the patron prince and proprietor of the château
            (see figs. 1-4).7
             
            6. A summary of internal and external factors in the transformation
            of lyric to Rhetoric is provided in my review of Die musikalische
            Erscheinungsform der Trouvèrepoesie by Hans-Herbert S. Råkel (Bern,
            1977), in Romance Philology 34 (Nov. 1980): 250-58.
            7. This following collage of fragments from ML was constructed
            (like a Renaissance quodlibet) ôto serve as commentary on
            photographs of tile designs compared with verbal texts, in an
            earlier version of this paper ("Formal Constructivism in Late
            Medieval French Poetry: Lyric to Rhetoric, mouvance to formex
            fixes, canso to carreau"), from which the examples in figs.
            1-4 are taken.
            Culte de l'objet subtilement travaillé, au-delà de toute
            fonctionnalité primaire (28) *** primat du labeur ardu, patient, du
            difficile, de l'inattendu (212) *** les mots mêmes semblent
            travaillés d'un besoin de scientificité fictive,
            d'anoblissement par le savoir (76) *** les … mots ne sont
            plus que les particules d'une parole dont la seule
            signification est globale (50) *** matériau émancipé (autant que
            faire se peut) des contraintes de la phrase, transposé sur un plan
            où le signe devient le nom vide de ce signe (195) *** goût du
            bricolage plutôt que de l'industrie; … du bariolage plus que
            du fondu et de la nuance; de l'équilibre numéral des parties
            plus que de la synthèse; du multiple plus que de l'un. Outil
            forgé martelé d' "aornures" sans fonction
            utilitaire; enchâssements cubiques, coniques, pyramidaux,
            cruciformes du bâtiment … meubles marquetés, forrés de tiroirs
            minuscules et secrets (134) [and so forth].
            For the iconography of these examples (and numerous others), see
            Emile Amé, Less Carrelages émaillés du Moyen Age et de la
            Renaissance (Paris, 1859), pp. 61-108.
             
            Jonathan Beck is associate professor of French at the University of
            Arizona. He is the author of Théâtre et propaganda aux débuts de la
            Réforme(forthcoming in 1984), a sequel to his edition and study, Le
            Concil de Basle: Le Origines du theater réformiste et partisan en
            France.
Walter A. Davis
         The Fisher King: Wille zur Macht in Baltimore
         Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the
            most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and
            as such we train students to think about literature in certain
            ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one
            masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the
            source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution.
            Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most
            recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the
            ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of
            resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know
            what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what
            constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the
            "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues,
            focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these
            matters are determined.
            Though he has had more than his share of professional attention,
            having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of
            further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we
            are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and,
            in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his
            representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated
            the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are
            favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed
            of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in
            use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with
            literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for
            the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless
            function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's
            focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the
            debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old
            opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to
            move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our
            discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish
            is invaluable because he has set out to become the official
            spokesman and efender of the profession.
             
            Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State
            University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique
            of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed
            work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on
            modern American drama.
Stanley Fish
         Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis
         Perhaps the best place to begin would be with the model or picture
            of things Davis opposes to mine. It is a familiar model that has at
            its center an independent text, or at least a text that is
            independent enough to provide "common reference points"
            that serve as a check against, and a means of discriminating
            between, the operation of different interpretive strategies (p.
            681). In my account of interpretation, Davis complains, there is no
            such check, and therefore different interpretive strategies are
            free to "create completely different texts with no point of
            comparison"; as a result, "all attempts to ground
            criticism in commonly observed data are ruled out" (p. 681).
            Davis cites as a piece of "commonly observed data,"
            which in my argument "suddenly become[s] problematic,"
            the fact that "God is represented as somewhat ponderous and
            dull in book 3 of Paradise Lost" (p. 681). Now it is
            certainly the case that much criticism has been grounded in this
            piece of data, and it is also the case that it has been
            "commonly observed," in the sense that many
            commentators begin by assuming it before proceeding either to
            lament it or explain it or explain it away. The question I would
            ask, however, is "What is its source?" Davis'
            answer is already given; its source is the text; but I would
            suggest that its source is a tradition of literary judgment at
            least as old as the pronouncements of Alexander Pope, a tradition
            that over a period of time was consolidated and became so
            authoritative that it acquired the status of a commonplace, which,
            in combination with other related commonplaces, made up the context
            within which the act of reading occurred. In short, I would want to
            historicize (and perhaps rhetorize) the category of commonly
            observed data, and I would do this in part by pointing out first,
            that the category is a relational one formed not by direct
            inspection but by a system of differences that inform
            perception and second, that what is in the category can
            change (although change is one of the things Davis claims that I
            cannot accommodate).
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions
            to  include "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and
            Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983).
Walter A. Davis
         Offending the Profession (After Peter Handke)
         Interpretation is an institutional activity and that may be the
            most significant fact about it; we are, indeed, a profession, and
            as such we train students to think about literature in certain
            ways. Membership in the community is determined by how well one
            masters the rules of the game. These inescapable facts may be the
            source of our greatest problems or their hidden solution.
            Stanley Fish champions the latter alternative, arguing, in his most
            recent book, that "the interpretive community" is the
            ultimate principle of authority in criticism and is capable of
            resolving all the problems of interpretation.1 If we want to know
            what reading is, how texts achieve determinate meaning, what
            constitutes validity in interpretation, or how to resolve the
            "conflict of interpretations," we must, Fish argues,
            focus on the community itself, for it is here alone that these
            matters are determined.
            Though he has had more than his share of professional attention,
            having developed this argument makes Fish's work worthy of
            further consideration. He quite simply presents the best picture we
            are likely to get of the "mind" of the profession, and,
            in treating him at length here, I am primarily concerned with his
            representative status. His great achievement is to have articulated
            the assumptions and beliefs underlying the practices that are
            favored in our profession: the tacit theoretical position composed
            of ideas and commonplaces that are so deeply held and constantly in
            use that they "prestructure" both our dealings with
            literature and our debates over those dealings. While remaining for
            the most part "unconscious," these ideas nevertheless
            function as self-evident and unassailable truths. (Fish's
            focus on general rules shared by everyone cuts across both the
            debates among theorists of different persuasions and the old
            opposition between theory and practical criticism.) If we are to
            move, as I think we must, toward experiencing a crisis in our
            discipline, we first have to know where we are. And for that, Fish
            is invaluable because he has set out to become the official
            spokesman and defender of the profession.
             
            Walter A. Davis, associate professor of English at the Ohio State
            University, is the author of The Act of Interpretation: A Critique
            of Literary Reason. The present essay is from a recently completed
            work on contemporary criticism. He is currently writing a book on
            modern American drama.
Stanley Fish
         Fear of Fish: A Reply to Walter Davis
         It may seem that I am simply confirming Davis' assertion (and
            accusation) that in my view of the critical process
            "different interpretive strategies create completely
            different texts with no point of comparison" (p. 681); but
            the differences are not all that complete. While many readers now
            see (and argue for) a God who is more dramatically effective than
            Pope's "school divine," they still see a God who
            exists in a defining relationship with the figure of Satan, a Satan
            who is himself significantly changed from the energy-bearing
            Byronic antihero who was for so long a "given" in the
            interpretive landscape. The point is, again, that changes do not
            occur in isolation, because the facts that have undergone change
            (and, on occasion, dislodgment) did not exist in isolation either.
            In the history of Milton criticism, any judgment against God is
            always and simultaneously a judgment for Satan (of course the ways
            of making thatpositive judgment are themselves varied); and it
            follows that a reversal in one pole of the judgment cannot occur
            without a corresponding that is, related reversal in
            the other. Any increase in the literary "cash value" of
            Milton's God will be registered at the expense of his Satan.
            In short, since literary judgments or observations are not made
            piecemeal, the process of challenging and (perhaps) changing them
            is not piecemeal either. That is why it is not
            "contradictory," as Davis asserts, "to talk about
            recalcitrant features of a text" in the context of a thesis
            that makes the text's features a function of interpretation
            (p. 672). The source of recalcitrance or resistance is not the text
            as it exists independently of interpretation, but the text as an
            authoritative and elaborated interpretation has given it to us. I
            stress "elaborated" because the interpretation is not a
            single assertion but a complex of assertions; and when a challenge
            is made to the interpreted text at one point, its other points
            constitute a reservoir from which objections and
            "counterchallenges" can emerge. Thus, when someone
            offers a revisionist account of Milton's God, a skeptical or
            unpersuaded reader will respond by observing that this account is
            incompatible with what we know to be true about other parts of the
            poem: the characterization of Satan, or of the War in Heaven, or of
            books 11 and 12. It is then the obligation of the revisionist
            critic either to demonstrate there is no incompatibility or (and
            this is the more usual path) to extend his new reading in such a
            way as to recharacterize those parts of the poem that seem to stand
            as refutations of the revisionist's reading. He will then be
            working against resistance, but it will not be the resistance of
            something that stands outside interpretation; rather it will be the
            resistance offered by one interpretively produced shape to the
            production of another.
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His contributions
            to  include "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982) and "Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and
            Self-Loathing in Literary Studies" (December 1983).
Walter A. Davis
         Offending the Profession
         Fish has always been adept at revising his position to incorporate
            what he's learned from his critics while repaying the favor
            by assigning them a position they never took. The latter practice
            naturally helps conceal the borrowings, but as Fish's
            position evolves it becomes progressively difficult to determine
            who is the author of his essays. (Fish Unlimited Inc., abc) I am,
            of course, gratified to see how much Fish has learned from me. It
            is salutary to find that Fish is finally just a humble historian
            working with others at "recovering a system of thought and
            feeling" (p. 697) that will enable us to establish the
            historical context of Milton's most probable intentions and
            realizing, as many historians of literature don't, that we
            can only do so by bringing concepts provided by literary
            theory form, function, artistic purpose, and so
            forth to bear on the mass of historical materials at our
            disposal.3 It is also gratifying to see that Fish has discovered
            the law of context and now realizes that there are no local
            matters. Had he discovered that earlier, we'd have been
            spared Aunt Tilly and the discussion of Mr. Collins as well
            as the general notion extrapolated from those examples that
            anything a sizable group decides to do will fly since nothing else
            constraints interpretation. We'd also have been spared the
            concepts of reading and affective criticism presented in
            Fish's early work and the unchecked linguistic hijinks used
            to sustain those readings. I derive my deepest pleasure, however,
            from finding that Fish has finally discovered the conflict of
            interpretations proper and its primacy "the resistance
            offered by one interpretively produced shape to the production of
            another" (p. 699) though I must sadly abridge this
            progress report by noting that he finds himself powerless to do
            anything with this recognition. That is as it must be, for the most
            interesting thing about Fish's borrowings is where he
            stops and why he has to. Having let me write the first 5 ½
            pages of his reply, he suddenly stops taking dictation so that he
            can simply reassert, in all its abstract glory, his tried-and-true
            resolution of all interpretive controversy by community interest.
            Had he read further, he would have discovered that a good deal more
            emerges if one attempts to preserve and deal with the conflict of
            interpretations rather than to do away with it. He would even have
            discovered my epistemology and would have learned the main
            lesson that his position is not an alternative to mine but an
            early moment it contains and sublates in a larger context.
            Have taught Fish so much, I found myself, instead, poorly repaid by
            the position he foists upon me. Constantly caught up in an effort
            to reiterate the dichotomy on which his entire theorizing depends,
            Fish's fixed need is to rework all disputes into an
            opposition between the party of independent fact-disinterested
            reason and the party of interest so that he might triumphantly
            resolve all difficulties by once again discovering the simple fact
            of interests. Lest this strategy hide behind a common
            misconception, our debate is not a case where distinct frameworks
            are simply misreading one another, as they must, but one where one
            framework must deliberately and seriously misread others since it
            has no other way to sustain itself. If the account Fish gives of my
            argument is the way things must look from his framework, all that
            this fact signifies is the paucity of his framework and its
            inability to achieve even minimal descriptive adequacy.
             
            3. But even here things are a good deal more complex than Fish
            imagines. For a good statement of the logic and problems of
            historical interpretation, see Robert Marsh, "Historical
            Interpretation and the History of Criticism," in Literary
            Criticism and Historical Understanding, ed. Philip Damon (New York,
            1967), pp. 1-24.
Richard Rorty
         Deconstruction and Circumvention
         I think … we ought to distinguish two sense of
            "deconstruction." In one sense the word refers to the
            philosophical projects of Jacques Derrida. Taken this way, breaking
            down the distinction between philosophy and literature is essential
            to deconstruction. Derrida's initiative in philosophy
            continues along a line laid down by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin
            Heidegger. He rejects, however, Heidegger's distinctions
            between "thinkers" and "poets" and between
            the few thinkers and the many scribblers. So Derrida rejects the
            sort of philosophical professionalism which Nietzsche despised and
            which Heidegger recovered. This does indeed lead Derrida in the
            direction of "a general, undifferentiated textuality."
            In his work, the philosophy-literature distinction is, at most,
            part of a ladder which we can let go of once we have climbed up it.
            In a second sense of "deconstruction," however, the
            term refers to a method of reading texts. Neither this method, nor
            any other, should be attributed to Derrida who shares
            Heidegger's contempt for the very idea of method.2 But the
            method exists, and the passage I have quoted from Culler describes
            one of its essential features. Culler is quite right to say that
            deconstruction, in the second sense, needs a clear distinction
            between philosophy and literature. For the kind of reading which
            has come to be called "deconstructionist" requires two
            different straight persons: a macho professional philosopher who is
            insulted by the suggestion that he has submitted to a textual
            exigency, and a naive producer of literature whose jaw drops when
            she learns that her work has been supported by philosophical
            oppositions. The philosopher had thought of himself as speaking a
            sparse, pure, transparent language. The poetess shyly hoped that
            her unmediated woodnotes might please. Both reel back in horror
            when the deconstructionist reveals that each has been making use of
            complex idioms to which the other has contributed. Both go all to
            pieces at this news. A wild disorder overtakes their words. Their
            whimpers lend into interminable androgynous keening. Once again,
            deconstructionist intervention has produced a splendidly diffuse
            irresolution.
             
            Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of
            Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism and is
            currently writing a book on Martin Heidegger.
Brook Thomas
         The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville and Lemuel_Shaw
         I have three aims in this essay. (1) I want to offer an example of
            an interdisciplinary historical inquiry combining literary
            criticism with the relatively new field of critical legal studies.
            (2) I intend to use this historical inquiry to argue that the
            ambiguity of literary texts might better be understood in terms of
            an era's social contradictions rather than in terms of the
            inherent qualities of literary language or rhetoric and,
            conversely, that a text's ambiguity can help us expose the
            contradictions masked by an era's dominant ideology. (3) I
            try to prove my assertion by applying my method to Herman
            Melville's three most famous short works "Benito
            Cereno," "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Bill
            Budd, Sailor works dealing with the law and lawyers and
            widely acknowledged as ambiguous.1 I will base my critical inquiry
            into these stories on Melville's relationship with his
            father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, who, while sitting as the chief justice
            of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860,
            wrote some of the most important opinions in what Roscoe Pound has
            called "the formative era of American law."2
            Before I get started, I should clarify what this study does not
            entail. By using Shaw and his legal decisions in conjunction with
            Melville's fiction, I am not conducting a positivistic
            influence study. My method will not depend on the positivist
            assumption that Shaw's legal opinions can be used to
            illuminate Melville's texts only when his direct knowledge of
            Shaw's opinions can be proved. Nor will I limit myself to a
            traditional psychoanalytic reading: my emphasis is on political and
            social issues, and too often these issues are deflected by
            translating them into psychological ones. At the same time, I
            recognize that critics concerned with political and social issues
            too often neglect questions raised by a writer's individual
            situation. I compare Shaw to Melville not to reduce
            Melville's politics to psychology but to prevent a political
            study from neglecting the political implications of psychology, to
            remind us as the title of Fredric Jameson's book The
            Political Unconscious reminds us that psychological questions
            always have political implications.
             
            1. See Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno,"
            "Bartleby," and Billy Budd, Sailor, "Billy Budd,
            Sailor" and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth,
            1967); all further references to these works will be included in
            the text.
            2. See Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law (Boston,
            1938). For discussions of Melville and Lemuel Shaw, see Charles
            Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, Columbia University
            Studies in English and Comparative Literature, no. 138 (New York,
            1966), pp. 432-33; Charles H. Foster, "Something in Emblems:
            A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick," New England Quarterly 34
            (Mar. 1961): 3-35; Robert L. Gale,
            "Bartleby Melville's Father-in-Law," Annali
            sezione Germanica, Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 5
            (Dec. 1962): 57-72; Keith Huntress, " &lsquo;Guinea" of
            White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw," American Literature 43
            (Jan. 1972): 639-41; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised
            Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville's America (Baton
            Rouge, La., 1980), pp. 9-11 and 40; John Stark, "Melville,
            Lemuel Shaw, and &lsquo;Bartleby,' " in Bartleby, the
            Inscrutable: A Collection of Comentary on Herman Melville's
            Tale "Bartleby the Scrivener,"ed. M. Thomas Inge
            (Hamden, Conn., 1975), all further references to this work,
            abbreviated JA, will be included in the text.
             
            Brook Thomas teaches English and American literature at the
            University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of James
            Joyce's "Ulysses": A Book of Many Happy Returns
            and is at work on a study of the relations between law and
            literature in antebellum America.
David Simpson
         Criticism, Politics, and Style in Wordsworth's Poetry
         Questions could and should be raised about the political profile of
            English Romanticism both in particular and in general.
            Wordsworth's poetry is especially useful to me here because
            of the way in which, through formal discontinuities, it dramatizes
            political conflicts. Reacting against these discontinuities,
            aesthetically minded critics have simply tended to leave out of the
            canon those poems which have the greatest capacity to help us
            become aware of a political poetics. In this respect it may well be
            that Wordsworth is the most stylistically perverse of the Romantic
            poets. Not the most difficult to read, necessarily Percy
            Bysshe Shelley's breath-suspending songs and William
            Blake's determination to produce "variety in every
            line" with the aim of unfettering poetry surely make more
            aggressive and obvious demands on the reader.1 But in these cases
            we can be reasonably sure that the difficulties are part of a
            conscious and coherent intention to set imagination to work in
            kindling sparks from ashes. Wordsworth also set out to do this, and
            we can agree that he did so with some success in some poems. But
            critics from Samuel Taylor Coleridge onward have rightly questioned
            the unity of Wordsworth's canon in this respect. In
            Biographia Literaria, Coleridge notices the "inconstancy of
            the style," an unevenness and a general inability to satisfy
            the demands of "good poetry" conceived as something
            possessing an organic form.2 This concern with a wholeness and
            consistency of artifice is more Coleridge's than
            Wordsworth's, and it seems to me that it is precisely the
            disjunctions in the poems that embody some of their most original
            and historically urgent meanings. The blemishes recorded by
            Coleridge alternating and dissimilar states of feeling,
            overminuteness in description, and obsession with "accidental
            circumstances" (BL, 2:126), overuse of the dramatic mode,
            disproportion of thought to event, and so forth can in fact
            serve as eloquent signals for discerning the complexities of the
            poems as they address a historical crisis in consensus (both social
            and literary) embodied exactly in the unstable vehicle of the
            Wordsworthian speaker.3
             
            3. I have explored the "formal" implications of this
            crisis in Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (London and
            Totowa, N.J., 1979), and the terms of its historical discourse in
            Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (London and Atlantic
            Highlands, N.J., 1982).
             
            David Simpson is professor of English at Northwestern University.
            He is the author of Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979),
            Wordsworth and the Figurings of the Real (1982), and Fetishism and
            Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (1982) and editor of German
            Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Kant, Fichte, Schelling,
            Schopenhauer, Hegel (1984).
Gerald Mast
         On Framing
         One of the common and commonsensical ways to distinguish cinema
            from every other art and semiotic system, and to define the
            property of its uniqueness, is to claim that cinema is the only
            art/"language" that links images. This
            "linking" can imply three different yet complementary
            operations. First, cinema links individual still photographs into
            an apparently continuous sequence of movement by pushing the
            individual frames or photographs through a camera or projector at
            sixteen or twenty-four or however many frames per second. Second,
            cinema links images by editing (or cutting, or montage, or
            decoupage), by splicing together individual shots, which are
            continuous chains of linked frames. Finally, cinema links images
            with sounds, synchronously or otherwise. The only problem with such
            an apparently unrestrictive and unprescriptive definition of cinema
            and the "cinematic" is that it obscures an essentially
            cinematic operation that precedes the linking of cinema images: the
            image must first be framed before it can be linked with another.
            But is framing unique to cinema? Don't paintings have frames?
            Aren't photographs frames?  Isn't the theater's
            proscenium arch a frame? A consequence of such perfectly sensible
            questions is a consistent undervaluing of the cinema frame as an
            essentially and uniquely cinematic tool, unlike that of any other
            art, producing serious errors in the writing of film theory and
            serious misunderstandings of the processes of film history. The
            goal of this article is to diagnose some of these errors (arising
            from mistaken assumptions and complementary prejudices) so they
            might someday be cured.
             
            Gerald Mast is professor of English and general in the humanities
            at the University of Chicago. Among his many books are A Short
            History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Film/
            Cinema/Movie, The Movies in Our Midst,and Howard Hawks,
            Storyteller.His previous contributions to  are
            "What Isn't Cinema?"(December 1974) and
            "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of
            Film Narrative" (Spring 1980).
Anthony J. Niesz and Norman N. Holland
         Interactive Fiction
         The structure of traditional fiction is essentially linear or
            serial. No matter how complex a given work may be, it presents
            information to its reader successively, one element at a time, in a
            sequence determined by its author. By contrast, interactive fiction
            is parallel in structure or, more accurately, dendritic or tree-
            shaped. Not one, but several possible courses of action are open to
            the reader. Further, which one actually happens depends largely,
            though not exclusively, upon the reader's own choices. To be
            sure, the author is still in overall control, since it is she who
            has set up the particular nexus of events, but the route up the
            narrative tree, the actual sequence of events, is generally
            affected, if not completely determined, by the reader's
            responses to that particular reader's specific situation. In
            an adventure, the sequence of action frequently depends upon the
            reader's decision to go in one geographical direction rather
            than another. In the eliza sample, the content of the
            "story" depends on such particulars as whether this
            reader has a brother or not, whether she fears her father, and why
            she has consulted the terminal. In general, the text presented to
            the eliza-reader depends on what that reader has already said and
            how the computer has interpreted and stored it, and this is
            generally true of interactive fiction.
            Further, interactive fiction is, in principle (if not in practice),
            open-ended infinite. A conversation with eliza could go on
            for as long as one with Woody Allen's psychoanalyst in
            principle, forever. It has no necessary terminus. The program will
            go one writing texts and answers on the screen as long as the
            reader or player chooses to supply responses. Further, the computer
            can act as a metafictional narrator like John Barth or Thomas
            Pynchon who can create a story within a story or a story that
            generates another story within itself which generates another story
            within itself and so on, fictions dizzying and dazzling. One senses
            one's essential humanity wobbling in the midst of the
            infinite paradoxes of existence and meaning.
             
            Anthony J. Niesz, assistant professor of German at Yale University,
            is the author of Dramaturgy in German Drama: From Gryphius to
            Goethe (1980). He is interested in the phenomenon of the meta-
            theater, especially in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German
            drama, as well as in the literature and cultural policies of the
            German Democratic Republic. Norman N. Holland is Milbauer Eminent
            Scholar at the University of Florida. He is the author of Laughing
            (1982) and The I (forthcoming in 1985).
Strother B. Purdy
         Technopoetics: Seeing What Literature Has to Do with_the_Machine
         What I refer to is how our thought in inventing, designing,
            modifying, and using machines carries over into acts we do not
            consciously associate with them like writing or reading
            poetry. An airplane in flight may be "pure poetry," or
            a Ferrari "a poem in steel"; it intrigues me to
            consider that beneath such object comparisons an object-of-thought
            connection may be made. Or in other words, there may be really
            something to a hackneyed compliment like "poem in
            steel." ("Ah, commendatore, tu sei veramente in gamba!
            Questa volta c'è la poesia di acciaio!")
            My preference for thought form over object form makes me less
            interested in machines that we can see than in those that we
            can't, and it makes me direct my inquiry along two lines,
            concerning two questions about invisibility. The first involves the
            history of technology: How is it that machines
            "disappear" become less visible, impinge less and
            less upon popular consciousness? The effect cannot be imputed
            entirely to familiarity. The second involves the history of
            literature: If machines have disappeared, are there
            "disappeared" or
            "invisible" machines in literature? It is
            reasonably clear that we go to considerable lengths to hide the
            machines that surround us and that we choose, or our artists
            choose, insofar as such choice can be located, to restrict the
            appearance of machines in art.3 Commonly their restricted
            appearance in art is understood as a kind of resistance to some
            form of machine takeover, while their concealment has only
            uncommonly received analysis and is not generally discussed in
            context with the matter of artistic representation. But we do
            accept, at least in theory, the idea that style of living and style
            in literature are connected. If the machine penetrates our style of
            living, then and this is the end of my inquiry these
            invisibilities are of interest to literary criticism, for they have
            something to do with the way literature is written, with whether or
            not, that is, writers choose to describe machines, use them as
            characters, or give them any role at all to play in surface
            structure. Since the artist often works to reveal what his society
            works to conceal and since the postmodern period has so far been
            one of crisis in the relations between society and technology, we
            may expect to find in postmodern fiction, or in writing to come,
            some greater revelation or simple exposure of the workings, than we
            could have seen before.
             
            3. I use "restrict" in a statistical sense, for since
            the beginning of the Industrial Revolution there have been artists
            to celebrate the machine; today's hyperrealist movement
            offers contemporary examples. These artists Tom Blackwell,
            Ron Kleemann, Ralph Goings, and others work a transformation
            like that of Andy Warhol with the pop object. They present not so
            much a celebration as an effort to turn looking into seeing, here
            directed at automobiles in particular, so much a part of everyday
            life as to have become (despite all efforts of the advertising
            industry) indistinguishable from one another and as a species from
            the other parts of the semiurban landscape the mailbox, the
            front lawn, the visiting relatives staring into the camera.
             
            Strother B. Purdy is the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science,
            Contemporary Literature, and Henry James. His previous
            contributions to  are "Stalingrad and My Lai:
            A Literary-Political Speculation" (Summer 1979) and
            "Reply to Lawrence W. Hyman (Summer 1980).
Michael Riffaterre
         Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse
         If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid
            definition of the representation of reality in literature, we may
            dispense with grammatical features such as verisimilitude or with
            genres such as realism, since these are not universal categories.
            Their applicability depends on historical circumstances or
            authorial intent. The most economic and general definition,
            however, must at least include the following two features. First,
            any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside
            of the text and preexistent to it. Readers feel, and critics
            pronounce, that the text's significance depends on this
            objective exteriority, even though this significance may entail
            destroying the commonplace acceptance of the object; indeed,
            negating something still presupposes that something. Second, the
            reader's response to the mimesis consists in a
            rationalization tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to
            expand on it sensory terms (through visualizations, for instance).
            The metalanguage of criticism accordingly prolongs and continues
            the text's mimetic discourse, and critics evaluate
            representation in terms of its precision and suggestive power. Both
            processes presupposition and rationalization
            alike assume that referentiality is the basic semantic
            mechanism of the literary mimesis.
            There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of
            descriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object
            cannot be analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is
            hard put to explain why readers feel compelled to evaluate them.
            And yet these texts not only lend themselves to interpretation but
            they are especially apt to trigger and control the reader's
            hermeneutic behavior. In short, the represented object eschews
            referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether, becoming instead
            the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends up by
            making the object subservient to the subject.1
             
            1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité (Paris, 1982),
            esp. my paper, pp. 81-118, on the referential fallacy.
             
            Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is
            the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book
            about Anthony Trollope (forthcoming in 1985). His previous
            contribution to , "Syllepsis," appeared
            in the Summer 1980 issue.
Edward Pechter
         When Pechter Reads Froula Pretending She's Eve Reading_Milton;_or,
            New Feminist Is But Old Priest Writ Large
         According to Froula, Paradise Lost is aimed at affirming or
            reaffirming the power of orthodox authority, by locating its source
            in an invisible being beyond understanding or question. In this
            respect, Milton's own authority is analogous to that of the
            metaphorical priest in the Virginia Woolf passage quoted at the
            beginning of Froula's essay, who can claim a direct
            connection, presumably derived from the laying on of hands, with
            this original authority to which the rest of us have no access. It
            is an odd analogy: Milton and a priest. It sorts very badly with
            everything we know about Milton, who was dedicated to the
            eradication of formal instutitional authority in favor of freedom
            of conscience. What is more important, such a view sorts oddly with
            the working of Paradise Lost itself.
            If we try to read Paradise Lost as an attempt to affirm orthodox
            authority by mystifying it, we run immediately into some major
            problems well before "Hee for God only, shee for God in
            him." The first of these problems is Satan, who is, as we all
            know, in many ways an impressively heroic figure. Satan directly
            affirms the autonomy that Eve is said to be made to repress in the
            story she tells of her creation in book 4. This Satanic
            affirmation, moreover, is also made to depend upon a creation
            story. In book 5, responding to Abdiel's argument that he
            owes gratitude to God for his creation, Satan says that he
            doesn't remember any time when he was not as he is. The
            notion that God created him is, Satan declares, a "strange
            point and new" (5.855). If Milton's purpose in the poem
            is the affirmation of authority, why has he made the proponent of
            autonomy and rebellion into such an impressive figure?
             
            Edward Pechter, associate professor of English at Concordia
            University in Montreal, is the author of Dryden's Classical
            Theory of Literature and is currently completing a book on
            Shakespeare and contemporary theory.
Christine Froula
         Pechter's Specter: Milton's Bogey Writ Small; or, Why_Is_He_Afraid
            of Virginia Woolf?
         The specter of Mr. Pechter's complaints haunted me as I wrote
            "When Eve Reads Milton," as those friends who helped me
            to write by continually banishing it can attest. This ghost seemed
            somehow familiar, a shadow of Milton's bogey or an echo of
            that angel in the house who still stalks the precincts of academia.
            Indeed, if Mr. Pechter did not exist, I confess that I could have
            invented him, although the specter of my imagining was rather more
            daunting, with his perfect command of my arguments, urbane bearing,
            and formidable learning. Never mind. The materialization of this
            specter in any form elicits some important issues that my article
            itself could not address; so I must thank Mr. Pechter for the
            trouble of his reply.
            The difficulty that I find in answering him, however, is that he
            responds to my arguments by ignoring them, substituting for them
            certain inventions of his own. While I could cheerfully join Mr.
            Pechter in dismissing much of what he says I say, I'm afraid
            the credit for it goes to him. The best refutation I can offer is
            the original essay, but it would be a waste of time to reiterate
            that here. Nor does it make sense, given the extent to which his
            representation of my essay differs from the essay itself, to refute
            him point by point. Instead, I will attempt to describe what I
            think is the crux of our dispute and to propose a way of
            reconciling our positions.
            Our disagreement arises, it seems to me, from the fact that,
            although he and I look at Paradise Lost from two quite different
            perspectives, Mr. Pechter is able to recognize only one. Since he
            does not grant that women's position and history in
            patriarchal culture place us at a vantage point which differs in
            some fundamental ways from that of readers like himself, who
            identify strongly with that culture, he cannot grasp indeed,
            cannot even read my arguments. It is not surprising, then,
            that such scattered impressions as he does pick up should seem to
            him not merely different from himself but, as he repeatedly says,
            "very strange." Mr. Pechter has an interesting way of
            coping with difference, however; even as he professes to find the
            essay very strange, he goes to great lengths to claim that in fact
            I am saying nothing new. My argument, he says, has been anticipated
            by Milton criticism and indeed by Milton's own Protestant
            resistance to orthodox authority. This position, so he thinks,
            already incorporates all imaginable differences, all possible inner
            voices, in itself. By these lights, there is no need and no use for
            a feminist critique of Miltonic authority, for it can only
            perform unoriginally, unnecessarily, indeed,
            redundantly another repetition of the poem and its critical
            history.
             
            Christine Froula is associate professor of English at Yale
            University. Her most recent book is "To Write
            Paradise": Style and Error in Pound's Cantos; she is
            currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce
            and Virginia Woolf. "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the
            Canonical Economy," her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,appeared in the December 1983 issue.
Murray Krieger
         The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E._H._Gombrich
            Retrospective
         It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s,
            which Gombrich's discussion of visual representation made on
            a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking
            about art and even more about literary art. For
            literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work
            as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and
            Illusionradically undermined the terms which had controlled
            discussion of how art represented "reality" or,
            rather, how viewers or members of the audience perceived that
            representation and related it to their versions of
            "reality." And, for those who accompanied or followed
            him from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser Gombrich helped
            transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like
            "imitation" as it could be applied to both the visual
            and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible
            for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary
            theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades.
            In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared
            more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have
            treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical
            innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and
            the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such
            followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his
            work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect
            Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art
            and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original
            misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending
            a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though
            supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in
            the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed
            to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his
            own errors of writing.
             
            Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University
            of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The
            Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition
            and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical
            History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is
            presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in
            Literary Theory(forthcoming). His latest contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory
            and the Duplicity of Metaphor," appeared in the Summer 1979
            issue.
E. H. Gombrich
         Representation and Misrepresentation
         It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray
            Krieger's "Retrospective." Qui s'excuse,
            s'accuse, and since I cannot ask my readers to embark on
            their own retrospective of my writings and test them for
            consistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in
            their eyes. Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor
            Krieger to his agonizing, if he did not present himself the
            "spokesman" for a significant body of theorists who
            appear to have acclaimed my book on Art and Illusion without ever
            having read it. The followers of this school of criticism of
            which Professor Krieger is a prominent member had apparently
            convinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in
            which the notions of reality and of nature had no place. They
            thought that I had subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all
            that remained were different systems of conventional signs which
            were made to stand for an unknowable reality. True, professor
            Krieger admits that I never endorsed such an interpretation of my
            views, and he even concedes that there are passages in Art and
            Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism, but he
            wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead
            precisely to the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse.
            If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all I
            could do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make
            myself sufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact
            that unlike these literary critics, the leading archaeologist of
            this country, Professor Stuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in
            discerning my meaning and profiting from my arguments. In his
            Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture of 1978, entitled Antiquity
            Depicted: Aspects of Archaeological Illustration, the author did me
            the honour of taking a statement from my book as his starting
            point. It is the passage at the end of part I in which I
            recapitulate the content of the first two chapters:
            What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful
            map, is an end product on a long road through schema and
            correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but
            the faithful construction of a relational mode.
            Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need
            lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any
            required degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly the
            word "required." The form of a representation cannot be
            divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in
            which the given visual language gains currency.1
             
            1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
            Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts,
            1956 (New York, 1960), p. 90.
             
            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 many influential works include The
            Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The
            Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, and, most
            recently, Tributes. His previous contributions to 
            include "The Museum: Past, Present and Future (Spring 1977)
            and "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving
            Eye" (Winter 1980).
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
         Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted
         Some people have found my distinction between meaning and
            significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction,
            I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility
            as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my
            realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an
            affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity
            in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that "there is no magic
            land of meanings outside human consciousness." 1 That
            assertion would be true if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of
            human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language
            users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go
            beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our
            meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and
            knowledge. Hence there isa land of meanings beyond past and present
            human consciousness the land of the future. What I should
            have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings
            beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and
            future. This correction of my original statements leads to a
            deepening of the concept of meaning.
            In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two
            aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed
            and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I
            acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more
            valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces
            the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I
            argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a
            text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise
            criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely
            float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader's
            opinion is as valid as another's would then be right, despite
            any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade
            people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what
            they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for
            those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. (I was writing
            in a context in which historical interpretation was being denounced
            as "unliterary" and hence illegitimate.)3 I also
            assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship
            might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically
            fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists
            sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically
            fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that
            meaning.
             
            1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.,
            1967), p. 4.
            2. See my "Objective Interpretation," PMLA 75 (Sept.
            1960): 463-79.
            3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley,
            "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon:
            Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1954), which
            ends:
            We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as
            contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a
            second kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or
            genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an
            inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem
            "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry.
            Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way.
            Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P.
            18]
             
            E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of
            Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in
            Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous
            contributions to  are "Against
            Interpretation?" (June 1983), "The Politics of Theories
            of Interpretation (September 1982), and "Stylistics and
            Synonymity" (March 1975).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley,_Sterne,_and_Male
            Homosocial Desire
         Surprisingly, when Laurence Sterne's Yorick sets his head
            toward Dover, it is with no developed motive of connoisseurship or
            curiosity: the gentleman dandy ups with his portmanteau at the
            merest glance of "civil triumph" from a male servant.
            Perhaps we are in the world of P. G. Wodehouse, with a
            gentleman's gentleman who happens, like Jeeves, to be the
            embodiment of all the prescriptive and opportunistic shrewdness
            necessary to maintain his master's innocent
            privileges but it is impossible to tell; the servant utters
            his five words, glances his glance, and disappears from the novel.
            The prestige that has lent force to his misprision or is it a
            sneer? seems to belong not to a particular personality but to
            a position, a function (or lack of it), a bond between gentleman
            and gentleman's gentleman that, throughout this novel, makes
            up in affective and class significance what it lacks in utilitarian
            sense. Yorick's bond to another valet is the most sustained
            and one of the fondest in the novel; and, for most of the novel,
            the bond is articulated through various forms of the conquest and
            exchange of women.
            In the discussion ahead, I will be using the "exchange of
            women" paradigm taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss and, for
            example, René Girard and Gayle Rubin, to focus on the changing
            meanings of the bonds between men in a seventeenth-century play and
            an eighteenth-century novel.1 These discussions are part of a book-
            length study of what I am calling "male homosocial
            desire" the whole spectrum of bonds between men,
            including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional
            subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic
            exchange within which the various forms of the traffic in
            women take place.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickis associate professor of English at Amherst
            College. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and
            Male Homosocial Desire (forthcoming, 1985).
Kendall L. Walton
         Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism
         That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the
            commonsense view, but as Edward Steichen reminds us it
            is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a
            photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the
            other. They point to "distortions" engendered by the
            photographic process and to the control which the photographer
            exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys
            for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive
            nature of the medium, observing that photographs are inevitably
            colored by the photographer's personal interests, attitudes,
            and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really
            does collide with photography's claim of extraordinary
            realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.
            Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of
            photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture
            makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a
            continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for
            realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward
            realism include the development of perspective and modeling
            techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details,
            attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very
            beginning, photography mastered perspective (a system of
            perspective that works, anyway, if not the only one). Subtleties of
            shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with
            the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of
            course the most mundane details of the scenes they
            portray stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty
            dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters
            striving for realism have always been after.
             
            2. See André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic
            Image," What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley
            and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 12; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated "OPI," will be included in the text. See
            also Rudolf Arnheim, "Melancholy Unshaped," Toward a
            Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1967), p. 186.
             
            Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of
            Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in
            the arts.
             
Barbara Johnson
         Rigorous Unreliability
         As a critique of a certain Western conception of the nature of
            signification, deconstruction focuses on the functioning of claim-
            making and claim-subverting structures within texts. A
            deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the conspicuously
            foregrounded statements in a text are systematically related to
            discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown into its
            shadows or margins; it is an attempt both to recover what is lost
            and to analyze what happens when a text is read solely in function
            of intentionality, meaningfulness, and representativity.
            Deconstruction thus confers a new kind of readability on those
            elements in a text that readers have traditionally been trained to
            disregard, overcome, explain away, or edit
            out contradictions, obscurities, ambiguities, incoherencies,
            discontinuities, ellipses, interruptions, repetitions, and plays of
            the signifier. In this sense it involves a reversal of values, a
            revaluation of the signifying function of everything that, in a
            signified-based theory of meaning, would constitute
            "noise." Jacques Derrida has chosen to speak of the
            values involved in this reversal in terms of "speech"
            and "writing," in which "speech" stands for
            the privilege accorded to meaning as immediacy, unity, identity,
            truth, and presence, while "writing" stands for the
            devalued functions of distance, difference, dissimulation, and
            deferment.
            This transvaluation has a number of consequences for the
            appreciation of literature. By shifting the attention from
            intentional meaning to writing as such, deconstruction has enabled
            readers to become sensitive to a number of recurrent literary topoi
            in a new way. Texts have been seen as commentaries on their own
            production or reception through their pervasive thematizations of
            textuality the myriad letters, books, tombstones, wills,
            inscriptions, road signs, maps, birthmarks, tracks, footprints,
            textiles, tapestries, veils, sheets, brown stockings, and self-
            abolishing laces that serve in one way or another as figures for
            the text to be deciphered or unraveled or embroidered upon. Thus, a
            deconstructor finds new delight in a Shakespearean character named
            Sir Oliver Martext or in Herman Melville's catalog of whales
            as books in Moby Dick, or she makes jokes about the opposition
            between speech and writing by citing the encounter between Little
            Red Riding Hood and the phony granny.
             
            Barbara Johnson is professor of Romance languages and literatures
            at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du
            langage poétique and The Critical Difference, translator of Jacques
            Derrida's Dissemination, and editor of The Pedagogical
            Imperative: Teaching as a literary Genre.
John Fisher
         Entitling
         For the moment, I assume that we have some rough idea of what
            "title" is supposed to mean: the large letters on the
            spine of a book, the words on the center of the first page of a
            musical score, or the little plate on the museum wall to the right
            of the painting (if we ignore the artist's name, the date,
            and the geographical and historical data). Thus examples of titles
            would be The Taming of the Shrew, "Mapleleaf Rag," or
            The Birth of Venus, but that generates a rather complex set of
            answers.
            Let us start with what is undoubtedly the simplest situation: where
            an inscription of the title is physically part of the work. The
            most familiar of the aquatints of Francisco Goya which collectively
            are called Los Caprichos the forty-third is titled The
            Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, or, more precisely, the Spanish
            equivalent of those words, for the Spanish words appear as a large
            and significant element on the plate, indeed occupying more than 10
            percent of its surface. In such cases titles are not given: they
            are elements of works, not by inference or subtle metaphor but in a
            most literal way. No other title fits in that way. That print could
            not be called Bats and Cats and Sleeping Man with the expectation
            that those words should serve as its title. Some works most
            works on the other hand, allow for a range of acceptable
            titles. Guernica could have been titled The Bombing of a Basque
            Village or Luftwaffe Hell. Neither of these would, I suspect, have
            been as good a title as Guernica, but they remain possibilities,
            even though the familiar title is not physically part of the work.
            (And, of course, some expressions could not serve as title of the
            mural: Sylvan Springtime or Saint Francis in Ecstasy. Of course,
            Picasso could have stood up and said, "I hereby name this
            work Marlene Dietrich on the Beach at Deauville," and no one
            could claim that the locution was false but more about this
            later.) Some works, incidentally, contain words, even sentences,
            and are not titled accordingly. Several familiar works of René
            Magritte include a most realistic representation of a tobacco pipe
            and the large words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
            (Of course it isn't a pipe; it's a pipe-picture, we
            might say. That's the point.) Examples of the titles given by
            Magritte to paintings in this series are L'Air et la chanson
            and Le Trahison des images. Obviously, not all works of visual art
            which contain linguistic inscriptions have titles which correspond
            to those inscriptions. The simplest situation is hardly much help.
             
            John Fisher is professor of philosophy at Temple University and
            editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is also
            the editor of Perceiving Artworks (1980) and Essays on Aesthetics
            (1983).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Loose Talk about Religion from William James
         In this paper I want to say some things about the way William James
            talks as, for example, in The Varieties of Religious
            Experience (1902), the famous Gifford Lectures in which (as it
            appears) James attempted to rehabilitate religion as a subject fit
            for philosophical discourse, or as something still worth talking
            about.1 Some familiar background for this matter is provided by the
            epigraph I have just given from "What Pragmatism
            Means," in which James shows himself to be a nominalist as
            against a metaphysical realist (see P,pp. 52-52; WWJ, p. 380). The
            nominalist position, as it applies to James, would be that words
            make sense to us but not for the reasons we give when we say that
            we designate things by them, because these things (whether gods or
            atoms) are never quite there, or at all events never quite things,
            in the way our language makes them out to be. It does not matter
            whether we are speaking of universals or particulars: words mean
            because of the way they hang together in sentences and contexts,
            and they fail to mean when they fail to fit in, not because of a
            failure of reference. It is not necessary (or not enough) to claim
            for our words that they are anchored in reality. The
            intelligibility of a word (or an utterance or a text) is always a
            hermeneutical construction, in the sense that the word depends for
            its meaning upon how it is taken. Whence the meaning of a word is
            always rhetorically contingent as well, because it is determined in
            varying measures by the situation in which it occurs and also,
            therefore, by the audience who is meant to hear it in a certain
            way, and who may take it in this certain way or perhaps in another
            way entirely, depending on the situations. We shall see how James
            exploits this contingency in his own way of speaking. A word can,
            of course, be taken as referring to some really existing entity,
            and in fact most words are taken in this way because (James would
            say) this is how they works for us. Words usually end up being
            about something. A nominalist in this case would be just someone
            who believes that (1) words do not have to refer to really existing
            entities in order to be taken in this realistic way, and (2) most
            words are taken in this realistic way for no good philosophical
            reason. But what might be allowed to stand as a good philosophical
            reason for taking words one way rather than another is exactly what
            our problem is, and it is also (but only in a loose sort of way)
            one of the things this paper is about.
             
            Gerald L. Bruns is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of
            Language (1974) and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and
            Understanding in Literary History (1982). He is currently at work
            on a new book, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. His most recent
            contribution to , "Canon and Power in the
            Hebrew Scriptures," appeared in the March 1984 issue.
George Rochberg
         Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of_the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)
         In trying to say what modernism is (or was), we must remind
            ourselves that it cannot and must not to be properly
            described and understood be confined only to the arts of
            music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture,
            those arts with which we normally associate the term
            "culture." Modernism can be said to embrace, in the
            broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also
            science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics,
            the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the
            politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as
            philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology
            (among others). Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive.
            No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound
            alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized
            all levels of human existence.
            What, then, is modernism?
            Some have described it as a state of "chronic
            revolution," that is, revolution against the past, against
            tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its
            voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the
            "new," for the hunger to be
            "original" to be the first and last with
            something unique and difference, whatever that something might be
            or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.
            Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all
            realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that
            is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing
            regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away
            the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is,
            morality and ethics those areas that lie outside the purely
            rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of
            freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and
            uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a
            separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the
            form of individuals or society as a whole.
            Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism
            as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point
            of the interface between the present and the future, always ready
            to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of
            constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation.
             
            George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works
            and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The
            Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer's View of Twentieth-
            Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a
            commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired
            from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor
            of the Humanities.
Jonathan D. Kramer
         Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?
         Modernism has been a celebration of the present. Why does it need a
            legacy (beyond its rejection of the past)? Why should that which
            was born (in Europe, at least) in the spirit of rebellion
            perpetuate itself as tomorrow's past? Modernism has been
            profoundly reflective of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
            cultural values. Is that not enough? It is not that modernism has
            forgotten the past an art that rebels against its past must
            understand its adversary but rather that it asks us not to
            forget the present. The revolt of modernism was made possible, if
            not inevitable, by the rediscovery of the past. In earlier, eras,
            when the past was less readily accessible, artists worked for their
            present with little thought about their heritage. Renaissance
            composers, for example, generally knew little of music even two
            generations old; much medieval music theory and composition were
            based on misconceptions of Greek models. Yet by the nineteenth
            century, works from the past were available and understood.
            Virtually all composers agreed with Johannes Brahms, who reputedly
            said of Ludwig van Beethoven, "You have no idea how the likes
            of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind
            us." Historical consciousness had entered the arts, and
            artists were both threatened by competition with the past and
            seduced by the powerful idea that their works might outlive them.
            The Romantic artist became a genius speaking to posterity. Gustav
            Mahler was not the only Romanticist to pin his hopes on the future:
            "My time will yet come." Small wonder that, once the
            future came to be, its artists rebelled against pronouncements from
            their past the time rightfully belonged to them and no longer
            to Mahler's generation. While many twentieth-century artists
            continued to create for their future, the most extreme modernists
            (in music, Erik Satie and Charles Ives and, a generation later,
            John Cage) rejected not only their past but also the quest for
            immortality. They have written of their day and for their day. The
            real legacy of modernism is that it has no legacy.
             
            Jonathan D. Kramer is professor of music theory and composition at
            the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati
            and also program annotator and new music advisor of the Cincinnati
            Symphony Orchestra. He is currently working on Time and the
            Meanings of Music (forthcoming). His previous contribution to
            , "New Temporalities in Music,"
            appeared in Spring 1981.
Sandra M. Gilbert
         Life's Empty Pack: Notes toward a Literary Daughteronomy
         A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may
            seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all
            her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the
            empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity
            most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this
            "legendary tale," whose status as a schoolroom classic
            makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the
            relationship between woman's fate and the structure of
            society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of
            daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father,
            an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are
            actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of
            society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with
            nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is
            converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then,
            this fictionalized "daughteronomy" becomes a female
            myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the
            vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence
            in the law of the Father.
            If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of
            daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a "legendary
            tale" about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact,
            it is through the image of the packman that the story, in
            Eliot's own words, "came across my other plans by a
            sudden inspiration" and, clearly, her vision of this
            burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who
            haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a
            name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot's depiction
            of Silas Marner's alienation begins to explain Ruby
            Redinger's sense that the author of this "fluid and
            metaphoric" story "is" both Eppie, the redemptive
            daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the
            outcast weaver's marginality, this novelist of the
            "hidden life" examines also her own female
            disinheritance and marginality.12
             
            11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger,
            George Eliot: The Emergent Self (New York, 1975), p. 436. As Susan
            Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the
            "packman" may be associated with the figure of Bob
            Jakin in The Mill on the Floss (which Eliot had just completed),
            the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a
            number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis'
            treatise on Christian renunciation (so that its subject
            metaphorically associates it with Silas Marner's pack full of
            emptiness).
            12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, "Finale,"
            Middlemarch, p. 896.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of
            California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton
            University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection
            of poems, Emily's Bread (1984), and, coedited with Susan
            Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition
            in English (1985). In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites:
            Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which
            "Life's Empty Pack" is drawn, and, with Susan
            Gubar, on No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the
            Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the
            Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
            Imagination (1979). "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as
            Metaphor in Modern Literature" appeared in the Winter 1980
            issue of .
Zhang Longxi
         The Tao and the Logos: Notes on Derrida's_Critique_of_Logocentrism
         In a wholesale destructive or deconstructive critique of Western
            philosophical tradition, it is precisely this ethnocentric-
            phonocentric view of language that Jacques Derrida has chosen for
            his target. In Derrida's critique, Hegel appears as one of
            the powerful enactors of that tradition yet peculiarly on the verge
            of turning away from it as "the last philosopher of the book
            and the first thinker of writing."13 As Derrida sees it,
            phonocentrism in its philosophical dimension is also
            "logocentrism: the metaphysics of phonetic writing" (p.
            3). Derrida makes it quite clear that such logocentrism is related
            to Western thinking and to Western thinking alone. Gayatri
            Chakravorty Spivak points this out in the translator's
            preface to Of Grammatology: "Almost by a reverse
            ethnocentrism, Derrida insists that logocentrism is a property of
            the West…. Although something of the Chinese prejudice of the West
            is discussed in Part I, the East is never seriously studied or
            deconstructed in the Derridean text" (p. lxxxii). As a matter
            of fact, not only is the East never seriously deconstructed but
            Derrida even sees in the nonphonetic Chinese writing "the
            testimony of a powerful movement of civilization developing outside
            of all logocentrism" (p. 90). When he looks within the
            Western tradition for a breakthrough, he finds it in nothing other
            than the poetics of Ezra Pound and his mentor, Ernest Fenollosa,
            who built a graphic poetics on what is certainly a peculiar reading
            of Chinese ideograms:
            This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa [sic] whose influence
            upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly
            graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the
            most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese
            ideogram exercised on Pound's writing may thus be given all
            its historical significance. [P. 92]
            Since Chinese is a living language with a system of nonphonetic
            script that functions very differently from that of any Western
            language, it naturally holds a fascination for those in the West
            who, weary of the Western tradition, try to find an alternative
            model on the other side of the world, in the Orient. This is how
            the so-called Chinese prejudice came into being at the end of the
            seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries, when some
            philosophers in the West, notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, saw
            "in the recently discovered Chinese script a model of the
            philosophical language thus removed from history" and
            believed that "what liberates Chinese script from the voice
            is also that which, arbitrarily and by the artifice of invention,
            wrenches it from history and gives it to philosophy" (p. 76).
            In other words, what Leibniz and others saw in the Chinese language
            was what they desired and projected there, "a sort of
            European hallucination," as Derrida rightly terms it.
            "And the hallucination translated less an ignorance than a
            misunderstanding. It was not disturbed by the knowledge of Chinese
            script, limited but real, which was then available" (p. 80).
             
            Zhang Longxi is on the faculty of the Department of English
            Language and Literature at Peking University. He is the author of A
            Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century Theories of Literature
            (forthcoming) and is currently studying comparative literature at
            Harvard University.
Jerome J. McGann
         Some Forms of Critical Discourse
         The project begins by drawing two basic distinctions. The first
            distinction is between forms of ideological discourse in general,
            which may not be critical in their orientation, and those forms of
            criticaldiscourse which are historically self-conscious in their
            method. The formal antitype of all critical discourse is, in this
            view, the discourse of interpretation. The second distinction
            separates forms of critical thought (for example, forms of logic)
            from forms of critical discourse. Unlike the latter, forms of
            thought do not require for their existence the operation of an
            explicit set of signs or system of objective articulation.
            One further introductory point is in order. I believe that the
            elementary forms of critical discourse should be divided into two
            large categories: the narrative forms, on the one hand, and the
            nonnarrative forms, on the other. Furthermore, I suggest that the
            nonnarrative forms which are my chief concern in this
            paper comprise four elementary types: the hypothetical (which
            corresponds to the form of thought we call inductive logic); the
            practical or injunctive (which corresponds to the form of thought
            we call deductive logic); the array; and the dialectic. I shall
            concentrate on the nonnarrative forms, and in particular on the
            array and the dialectic, for two reasons: first, one of these, the
            array, is not normally recognized as a form of critical discourse;
            and, second, both the array and the dialectic offer especially
            clear contrasts with narrative forms of discourse, both critical
            and noncritical.1
             
            1. Some brief comments on the other two nonnarrative forms may be
            useful. Perhaps the best examples of a practical or injunctive form
            are furnished in a book like Euclid's Elements, or any
            cookbook. The hypothetical form may be illustrated out of any
            number of classic works such as Sir Humphry Davy's "On
            Some New Phenomena of Chemical Changes Produced by
            Electricity" (Philosophic Transactions of the Royal Society
            of London,19 Nov. 1807) and Michael Faraday's
            "Electricity from Magnetism" (Philosophic Transactions
            of the Royal Society of London,24 Nov. 1831).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of
            Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. A new book,
            The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical
            Method and Theory (1985), continues the critical projects of his
            recent books The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983)
            and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His most recent
            contribution to  is "The Religious Poetry of
            Christina Rossetti" (September 1983).
Peter J. Rabinowitz
         The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction_as_Reading_Strategy
         Even among critics not particularly concerned with detective
            fiction, Dashiell Hammett's fourth novel, The Glass Key
            (1931), is famous for carrying the so-called objective method to
            almost obsessive lengths: we are never told what the characters are
            thinking, only what they do and look like. Anyone's decisions
            about anyone else's intentions (which, in this underworld of
            ward politics, often have life-and-death consequences) are
            interpretivedecisions, dependent on correct
            presuppositions on having the right interpretive key. The
            novel's title, in part, refers to this kind of key. Ned
            Beaumont, the protagonist, has to decide how to govern his
            relationship with Janet Henry; one of his major clues to her mind
            is a dream that she tells him, a dream that climaxes in an attempt
            to lock a door against an onslaught of snakes. Dream interpretation
            is difficult enough to begin with, and Janet Henry compounds that
            difficulty by telling the dream twice. In the first version, the
            attempt to lock the door succeeds; in the second, the key turns out
            to be made of glass and it shatters. Ned Beaumont, in deciding
            which dream to us as his key, chooses the second (as do most
            readers) but it is a choice based on an intuitive mix of
            experience and faith, knowledge and hunch.
            A reader often faces the same difficulties that Ned Beaumont does.
            Reading a book, too, requires us to make a choice about what key to
            use to unlock it, and that choice must often be based on an
            intuitive mix of experience and faith, knowledge and hunch. For
            example, as I shall show, the experience of reading certain
            texts not all, but a significant number of them is
            problematic because it depends in part on whether the reader has
            chosen, before picking them up, to approach them as popular or
            serious. My argument hinges on two prior claims. First, I contend
            that one way (but not the only way) of defining genres is to
            consider them as bundles of operations which readers perform in
            order to recover the meanings of texts rather than as sets of
            features found in the texts themselves. To put this crudely but
            more modishly, genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use
            to process texts. Second, I argue that popular literature and
            serious literature can be viewed as broad genre categories.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative
            literature at Hamilton College. He is currently working on a book
            about literary conventions and is also active as a music critic for
            such publications as Fanfare and Ovation. His previous
            contributions to  are "Truth in Fiction: A
            Reexamination of Audiences" (Autumn 1977) and "Who Was
            That Lady? Pluralism and Critical Method" (Spring 1979).
Stanley Fish
         Consequences
         Nothing I wrote in Is There a Text in This Class? has provoked more
            opposition or consternation than my (negative) claim that the
            argument of the book has no consequences for the practice of
            literary criticism.1 To many it seemed counterintuitive to maintain
            (as I did) that an argument in theory could leave untouched the
            practice it considers: After all, isn't the very point of
            theory to throw light on or reform or guide practice? In answer to
            this question, I want to say, first, that this claim is
            unsupportable. Here, I am in agreement with Steven Knapp and Walter
            Benn Michaels, who are almost alone in agreeing with me and who
            fault me not for making the "no consequences" argument
            but for occasionally falling away from it. Those dislike Is There a
            Text in This Class? tend to dislike "Against Theory"
            even more, and it is part of my purpose here to account for the
            hostility to both pieces. But since the issues at stake are
            fundamental, it is incumbent to begin at the beginning with a
            discussion of what theory is and is not.
             
            1. See my Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of
            Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), p. 370. For a
            response to the "no consequences" claim, see Mary
            Louise Pratt, "Interpretive Strategies/Strategic
            Interpretations: on Anglo-American Reader Response
            Criticism," Boundary 2 11 (Fall-Winter 1982-830): 222.
             
            Stanley Fish is the William Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and
            the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent
            contributions to  are "Profession Despise
            Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary Studies"
            (December 1983) and "Fear of Fish:"A Reply to Walter
            Davis" (June 1984). The present essay is the concluding
            chapter of Change (forthcoming, 1985).
Richard Rorty
         Philosophy without Principles
         My colleague E. D. Hirsch has skillfully developed the consequences
            for literary interpretation of a "realistic"
            epistemological position which he formulates as follows: "If
            we could not distinguish a content of consciousness from its
            contexts, we could not know any object at all in the world."
            Given that premise, it is easy for Hirsch to infer that
            "without the stable determinacy of meaning there can be no
            knowledge in interpretation."1 A lot of people disagree with
            Hirsch on the latter point, and they look to philosophy for replies
            to the premise from which it was inferred. But it is not clear
            where in philosophy they should look: To epistemology? Ethics?2
            Philosophy of language? What Jacques Derrida calls "a new
            logic, … a graphematics of iterability"?3 Where do we find
            first principles from which to deduce an anti-Hirsch argument?
            I want to argue that there is no clear or straight answer to this
            question and that there need be none. I shall begin by criticizing
            the strategy used against Hirsch and others by my fellow
            pragmatists Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. They think that
            one can start with philosophy of language and straighten things out
            by adopting a correct account of meaning. I share their desire to
            refute Hirsch, their admiration for Stanley Fish, and their view
            that "theory" when defined as "an attempt
            to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an
            account of interpretation in general" has got to go (p.
            723, and see p. 742). But they want to defend this position by
            exposing a mistake which they think common to all theory so
            defined: an error about the relation between meaning and intention.
            They assert that "what is intended and what is meant are
            identical" and that one will look for an "account of
            interpretation in general" only if one fails to recognize
            this identity (pp. 729, 723). Such failure leads to an attempt to
            connect meaning and intention (as in Hirsch) or to disconnect them
            (as in Paul de Man). But such attempts must fail, for they
            presuppose a break "between language and speech acts"
            which does not exist (p. 733).
             
            1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago, 1976),
            pp. 3, 1.
            2. See ibid., where Hirsch offers a "fundamental ethical
            maxim for interpretation" which, he says, "claims no
            privileged sanction from metaphysics or analysis" (p. 90).
            Here and elsewhere Hirsch suggests that it may be ethics rather
            than epistemology which provides the principles that govern
            interpretation. There remain other passages, however, in which he
            retains the view, conspicuous in his earlier writings, that an
            analysis of the idea of knowledge is the ultimate justification for
            his approach.
            3. Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc abc … , " Glyph 2
            (1977) : 219.
             
            Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of
            Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays:
            1972-1980),among other works, and is currently writing a book on
            Martin Heidegger. His previous contribution to ,
            "Deconstruction and Circumvention," appeared in the
            September 1984 issue.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         A Reply to Richard Rorty: What is Pragmatism?
         We are grateful to Stanley Fish for demonstrating what
            "Against Theory" had merely assumed, that the only kind
            of theory worth attacking is the kind which claims to be more than
            just another form of practice. Some readers have thought that our
            arguments were directed against all general reflection about
            literature or criticism. Others have thought that we were resisting
            the encroachment on literary study of themes derived from politics,
            or psychoanalysis, or philosophy. These are plausible misreading of
            our intention, since the term "theory" is indeed
            sometimes applied to any critical argument marked by historical or
            aesthetic generalization or by the reading of literature in terms
            of themes derived from other disciplines. But, as Fish shows,
            neither empirical generality nor thematic novelty is enough to make
            an argument theoretical in more than a trivial sense, that is, in a
            sense that marks it as importantly different in kind from other
            critical arguments. Theory in a nontrivial sense always consists in
            the attempt "to stand outside practice in order to govern
            practice from without," and this strong
            ("foundationalist") kind of theory is the kind whose
            coherence we deny (p. 742). It is also the kind of theory engaged
            in by the vast majority of those who consider themselves
            theorists including many who might prefer to think of
            themselves as practicing theory in some weaker sense.
            At the conclusion of "Philosophy without Principles,"
            Richard Rorty appears to join those who think we are attacking
            theory in its weaker senses as well as in the strong sense just
            described. He suggests that eliminating the writing and teaching of
            theory would deprive literary scholars of "an opportunity to
            discuss philosophy books as well as novels, poems, critical
            essays, and so forth with literature students" (Rorty,
            p. 464). If this were the only issue between Rorty's version
            of pragmatism and ours, our disagreement would come to an immediate
            end, since nothing could be further from the aims of "Against
            Theory" than rendering a judgment about what books should be
            discussed in literary classrooms. But our disagreement runs deeper
            than debates about the curriculum. It involves, first, a
            fundamental disagreement about language and, second, an equally
            fundamental disagreement about the nature and consequences of
            pragmatism.
             
            Steven Knapp is an assistant professor of English at the University
            of California, Berkeley; his book Personification and the Sublime:
            Milton to Coleridgeis forthcoming. Walter Benn Michaels,an
            associate professor of English at the University of California,
            Berkeley, is working on the relation between literary and economic
            forms of representation in nineteenth-century America. A previous
            contribution to , "Sister Carrie's
            Popular Economy," appeared in the Winter 1980 issue. The
            authors' joint contribution to ,
            "Against Theory," and "A Reply to Our
            Critics," appeared respectively in the Summer 1982 and June
            1983 issues.
James McMichael
         Real, Schlemiel
         At some moment in his life, James Joyce stopped writing Ulysses. If
            there had been at least one more thing he meant to fuss with or to
            fix, one more thing he meant to do to the book, he never did it.
            Ulysses was at that moment complete.
            The book reads to me as if it's "harking back in a
            retrospective sort of arrangement" from that very moment, as
            if Joyce anticipated coming to it all along.1 Because he knew it
            would be a moment in which the book he was writing would become the
            book he had written, that moment backed up into the writing itself,
            it dictated to him that the narrator's sentences must be in
            the past tense. For Joyce, each phrase of Ulysses was over and done
            with as soon as he found that he could let it stand as it was. I
            think it's for this reason that his characters' actions
            and words are narrated as if they too were in the past.
            "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead,
            bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
            A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him
            by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned
            …" (pp. 2-3). The writing which empowers Buck Mulligan to
            speak and act had at some moment stopped being a present participle
            for Joyce and begun to be a noun, a piece of writing, that now-
            realized thing which had been written. It's therefore in the
            past tense that the narrative proceeds.
            Not that along the way there isn't interior monologue that
            offers what a given character thinks, each thought sounding very
            much as if it's in the present. "Mr Bloom stood far
            back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve.
            I'm thirteen" (p. 110). The illusion is that right
            here, right now, autonomously, Bloom is thinking about how many
            mourners there are at Dignam's funeral and is trying to
            establish their number for himself. And yet while the sentence
            fragments "Twelve" and "I'm thirteen"
            interrupt the already completed past-tense narrative, the past-
            tense sentence which introduces the fragments implies an
            intelligence that has managed to narrate Bloom's thoughts
            before Bloom himself has thought them. To narrate that Bloom is
            "counting the bared heads" in advance of that counting
            is paradoxically to review what hasn't yet happened. It
            implies a knowledge that looks back on each present moment from a
            point outside of time. And it's from precisely this point
            that the narrating intelligence closes off Bloom's present-
            tense thoughts with past-tense news: "The coffin dived out of
            sight, eased down by the men straddled on the gravetrestles"
            (p. 110).
             
            James McMichael,professor of English at the University of
            California, Irvine, is completing a manuscript called Reading
            "Ulysses."His most recent book of poems is Four Good
            Things.
Jane Marcus
         Quentin's Bogey
         In a famous essay, later a chapter in the classic work of feminist
            criticism The Madwoman in the Attic, called "Milton's
            Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers," Sandra Gilbert
            argues that "Milton's bogey" is made deliberately
            ambiguous by Woolf and may refer to Milton himself, Adam, or Satan.
            She argues that "the allusion has had no significant
            development."3&shy;&shy;But, of course, the previous
            reference to "the large and imposing figure of a gentleman,
            which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration" makes it
            clear that Woolf's bogey is Milton's patriarchal god.
            That she later calls him a "human being" may be wicked
            and perverse, but is a brilliant undercutting of patriarchal
            divinity. The allusion is also developed in several ways throughout
            A Room of One's Own,and the reader who puts the pieces
            together has perhaps caught the "little fish" she
            promises her readers in the beginning. If Milton's bogey
            blocks the view of the open sky, her aunt's legacy
            "unveiled the sky" to her; money freed her to look at
            "reality" (Room, p. 39; and see p. 5). The second
            development of the figure is in the phantom form of
            "J H ." Jane Harrison's ghostly
            presence does not block the view of the open sky: "As if the
            scarf which the dusk had flung over the garden were torn asunder by
            star or sword the flash of some terrible reality
            leaping" (Room, p. 17). Harrison herself, and her great
            scholarly feminist work on preclassical Greece, is suggested here
            as having the opposite effect of Milton's bogey. She unveils
            reality and is held up as a model for women. The third development
            of the theme is the "loneliness and riot" of
            Woolf's vision of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of
            Newcastle the writer as madwoman, "plunging ever deeper
            into obscurity and folly": "Evidently the crazy Duchess
            became a bogey to frighten clever girls with" (Room, p. 65;
            emphasis mine). Virginia Woolf had been a clever girl, and she
            feared mental instability. The woman writer as madwoman certainly
            frightened her. She saw Margaret Cavendish's mind "as
            if some giant cucumber had spread itself all over the roses and
            carnations in the garden and choked them to death" (Room, p.
            65). There is a distinct relationship between Milton's
            patriarchal bogey and the giant cucumber. Patriarchy covers sky and
            earth with phallic images preventing women's vision and
            growth. The woman writer's power is inhibited by the
            forbidding Christian God who suggests that writing is a male
            prerogative; and if that doesn't inhibit her enough, a female
            bogey is invented to show her the woman writer's madness and
            folly.
             
            3. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic:
            The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
            (New Haven, Conn., 19790, p. 188; and see pp. 187-212.
             
            Jane Marcus is associate professor of English and director of
            women's studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has
            edited three collections of essays on Virginia Woolf, a collection
            of Rebecca West's socialist-feminist essays, and is presently
            finishing Liberty, Sorority, Misogyny: Virginia Woolf and the
            Languages of the Patriarchy.
Quentin Bell
         Reply to Jane Marcus
         It must be admitted that there are some of us who
            "teach" Virginia Woolf and yet seem unable to learn
            from her. The secret of Virginia's eminently readable prose
            style remains hidden from us. It is for this reason that I find it
            impossibly hard to read everything that Professor Marcus and some
            of her colleagues produce in such astounding abundance, and that,
            she may retort, is why she has found it impossible to read my
            biography of Virginia Woolf. In a sense, she does not need to; she
            can imagine it and, thus, credit me with the statement that I
            considered my aunt "a minor British novelist, ranked
            somewhere below E. M. Forster as a writer of fiction" (p.
            489). Seeing that I made it clear from the outset of that biography
            that I would not attempt to assess the work of Virginia Woolf,
            seeing that I have been blamed for this abstention (by Professor
            Marcus herself, if memory serves), and seeing that I have said
            absolutely nothing at any time that could possibly be construed in
            this sense, I think that we may well call this a master-stroke of
            the imagination.
            Also it is irrelevant. I accuse her of inaccuracy; she
            "replies" by asserting that I have bad taste. It seems
            a rather unconvincing form of defence. In fact, in her
            "reply," which must be about as long as the article by
            which it was engendered, Professor Marcus can find so little in the
            way of evidence or argument with which to support those contentions
            which I have criticized that the reader must wade through page
            after page of completely otiose matter before coming to anything
            which seems to bear on the matter at hand. At last Professor Marcus
            tells us that she has written "two long essays in which I did
            at length and in detail exactly what he does here"; here,
            then, we come to her answer (p. 493). The reader, who may be
            somewhat bewildered by so long a preface, may wish to be reminded
            what there is that needs to be answered. I maintain that Professor
            Marcus has neglected to notice that Margaret Llewelyn Davis was
            primarily Leonard Woolf's friend rather than
            Virginia's, that her relationship with Virginia was at times
            very uneasy, that Virginia was out of sympathy with politically
            minded women, and that Professor Marcus neglects to notice any of
            this because she fails to use the evidence of the diaries and the
            letters. When she does quote from a letter, she completely
            misunderstands it, just as she fails to understand Virginia's
            use of the term "the woman's republic" (see p.
            563).
             
            Quentin Bell is the author of, among other works,Ruskin (1963),
            Bloomsbury (1969), Virginia Woolf: A Biography(1972), and On Human
            Finery (1978). His previous contributions to 
            include "Art and the Elite" (Autumn 1974),
            "Bloomsbury and &lsquo;the Vulgar Passions'"
            (Winter 1979), and "A &lsquo;Radiant' Friendship"
            (June 1984).
Murray Krieger
         Optics and Aesthetic Perception: A Rebuttal
         I am troubled by the temper of E. H. Gombrich's response,
            "Representation and Misrepresentation" (Critical
            Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 195-201), to my "Ambiguities of
            Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective"
            (11 [December 1984]: 181-94) and by his preferring
            not to sense the profound admiration indeed, the
            homage intended by my essay, both for his contributions to
            recent theory and for their influence upon its recent developments.
            But I am more troubled by the confusions his remarks may cause in
            the interpretation of his own work as well as in the judgment of
            mine. There are important issues at stake, I feel, especially as
            regards the relation between scientific and aesthetic inquiry.
            The very irritated tone of his reaction helps make what I see as my
            major point: his work has contained a conflict between two
            Gombrichs one, the skeptical humanist and, the other, the
            positive scientist and with the passing years the second has
            increasingly sought to obliterate signs of the first, becoming
            increasingly impatient with any attempt to revive those signs or
            remind us of their existence. On the other side, since the line of
            literary criticism with which I associate myself has drawn strength
            from the first Gombrich, this development in his work and in his
            attitudes has caused some disappointment.
             
            Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University
            of California. He is the author of many works, including The Tragic
            Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition and
            its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical
            History and Theory,and Arts on the Level. His previous
            contributions to  are "Fiction, History, and
            Empirical Reality" (December 1974), "Poetic Presence
            and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of
            Metaphor" (Summer 1979), and "The Ambiguities of
            Representation and Illusion: An E. H. Gombrich Retrospective"
            (December 1984).
George Rochberg
         Kramer vs. Kramer
         Confusion abounds in Jonathan Kramer's attempt, in "Can
            Modernism Survive George Rochberg?" (
            [December 1984]: 341-54), to reply to the issues I raised in my
            essay "Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)" (Critical
            Inquiry [December 1984]: 317-40). Besides the endemic disarray of
            his thought process, he confutes and contradicts himself at every
            turn either out of his own mouth or out of the mouths of
            those he quotes to support his position. He is incapable of
            following his own line of argument either because he doesn't
            remember in one part of his paper what he's said in another
            or because he doesn't grasp the logical implications of his
            own statements sufficiently follow through. Thus he constantly cuts
            the ground out from under his own feet.
            Some specific illustrations are in order. First, let me deal with
            how he "thinks." To write prose we perforce must use
            words; and when we use words, it behooves us to know what they
            mean. All too often Kramer appears not to know what key words he
            uses domean but he marches blindly on through his own jungle
            of tangled thoughts. For instance, when he says, "A far
            better example of reductionism in musical scholarship than
            Schenker's multilayered theory is Rochberg's own
            article," he reveals a total lack of understanding his key
            word, "reductionism" (p. 345).
            "Reductionism" is the distilled or diminished content
            left after removing, stripping away, all alternative ways of
            understanding a situation or problem. That, of course, is what
            Schenker did in promulgating his theory of tonal practice, and it
            is clear Kramer understands that much. "Reductionism,"
            however, hardly describes the presentation of an overview of the
            impact of modernism on the life of the twentieth century (not only
            its art and culture but its intellectual, societal, and political
            aspects as well) which is what my article does.
             
            George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works
            and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The
            Aesthetics of Survival, a Composer's View of Twentieth-
            Century Music. He recently completed his fifth symphony, on
            commission from the Chicago Symphony. In 1983 he retired from the
            University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the
            Humanities. His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,"Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)," appeared
            in the December 1984 issue.
Stanley Cavell
         The Division of Talent
         My letter of invitation to this seminar expresses the thought that
            "it will be very useful to have someone from outside the
            field help us see ourselves." Given my interests in what you
            might call the fact of literary study, I was naturally attracted by
            the invitation to look at literary study as a discipline or
            profession but also suspicious of the invitation. I thought: Do
            professionals really want to be helped to see themselves by
            outsiders? This is an invitation to get a group of people sore at
            me, and it will only result in the group's having an occasion
            not to see itself, since any member of it can easily dismiss
            anything I say as uninformed. But the invitation goes on to give
            the title for this session as "The Nature and Function of
            Literary Study: As Others See Us." Reading that, I thought:
            That is different. That identifies me as an other to the
            "academic and professional concerns" of the
            field hence, not just outside but intimately outside, as if
            my position were an alternativeto yours. And how could I not be
            better informed about being other to you than you are?
            But of course I know that there is no single unified
            "you" to which I am other, that some of you, perhaps
            most, have other others than philosophy and see your practice not
            against philosophy but against history or criticism or literary
            theory. So I should perhaps say that I am not exactly single or
            unified myself, that I am also other to the Anglo-American
            profession of philosophy, to which at the same time I belong. A way
            of expressing my otherness to this profession of philosophy is
            simply to say that I take you as also among my others, that I
            recognize the study of literature to be an alternative to what I
            do a path I might have taken, might still irregularly be
            taking to occupy a relation to the way I think, that for most
            of the members of my profession would be occupied by a profession
            of logic or science. I will not try here to account theoretically
            for the intimate differences that may make philosophy and
            literature alternative studies, which means that I will not here
            systematically try taking the perspective of an other. But I will
            be bearing in mind its certain messages and rumors that have lately
            been coming my way from the field of literary studies. You have,
            for example, not kept it secret that you have been worrying, as a
            profession, and sometimes in the form of conducting arguments about
            the obligation to literary theory as part of literary study, nor
            secret that these arguments sometimes take on the color or texture
            of strong statements of, or against, something called
            deconstruction. I will try to say something about these poorly kept
            secrets.
             
            Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most
            recently, Themes Out of School. He has been chosen by the American
            Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to receive the 1985
            Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Criticism. His most recent
            contribution to , "Politics as Opposed to
            What?," appears in the September 1982 issue.
Joel Snyder
         Las Meninas and the Mirror of the Prince
         It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of
            critical literature about Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas fails
            to link knowledge to understanding fails to relate the
            encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to
            a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas
            is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature
            devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal
            subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of
            the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about
            clothing, and shoes (thought not one shoe appears in the painting),
            and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita (such
            cups were made of scented red clay imported from the East Indies
            and, after their contents had been imbibed, were eaten in the
            belief that the clay would bleach the skin to lighter and in
            a kingdom ruled by Hapsburgs a more regal tone).
            This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting's
            details is not altogether beside the point; some of this
            information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the
            painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts
            soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new
            details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting,
            might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las
            Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics
            called it "photographic" in its naturalism ("as
            [if seen] in a camera obscura" or "an anticipation of
            Daguerre's invention"), in the profusion of its detail,
            and in the alleged "snapshot" quality of its
            composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not
            to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly
            grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility.
            Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-
            century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the
            perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas
            nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle
            memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in
            terms of what is apparent in it.
             
            1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and
            His Times (London, 1889), p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted
            in ibid.
             
            Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and
            design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the
            Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on
            a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous
            contributions to  are "Photography, Vision,
            and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen (Autumn
            1975), "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980), and
            "Reflexions on Las Meninas:Paradox Lost," written with
            Ted Cohen (Winter 1980).
Daniel Cottom
         The Enchantment of Interpretation
         First, a joke that was circulating among academics a couple of
            years ago. In the version I heard, a Texan is walking across
            Harvard Yard. He stops a guy and asks him, in his nasal drawl,
            "Can you tell me where the library's at?" The guy
            looks him up and down, pauses, and says, "At Harvard we do
            not end our sentences with prepositions." The Texan
            apologizes, saying, "Excuse me. Can you tell me where the
            library's at, asshole?"
            This story may seem far removed from the subject of this essay,
            which is supposed to be a serious one. But what is the joke about,
            after all, if not the seriousness of language, its power, and the
            demystification of that power by our native brand of
            deconstructionist, the shrewd rube?
            […]
            If we find the joke funny, I imagine that the experience with which
            most of us identify is this: we want the gumption to reject an
            arrogant cultural authority. This experience may be especially
            appealing to students, but it also may appeal to intellectuals
            conscious of those problems of power and knowledge that have been
            so celebrated in recent years. In fact, if Friedrich Nietzsche was
            right in suggesting that grammar is a metaphysical discipline
            comparable to God, then the pleasure of this joke may lie in its
            humiliation of law, pure and simple. Sigmund Freud, among others,
            has suggested that figures of authority in jokes are only stand-ins
            of that general power of society over all individuals which is
            contested in the very form of the joke. Thus, following Freud, or,
            say, those who have made Mikhail Bakhtin's conception of
            carnival so popular a topic of academic discussion, we could see
            enjoyment of this joke as representing a momentary rebellion
            against every form of culture that, as the saying goes, it imposed
            upon us. From that perspective, even my use here of this joke is
            bound to seem ridiculous; indeed, academic psychologists who write
            on laughter and humor often preface their discussions with
            defensive remarks about people who find it funny to see
            intellectuals seriously and laboriously analyzing jokes.1
             
            1. See, e.g., Anthony J. Chapman and Hugh C. Foot, eds., It's
            a Funny Thing, Humour (Oxford, 1977), and Paul E. McGhee and
            Jeffrey H. Goldstein, eds., Handbook of Humor Research,2 vols. (New
            York, 1983).
             
            Daniel Cottom is associate professor of English at Wayne State
            University. He is the author of The Civilized Imagination(1985) and
            is currently working on a study of the politics of interpretation.
Betsy Erkkila
         Greta Garbo: Sailing Beyond the Frame
         Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name
            "Garbo" and officially registered the change from Greta
            Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4
            December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the
            nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo,
            "wood nymph," suggests the association with
            otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the
            Spanish meaning of the word, "animal grace sublimated,"
            combines the animal passion and spiritual grace that were part of
            her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo's life and work
            the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz
            Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king.
            The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo's initial
            act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film
            theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by
            treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes
            his own signature.
            What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it
            has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks
            the evidence. In her article "Gish and Garbo: The Executive
            War on the Stars," Louise Brooks suggests that the popular
            image of Garbo the "dumb Swede" transformed by
            Stiller's art was perpetuated by Hollywood executives
            eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited
            in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent (1926).
            "The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director,
            watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the
            stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul
            upon the screen." Although recent accounts of Garbo's
            life and work have advanced beyond the "dumb Swede"
            publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar,
            almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative
            power. "Her contribution," states Kenneth Tynan,
            "is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which
            normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced
            by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he
            needs" ("G," p. 347). Comparing Garbo to a
            "watermark in a blank sheet of paper," David Thomson
            says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: "She
            must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many
            others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because
            the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it
            out." In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active
            shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the
            impress of male voyeuristic fantasy.
             
            Betsy Erkkila,assistant professor of English at the University of
            Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and
            Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is
            currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet,and a
            collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing.
Steven Mailloux
         Rhetorical Hermeneutics
         The Space Act of 1958 begins, "The Congress hereby declares
            that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space
            should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all
            mankind." In March 1982, a Defense Department official
            commented on the statute: "We interpret the right to use
            space for peaceful purposes to include military uses of space to
            promote peace in the world."1 The absurdity of this willful
            misinterpretation amazed me on first reading, and months later it
            readily came to mind when I was looking for an effective way to
            illustrate the politics of interpretation. With just the right
            touch of moral indignation, I offered my literary criticism class
            this example of militaristic ideology blatantly misreading an
            antimilitaristic text.
            "But … the Defense Department is right!" objected the
            first student to speak. Somewhat amused, I spent the next ten
            minutes trying, with decreasing amusement, to show this student
            that the Reagan administration's reading was clearly,
            obviously, painfully wrong. I pointed to the text. I cited the
            traditional interpretation. I noted the class consensus, which
            supported me. All to no avail. It was at this point that I felt
            that "theoretical urge": the overwhelming desire for a
            hermeneutic account to which I could appeal to prove my student
            wrong. What I wanted was a general theory of interpretation that
            could supply rules outlawing my student's misreading.
            This little hermeneutic fable introduces the three topics of my
            essay. One topic is the theoretical moment that concludes the
            narrative; another is the simple plot, a brief rhetorical exchange;
            and finally there's the institutional setting(a university
            classroom) in which the exchange takes place. These three topics
            preoccupy the sections that follow. Section 1 analyzes the problems
            resulting from the theoretical urge, the impasse of contemporary
            critical theory. Section 2 proposes my solution to this impasse, a
            solution I call rhetorical hermeneutics, which leads in section 3
            to a rhetorical version of institutional history.
             
            1. "National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958," United
            States Statutes at Large (Washington, D.C., 1959), vol. 72, pt. 1,
            sec. 102(a), p. 426; Robert Cooper, director of the Defense
            Advanced Research Projects Agency, quoted in Frank Greve,
            "Pentagon Research Retains Vision of &lsquo;Winning' N-
            war," Miami Herald, 27 Mar. 1983, sec. D, p. 4.
             
            Steven Mailloux,associate professor of English at the University of
            Miami, is the author of Interpretive Conventions: the Reader in the
            Study of American Fiction. He is currently at work on a book
            tentatively entitled Rhetorical Power: Politics in American
            Literature, Criticism, and Theory. His previous contributions to
             are "Stanley Fish's
            &lsquo;Interpreting the Variorum': Advance or Retreat?"
            (Autumn 1976) and "Truth or Consequences: On Being Against
            Theory" (June 1983).
Nelson Goodman
         How Buildings Mean
         Arthur Schopenhauer ranked the several arts in a hierarchy, with
            literary and dramatic arts at the top, music soaring in a separate
            even higher heaven, and architecture sinking to the ground under
            the weight of beams and bricks and mortar.1 The governing principle
            seems to be some measure of spirituality, with architecture ranking
            lowest by vice of being grossly material.
            Nowadays such rankings are taken less seriously. Traditional
            ideologies and mythologies of the arts are undergoing
            deconstruction and disvaluation, making way for a neutral
            comparative study that can reveal a good deal not only about
            relations among the several arts2 but also about the kinships and
            contrasts between the arts, the sciences, and other ways that
            symbols of various kinds participate in the advancement of the
            understanding.
            In comparing architecture with the other arts, what may first
            strike us, despite Schopenhauer, is a close affinity with music:
            architectural and musical works, unlike paintings or plays or
            novels, are seldom descriptive or representational. With some
            interesting exceptions, architectural works do not
            denote that is, do not describe, recount, depict, or portray.
            They mean, if at all, in other ways.
            On the other hand, and architectural work contrasts with other
            works of art in scale. A building or park or city3 is not only
            bigger spatially and temporally than a musical performance or
            painting it is bigger even than we are. We cannot take it all
            in from a single point of view; we must move around and within it
            to grasp the whole. Moreover, the architectural work is normally
            fixed in place. Unlike a painting that may be reframed and rehung
            or a concerto that may be heard in different halls, the
            architectural work is firmly set in physical and cultural
            environment that alters slowly.
             
            1. See Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983),
            pp. 176-78.
             
            Nelson Goodman,emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard
            University, is the author of, among other works, The Structure of
            Appearance, Languages of Art, Ways of Worldmaking,andOf Mind and
            Other Matters. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Status of Style" (June 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story,
            Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), "The Telling and
            the Told" (Summer 1981), and "Routes of Reference)
            Autumn 1981).
Ken Hirschkop
         A Response to the Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin
         's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin [Critical
            Inquiry10 (December 1983): 225-319] is the latest contribution to
            the spectacular effort of interpretation and assimilation that is
            being applied to the work of this recently recovered critic. In
            such a situation, analysis proceeds with one eye on the work in
            question and the other on current debates in the field; in the case
            of Bakhtin, interpretation is at the same time an attempt to come
            to grips with challenges posed by recent literary theory to certain
            axiomatic critical assumptions about intentionality, textuality,
            and the human subject. But the matter is also complicated by the
            fact that we are dealing here with a critic who was active in the
            USSR. This brings into play additional ideological pressures,
            generated by the cold war, which bear on the scholarly assimilation
            of his work.
            The debate on Bakhtin is made yet more difficult by the nature of
            his writing: immensely varied stylistically and topically but
            also and more importantly, I believe writing which
            strives for solutions it cannot quite articulate. It moves between
            alternative and contradictory formulations in a single essay and
            thus produces a set of concepts whose explanatory importance is
            matched by an unnerving tendency to slide from one formulation to
            the next with disturbing ease. Such ambiguities are not the sign of
            an open and skeptical mind, but neither are they mere
            inconsistencies which can be safely ignored. These internal
            contradictions dictate that argument over concepts like
            "dialogism" and "heteroglossia" cannot be
            settled by a definitive decision as to what they
            &lsquo;really' mean; instead, we must discuss how to manage
            these complexities and contradictions, and to what ends. Certain
            definite strategies of management are emerging, and the articles
            presented in the forum, while by no means reducible to a single
            position, share key lines of interpretive strategy that I think
            ought to be brought out into the open and contested. With the
            notable exception of Susan Stewart's article ["Shouts
            on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics," pp. 265-
            81], the contributions share an ideological drift, the ultimate
            effect of which is to evade the most radical aspects of
            Bakhtin's work in favor of an interpretation that renders him
            useful in the argument against the recent advances of post-
            structuralism and recent literary theory in general.
             
            Ken Hirschkop is a postgraduate student at Saint Antony's
            College, Oxford University, working on a book about Mikhail
            Bakhtin.
Gary Saul Morson
         Dialogue, Monologue, and the Social: A Reply to_Ken_Hirschkop
         One particularly interesting aspect of Hirschkop's essay is
            the repertoire of "double-voiced words" (to use
            Bakhtin's terms for certain rhetorical strategies) it
            displays. I will enumerate just three of them:
            1. The Misaddressed Word.Apparently, Hirschkop has been arguing
            these points with someone else, whose voice has drowned out what
            was actually said by myself and the other contributors to the Forum
            on Bakhtin. In a number of cases, Hirschkop objects that we failed
            to say things that were, in fact, explicitly stated and attributes
            to us a different, phantom position, which he then cites as
            evidence of "liberal," individualistic, and "cold
            war" biases (p. 676; and see p. 673). Likewise, I ostensibly
            "implied" a number of things, thought Hirschkop offers
            no direct quotations as evidence (p. 677).
            2. The Word That Lies in Ambush(a special version of what Bakhtin
            called "the word with a loophole"). In a way that has
            become increasingly common in theoretical essays, Hirschkop
            contents himself with stating only what is not the case and
            neglects telling us his conception of the alternative, correct
            position. For example, Hirschkop says: "Such ambiguities [in
            Bakhtin] are not the sign of an open and skeptical mind, but
            neither are they mere inconsistencies which can be safely
            ignored" (p. 672). In consequence, respondents who presume to
            guess at his position, whether they guess rightly or wrongly, are
            subject to an accusation of total or partial misrepresentation of
            his position or, perhaps worse, of drawing typically liberal
            inferences.
            3. The Preemptive Word(another version of "the word with a
            loophole"). Using a strategy familiar to most polemicists,
            Hirschkop attempts to discredit his adversaries by anticipating
            their objections within his own argument. Unfortunately, he
            projects responses that no one has made as if those
            responses were inevitable and seeks to dismiss them simply by
            naming them rather than answering them. Thus, he accuses my fellow
            contributors and me of a "kind of relativism, whose
            ideological affinities with the commonplaces of Western cold war
            discourse (the contrast of a liberal openness with a Left
            &lsquo;dogmatism') cannot be missed" and which
            "crops up again and again when Bakhtin is interpreted"
            (p. 676). The phrase in parentheses and the word in quotation marks
            are an example of preemptive discourse.
             
            Gary Saul Morson is the author of The Boundaries of Genre:
            Dostoevsky's "Diary of a Writer" and the
            Traditions of Literary Utopia (1981) and the editor of Literature
            and History: Theoretical Problems and Russian Case Studies
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a book on Tolstoy, one
            chapter of which ("Tolstoy's Absolute Language")
            appeared in the Summer 1981 issue of . He was the
            guest editor of 's Forum on Mikhail Bakhtin,
            for which he wrote the introduction, "Who Speaks for
            Bakhtin?" (December 1983).
Richard M. Berrong
         Finding Antifeminism in Rabelais; or, A Response to_Wayne_Booth's
            Call for an Ethical Criticism
         In his article "Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the
            Challenge of Feminist Criticism" (9
            [September 1982]: 45-76), Wayne Booth develops an argument for
            "ethical" literary criticism, criticism that is
            concerned with the ideologies inherent in works of literature and
            the effects these ideologies may have on the reader. Or, as he
            phrases it himself: "What we are talking about [is] human
            ideals, how they are created in art and thus implanted in readers
            and left uncriticized" (p. 65). Booth's starting point,
            his "inspiration" for this argument, is Mikhail
            Bakhtin's notion of "dialogism" and, in
            particular, Bakhtin's use of this notion in his
            interpretation of François Rabelais' Gargantuaand Pantagruel
            narratives.1 For those not familiar with Booth's essay (and/
            or Bakhtin's interpretation), I will briefly summarize his
            argument in support of ethical criticism.
            Booth begins with much praise for Bakhtin (and Rabelais, as Bakhtin
            saw him) because Bakhtin seems (to Booth) to have discovered in
            Rabelais a linguistic technic that frees the reader from the
            ideologies inherent in language (much less in works of literature
            constructed with language). As Booth paraphrases Bakhtin, any
            writer who employs the languages of different ideologies within one
            text (hence making the text "dialogic") freed the
            reader from the "prison-house of language" to the
            extent that he allows the reader to view each ideology from the
            outside, from these other languages, so that this reader can judge
            each ideology in terms other than those which the ideology builds
            into its own language.
             
            1. See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene
            Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).
             
            Richard M. Berrong is visiting assistant professor of French at the
            University of Nebraska. He is the author of Every Man for Himself:
            Social Order and Its Dissolution in Rabelais(forthcoming, 1985) and
            Rabelair and Bakhtin Revisited: The Presence and Exclusion of
            Popular Culture in "Gargantua and Pantagruel"
            (forthcoming, 1986).
Wayne C. Booth
         Reply to Richard Berrong
         At first I thought Richard Berrong's claim was only that I
            had misread Rabelais. My main point was not about Rabelais but
            about how, in general, we might deal with sexist classics. But it
            remains true that if Berrong has caught me misreading and
            then condemning "bits" torn from their context, I
            have violated my own professed standards. He and I both see
            Rabelais as a very great author, and we both hope to avoid the
            pointlessness of judging works, great or small, for faults that
            they do not exhibit. But I am not certain whether we agree that
            when, after careful reading, we find that a beloved author is in
            some way insensitive or unjust, we will want somehow to include
            that judgment in what we say about the author's genius. When
            I consider his conclusion closely, I begin to suspect that we are
            engaged in a dispute not about Rabelais but about whether we are
            free to appraise a literary work in terms other than "its
            own."
            I shall not attempt a detailed answer to the claim that I have
            misread Rabelais. Even if I chanced to persuade Berrong an
            unlikely outcome now, since my long article failed to win
            him we can be sure that many other modern readers would rise
            up to call Rabelais inoffensive. Disputes about his treatment of
            women have continued for more than four centuries, and they are not
            likely ever to be finally settled. So I shall just touch on four of
            our contrasting readings and then turn to the more important matter
            of how we view ethical criticism.
             
            Wayne Booth's most recent book is Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism. A version of his critique of
            Rabelais will appear this year in The Company We Keep: Ethical
            Criticism and the Ethics of Reading.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Editor's Introduction: Writing "Race" and the Difference It_Makes
         What importance does "race" have as a meaningful
            category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical
            theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the
            history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial
            response would probably be "nothing" or, at the very
            least, "nothing explicitly." Indeed, until the past
            decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics
            would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in
            the history of criticism, race has not been brought to bear upon
            the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot,
            after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition
            have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that
            somehow speak to, or respond to, "the human condition"
            and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision.
            And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute
            and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions,
            certain canonical works (the argument runs) do seem to transcend
            value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human
            condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other
            (be that odd metaphorical negation of the European defined as
            African, Arabic, Chinese, Latin American, Yiddish, or female
            authors) in the proper study of "literature,"
            "Western literature," or "comparative
            literature" has, until recently, remained an unasked
            question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the
            canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In
            much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this
            century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet
            implicit presence.
            This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century,
            "national spirit" and "historical period"
            had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature
            and function of literature which argued that the principal value in
            a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these
            categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu's
            De l'esprit des lois considered a culture's formal
            social institution as the repository of its "guiding
            spirit," while Giambattista Vico's principi di una
            scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of
            historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather
            deftly to bring "both national spirit and historical
            period" to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W.
            Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made
            the implicit explicit by postulating "race, moment, and
            milieu" as positivistic criteria through which any work could
            be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine's
            History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which
            subsequent nineteenth-century notions of "national
            literatures" would be constructed.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative
            literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has
            edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The
            Signifying Monkey.
Anthony Appiah
         The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion_of_Race
         Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether
            there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific
            consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however,
            we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most
            people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance
            of "racial" difference is quite remote, I think, from
            what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will
            agree that human genetic variability between the populations of
            Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those
            populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the
            measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists
            want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can
            say that "the proportion of genic variation attributable to
            racial differences is … 9   11%."1 If they want to make
            it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both
            Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one
            site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3
            percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human
            population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent. (I will
            discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in
            section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant
            characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the
            same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible
            morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we
            are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial
            categories black, white, yellow there are few genetic
            characteristics to be found in the population of England that are
            not found in similar proportions in Zaire or in China; and few too
            (though more) which are found in Zaire but not in similar
            proportions in China or in England. All this, I repeat, is part of
            the consensus (see, "GR," pp. 1-59). A more familiar
            part of the consensus is that the differences between peoples in
            language, moral affections, aesthetic attitudes, or political
            ideology those differences which most deeply affect us in our
            dealings with each other are not biologically determined to
            any significant degree.
            […]
            In this essay, I want to discuss the way in which W. E. B. Du
            Bois who called his life story the "autobiography of a
            race concept" came gradually, though never completely,
            to assimilate the unbiological nature of races. I have made these
            few prefatory remarks partly because it is my experience that the
            biological evidence about race is not sufficiently known and
            appreciated but also because they are important in discussing Du
            Bois. Throughout his life, Du Bois was concerned not just with the
            meaning of race but with the truth about it. We are more inclined
            at present, however, not to express our understanding of the
            intellectual development of people and cultures as a movement
            toward the truth; I shall sketch some of the reasons for this at
            the end of the essay. I will begin, therefore, by saying what I
            think the rough truth is about race, because, against the stream, I
            am disposed to argue that this struggle toward the truth is exactly
            what we find in the life of Du Bois, who can claim, in my view, to
            have thought longer, more engagedly, and more publicly about race
            than any other social theorist of our century.
             
            1. Masatoshi Nei and Arun K. Roychoudhury, "Genetic
            Relationship and Evolution of Human Races," Evolutionary
            Biology 14 (1983): 11; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated "GR," will be included in the text.
             
            Anthony Appiah is associate professor of philosophy, African
            studies, and Afro-American studies at Yale. He is the author of
            Assertion and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics
            (forthcoming). In addition, he is at work on African Reflections:
            Essays in the Philosophy of Culture.
             
Edward W. Said
         An Ideology of Difference
         The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 seems to have broken, for
            the first time, the immunity from sustained criticism previously
            enjoyed by Israel and its American supporters. For a variety of
            reasons, Israel's status in European and American public life
            and discourse has always been special, just as the position of Jews
            in the West has always been special, sometimes for its tragedy and
            horrendous suffering, at other times for its uniquely impressive
            intellectual and aesthetic triumphs. On behalf of Israel, anomalous
            norms, exceptional arguments, eccentric claims were (and still are)
            made, all of them forcibly conveying the notion that Israel does
            not entirely belong to the world of normal politics. Nevertheless,
            Israel and with it, Zionism had gained this unusual
            status politically, not miraculously: it merged with a variety of
            currents in the West whose power and attractiveness for supporters
            of Israel effaced anything as concrete as, for example, an Israeli
            policy of rigid separation between Jew and non-Jew, or a military
            rule over hundreds of thousands of Arabs that was as repressive as
            any tyranny in Latin America or Eastern Europe. There are any
            number of credible accounts of this, from daily fare in the Israeli
            press to studies by Amnesty International, to reports by various
            U.N. bodies, Western journalists, church groups, and, not least,
            dissenting supporters of Israel. In other words, even though Israel
            was a Jewish state established by force on territory already
            inhabited by a native population largely of Muslim Arabs, in a part
            of the world overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, it appeared to most of
            Israel's supporters in the West (from which Zionism
            increasingly drew its greatest help) that the Palestinian Arabs who
            paid a large part of the price for Israel's establishment
            were neither relevant nor necessarily even real. What changed in
            1982 was that the distance between Arab and Jew was for the first
            time perceived more or less universally as not so great and,
            indeed, that any consideration of Israel, and any perception of
            Israel at all, would have to include some consideration of the
            Palestinian Arabs, their travail, their claims, their humanity.
            Changes of this sort seem to occur dramatically, although it is
            more accurate to comprehend them as complex, cumulative, often
            contradictory processes occurring over a long period of time. Above
            all else, however, no such process can be viewed neutrally, since
            for better or for worse there are many interests at work in it and,
            therefore, many interests also at work whenever it is interpreted
            or reported. Moreover, while it is worthwhile and even possible to
            reduce and curtail the gross pressure of those interests for the
            purpose of analysis or reflection, it is useless to deny that any
            such analysis is inevitably grounded in, or inevitably affiliated
            to, a particular historical moment and a specific political
            situation.
             
            Edward Said,Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
            Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, The
            Question of Palestine (1979), The World, the Text, and the Critic
            (1983), and After the Last Sky(forthcoming). He will give the 1985
            T. S. Eliot Lectures, on Culture and Imperialism,at the University
            of Kent later this year. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and
            Community" (September 1982) and "On Professionalism:
            Response to Stanley Fish" (December 1983).
Abdul R. JanMohamed
         The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of_Racial
            Difference in Colonialist Literature
         Despite all its merits, the vast majority of critical attention
            devoted to colonialist literature restricts itself by severely
            bracketing the political context of culture and history. This
            typical facet of humanistic closure requires the critic
            systematically to avoid an analysis of the domination,
            manipulation, exploitation, and disfranchisement that are
            inevitably involved in the construction of any cultural artifact or
            relationship. I can best illustrate such closures in the field of
            colonialist discourse with two brief examples. In her book The
            Colonial Encounter, which contrasts the colonial representations of
            three European and three non-European writers, M. M. Mahood skirts
            the political issue quite explicitly by arguing that she chose
            those authors precisely because they are "innocent of
            emotional exploitation of the colonial scene" and are
            "distanced" from the politics of domination.`1
            We find a more interesting example of this closure in Homi
            Bhabha's criticism. While otherwise provocative and
            illuminating, his work rests on two assumptions the unity of
            the "colonial subject" and the
            "ambivalence" of colonial discourse that are
            inadequately problematized and, I feel, finally unwarranted and
            unacceptable. In rejecting Edward Said's "suggestion
            that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the
            colonizer," Bhabha asserts, without providing any
            explanation, the unity of the "colonial subject (both
            colonizer and colonized)."2 I do not wish to rule out, a
            priori, the possibility that at some rarefied theoretical level the
            varied material and discursive antagonisms between conquerors and
            natives can be reduced to the workings of a single
            "subject"; but such a unity, let alone its value, must
            be demonstrated, not assumed. Though he cites Frantz Fanon, Bhabha
            completely ignored Fanon's definition of the conqueror/native
            relation as a "Manichean" struggle a definition
            that is not a fanciful metaphoric caricature but an accurate
            representation of a profound conflict.3
             
            1. M. M. Mahood, The Colonial Encounter: A Reading of Six Novels
            (Totowa, N.J., 1977), pp. 170, 171; and see p. 3. As many other
            studies demonstrate, the emotional innocence and the distance of
            the six writers whom Mahood has chosen Joseph Conrad, E. M.
            Forster, Graham Greene, Chinua Achebe, R. K. Narayan, and V. S.
            Naipaul are, at best, highly debatable.
            2. Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question The Stereotype
            and Colonial Discourse," Screen 24 (Nov.-Dec. 1983): 25, 19.
            3. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance
            Farrington (New York, 1968), p. 41.
             
            Abdul R. JanMohamed,assistant professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Manichean
            Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa. He is a
            founding member and associate editor of Cultural Critique and is
            currently working on a study of Richard Wright.
Bernard Lewis
         The Crows of the Arabs
         Aghribat al-Arab,"crows or ravens of the Arabs," was
            the name given to a group of early Arabic poets who were of African
            or partly African parentage. Of very early origin, the term was
            commonly used by classical Arabic writers on poetics and literary
            history. Its use is well attested in the ninth century and was
            probably current in the eighth century, if not earlier. The term
            was used with some variation. Originally, it apparently designated
            a small group of poets in pre-Islamic Arabia whose fathers were
            free and sometimes noble Arabs and whose mothers were African,
            probably Ethiopian, slaves. As the sons of slave women, they were,
            by Arab customary law, themselves slaves unless and until their
            fathers chose to recognize and liberate them. As the sons of
            African women, their complexions were darker than was normal among
            the Arabs of the peninsula.
            Both themes servitude and blackness occur in some of
            the verses ascribed to these poets and, in a sense, define their
            identity as a group. Professor &lsquo;Abduh Badawī of Khartoum
            begins his book on the black Arab poets the first serious and
            extensive study devoted to the topic with this definition:
            This name [the crows of the Arabs] was applied to those [Arabic]
            poets to whom blackness was transmitted by their slave mothers, and
            whom at the same time was transmitted by their slave mothers, and
            whom at the same time their Arab fathers did not recognize, or
            recognized only under constraint from them.1&shy;
             
            Bernard Lewis is Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern
            Studies at Princeton University and has been a long-term Member of
            the Institute for Advanced Study. His most recent books are The
            Muslim Discovery of Europeand the Jews of Islam.
Israel Burshatin
         The Moor in the Text: Metaphor, Emblem, and_Silence
         The image of the Moor in Spanish literature reveals a paradox at
            the heart of Christian and Castilian hegemony in the period between
            the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of the
            Moriscos by Philip III in 1609.&shy;&shy; Depictions fall between
            two extremes. On the "vilifying" side, Moors are
            hateful dogs, miserly, treacherous, lazy andoverreaching. On the
            "idealizing" side, the men are noble, loyal, heroic,
            courtly they even mirror the virtues that Christian knights
            aspire to while the women are endowed with singular beauty
            and discretion.
            Anti-Muslim diatribes are fairly common and predictable: they are
            flat and repetitive in their assertion of Old Christian superiority
            over every aspect of the lives of Muslims or crypto-Muslims. Any
            sign of cultural otherness is ridiculed; the conquering caste,
            insecure about its own lofty (and, more often than not, chimerical)
            standards of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"),
            laughs away whatever trace of old Hispano-Arab splendor might
            remain in the Morisco. Or, conversely, the uneasy master recasts
            wretched Moriscos as ominous brethren of the Ottoman Turk.
            The truly vexed problem, however, consists in determining the
            meaning of idealized Moors in historiography, ballads, drama, and
            the novel. Roughly speaking, modern criticism divides into two
            camps in attempting to explain this curious phenomenon of literary
            infatuation with a cultural and religious minority subjected to
            growing popular hostility, Inquisitional hounding, and economic
            exploitation. I will call one camp "aestheticist" and
            the other "social."
             
            Israel Burshatin,assistant professor of Spanish at Haverford
            College, is currently preparing a critical edition of Pedro del
            Corral's Crónica sarracina.
Mary Louise Pratt
         Scratches on the Face of the Country; or,_What_Mr._barrow_Saw_in
            the Land of the Bushmen
         If the discourse of manners and customs aspires to a stable fixing
            of subjects and systems of differences, however, its project is not
            and never can be complete. This is true if only for the seemingly
            trivial reason that manners-and-customs descriptions seldom occur
            on their own as discrete texts. They usually appear embedded in or
            appended to a superordinate genre, whether a narrative, as in
            travel books and much ethnography, or an assemblage, as in
            anthologies and magazines.6 In the case of travel writing, which is
            the main focus of this essay, manners-and-customs description is
            always in play with other sorts of representation that also bespeak
            difference and position subjects in their own ways. Sometimes these
            other positioning complement the ideological project of normalizing
            description, and sometime they do not.
            In what follows, I propose to examine this interplay of discourses
            in some nineteenth-century travel writing chiefly about Africa.
            While Barrow's work is not prominent on anybody's
            mental bookshelves these days, readers will recognize such names as
            David Livingstone, John Speke, James Grant, Richard Burton, Mungo
            Park, or Paul Du Chaillu. During the co-called opening up of
            central and southern Africa to European capitalism in the first
            half of the nineteenth century, such explorer-writers were the
            principal producers of Africa for European
            imaginations producers, that is, of ideology in connection
            with the European expansionist project there. What I hope to
            underscore in these writings is not their tendency towards single,
            fixed subject positions or single, fixed systems of difference.
            Rather, I wish to emphasize the multiplicity of ways of codifying
            the Other, the variety of (seemingly) fixed positions and the
            variety of (seemingly) given sets of differences that they posit.
            European penetration and appropriation is semanticized in numerous
            ways that can be quite distinct, even mutually contradictory. In
            the course of examining discursive polyphony in these travel
            writings, I hope to stress the need to consider ideology not only
            in terms of reductive simplification but also in terms of the
            proliferation of meanings.
             
            6. Ethnographies would seem to be a counterexample to this claim,
            but in fact one can fairly easily show that ethnographic writing is
            inextricably tied to personal narrative. Indeed this tie is a
            symptom of a serious contradiction between ethnographic methods and
            ethnographic discourse. See my "Fieldwork in Common
            Places," in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
            Ethnography,ed. James Clifford and George Marcus (forthcoming,
            1986).
             
            Mary Louise Pratt is an associate professor in the Department of
            Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at
            Stanford University. She is author of Toward a Speech-Act Theory of
            Literary Discourse and is a member of the editorial boards of
            Poetics, Signs Tabloid, and Cultural Anthropology.
Homi K. Bhabha
         Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and_Authority
            under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817
         How can the question of authority, the power and presence of the
            English, be posed in the interstices of a double inscription? I
            have no wish to replace an idealist myth the metaphoric
            English book with a historicist one the colonialist
            project of English civility. Such a reductive reading would deny
            what is obvious, that the representation of colonial authority
            depends less on a universal symbol of English identity than on its
            productivity as a sign of difference. Yet in my use of
            "English"  there is a "transparency"  of
            reference that registers a certain obvious presence: the Bible
            translated into Hindi, propagated by Dutch or native catechists, is
            still the English book; a Polish émigré, deeply influenced by
            Gustave Flaubert, writing about Africa, produces an English
            classic. What is there about such a process of visibility and
            recognition that never fails to be an authoritative acknowledgement
            without ceasing to be a "spacing between desire and
            fulfillment, between perpetuation and its recollection … [a] medium
            [which] has nothing to do with a center" (D,p. 212)?
            This question demands a departure from Derrida's objectives
            in "The Double Session"; a turning away from the
            vicissitudes of interpretation in the mimetic act of reading to the
            question of the effects of power, the inscription of strategies of
            individuation and domination in those "dividing
            practices" which construct the colonial space a
            departure from Derrida which is also a return to those moments in
            his essay when he acknowledges the problematic of
            "presence" as a certain quality of discursive
            transparency which he describes as "the production of mere
            reality-effects" or "the effect of content" or as
            the problematic relation between the "medium of writing and
            the determination of each textual unit." In the rich ruses
            and rebukes with which he shows up the "false appearance of
            the present," Derrida fails to decipher the specific and
            determinate system of address (not referent) that is signified by
            the "effect of content" (see D, pp. 173-85). It is
            precisely such a strategy of address the immediate presenceof
            the English that engages the questions of authority that I
            want to raise. When the ocular metaphors of presence refer to the
            process by which content is fixed as an "effect of the
            present," we encounter not plenitude but the structured gaze
            of power whose objective is authority, whose "subjects"
            are historical.
             
            Homi K. Bhabhais lecturer in English literature and literary theory
            at the University of Sussex. He is working at present on Power and
            Spectacle: Colonial Discourse and the English Novel and is
            commissioning and editing a collection of essays entitled Nation
            and Narration: Post-structuralism and the Culture of National
            Identity. He is also writing the introduction to the new English
            edition of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks.
Patrick Brantlinger
         Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth_of_the_Dark
            Continent
         Paradoxically, abolitionism contained the seeds of empire. If we
            accept the general outline of Eric Williams' thesis in
            Capitalism and Slavery that abolition was not purely altruistic but
            was as economically conditioned as Britain's later empire
            building in Africa, the contradiction between the ideologies of
            antislavery and imperialism seems more apparent than real. Although
            the idealism that motivated the great abolitionists such as William
            Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson is unquestionable, Williams argues
            that Britain could afford to legislate against the slave trade only
            after that trade had helped to provide the surplus capital
            necessary for industrial "take-off." Britain had lost
            much of its slave-owning territory as a result of the American
            Revolution; as the leading industrial power in the world, Britain
            found in abolition a way to work against the interests of its
            rivals who were still heavily involved in colonial slavery and a
            plantation economy.3
            The British abolitionist program entailed deeper and deeper
            involvement in Africa the creation of Sierra Leone as a haven
            for freed slaves was just a start but British abolitionists
            before the 1840s were neither jingoists nor deliberate
            expansionists. Humanitarianism applied to Africa, however, did
            point insistently toward imperialism.4 By mid-century, the success
            of the antislavery movement, the impact of the great Victorian
            explorers, and the merger of racist and evolutionary doctrines in
            the social sciences had combined to give the British public a
            widely shared view of Africa that demanded imperialization on
            moral, religious, and scientific grounds. It is this view that I
            have called the myth of the Dark Continent; by mythology I mean a
            form of modern, secularized, "depoliticized speech" (to
            adopt Roland Barthes' phrase) discourse which treats
            its subject as universally accepted. Scientifically established,
            and therefore no longer open to criticism by a political or
            theoretical opposition. In The Idea of Race in Science: Great
            Britain, 1800-1960,Nancy Stepan writes:
            A fundamental question about the history of racism in the first
            half of the nineteenth century is why it was that, just as the
            battle against slavery was being won by abolitionists, the war
            against racism was being lost. The Negro was legally freed by the
            Emancipation Act of 1833, but in the British mind he was still
            mentally, morally and physically a slave.5
            It is this "fundamental question" which a genealogy of
            the myth of the Dark Continent can help to answer.
             
            Patrick Brantlinger,professor of English at Indiana University, is
            the editor of Victorian Studies. He has written The Spirit of
            Reform: British Literature and Politics, 1832-1867 (1977) and Bread
            and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture and Social Decay (1983).
Sander L. Gilman
         Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of_Female
            Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature
         This essay is an attempt to plumb the conventions (and thus the
            ideologies) which exist at a specific historical moment in both the
            aesthetic and scientific spheres. I will assume the existence of a
            web of conventions within the world of the
            aesthetic conventions which have elsewhere been admirably
            illustrated but will depart from the norm by examining the
            synchronic existence of another series of conventions, those of
            medicine. I do not mean in any way to accord special status to
            medical conventions. Indeed, the world is full of overlapping and
            intertwined systems of conventions, of which the medical and the
            aesthetic are but two. Medicine offers an especially interesting
            source of conventions since we do tend to give medical conventions
            special "scientific" status as opposed to the
            "subjective" status of the aesthetic conventions. But
            medical icons are no more "real" than
            "aesthetic" ones. Like aesthetic icons, medical icons
            may iconographic in that they represent these realities in a manner
            determined by the historical position of the observers, their
            relationship to their own time, and to the history of the
            conventions which they employ. Medicine uses its categories to
            structure an image of the diversity of mankind; it is as much at
            the mercy of the needs of any age to comprehend this infinite
            diversity as any other system which organizes our perception of the
            world. The power of medicine, at least in the nineteenth century,
            lies in the rise of the status of science. He conventions of
            medicine infiltrate other seemingly closed iconographic systems
            precisely because of this status. In examining the conventions of
            medicine employed in other areas, we must not forget this power.
            One excellent example of the conventions of human diversity
            captured in the iconography of the nineteenth century is the
            linkage of two seemingly unrelated female images the icon of
            the Hottentot female and the icon of the prostitute. In the course
            of the nineteenth century, the female Hottentot comes to represent
            the black female in nuce, and the prostitute to represent the
            sexualized woman. Both of these categories represent the creation
            of classes which correspondingly represent very specific qualities.
            While the number of terms describing the various categories of the
            prostitute expanded substantially during the nineteenth century,
            all were used to label the sexualized woman. Likewise, while many
            groups of African blacks were known to Europeans in the nineteenth
            century, the Hottentot remained representative of the essence of
            the black, especially the black female. Both concepts fulfilled an
            iconographic function in the perception and the representation of
            the world. How these two concepts were associated provides a case
            study for the investigation of patterns of conventions, without any
            limitation on the "value" of one pattern over another.
             
            Sander L. Gilman is professor of Humane Studies in the Department
            of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies and professor of
            Psychiatry (History) in the Cornell Medical College, Cornell
            University. He is the author or editor of numerous studies of
            European cultural history with a focus on the history of
            stereotypes. In addition, he has coedited Degeneration (1985) with
            J. E. Chamberlin. His study Jewish Self-Hatred is forthcoming.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
         Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
         It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British
            literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as
            England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural
            representation of England to the English. The role of literature in
            the production of cultural representation should not be ignored.
            These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in
            the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself
            attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project,
            displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.
            If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study
            of British literature but in the study of the literature of the
            European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we
            would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the
            "worlding" of what is now called "the Third
            World." To consider the Third World as distant cultures,
            exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be
            recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation
            fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a
            signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding,"
            even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1
            […]
            In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the
            "worlding" of what is today "the Third
            World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane
            Eyre.2 I plot the novel's reach and grasp, and locate its
            structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's
            reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis even a
            deconstruction of a "worlding" such as Jane
            Eyre's.3
             
            Gayatri Chakravorty Spivakis Longstreet Professor of English at
            Emory University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida's
            De la grammatologie and is presently finishing a book entitled
            Master Discourse, Native Informant. Her previous contributions to
             are " &lsquo;Draupadi' by Mahasveta
            Devi" (Winter 1981) and "The Politics of
            Interpretations" (September 1982).
Hazel V. Carby
         "On the Threshold of Woman's Era": Lynching, Empire,_and_Sexuality
            in Black Feminist Theory
         My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in
            which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the
            nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of
            patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and
            gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially
            directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of
            Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and
            theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form,
            characterized by its own specific history; yet both groups are
            addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a
            voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it
            is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the
            black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and
            mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening
            of her bonds, liberation will be more painful.
             
            Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan
            University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race
            and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They
            Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
            (forthcoming, 1986).
Barbara Johnson
         Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora_Neale
            Hurston
         In preparing to write this paper, I found myself repeatedly stopped
            by conflicting conceptions of the structure of address into which I
            was inserting myself. It was not clear to me what I, as a white
            deconstructor, was doing talking about Zora Neale Hurston, a black
            novelist and anthropologist, or to whom I was talking. Was I trying
            to convince white establishment scholars who long for a return to
            Renaissance ideals that the study of the Harlem Renaissance is not
            a trivialization of their humanistic pursuits? Was I trying to
            contribute to the attempt to adapt the textual strategies of
            literary theory to the analysis of Afro-American literature? Was I
            trying to rethink my own previous work and the re-referentialize
            the notion of difference so as to move the conceptual operations of
            deconstruction out of the realm of abstract linguistic
            universality? Was I talking to white critics, black critics, or
            myself?
            Well, all of the above. What finally struck me was the fact that
            what I was analyzing in Hurston's writings was precisely,
            again and again, her strategies and structures of problematic
            address. It was as though I were asking her for answers to
            questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a
            lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with
            multiple agendas and heterogeneous implied readers. I will focus
            here on three texts that play interesting variations on questions
            of identity and address: two short essays, "How It Feels to
            Be Colored Me" and "What White Publishers Won't
            Print," and a book-length collection of folktales, songs, and
            hoodoo practices entitles Mules and Men.
             
            Barbara Johnson is professor of French and comparative literature
            at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du
            langage poétique and The Critical Difference,translator of Jacques
            Derrida's Dissemination,and editor of The Pedagogical
            Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre. Her previous contribution
            to ,"Rigorous Unreliability," appeared
            in the December 1984 issue.
Jacques Derrida
         Racism's Last Word
         APARTHEID may that remain the name from now on, the unique
            appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.
            May it thus remain, but may a day come when it will only be for the
            memory of man.
            A memory in advance: that, perhaps, is the time given for this
            exhibition. At once urgent and untimely, it exposes itself and
            takes a chance with time, it wagers and affirms beyond the wager.
            Without counting on any present moment, it offers only a foresight
            in painting, very close to silence, and the rearview vision of a
            future for which apartheid will be the name of something finally
            abolished. Confined and abandoned then to this silence of memory,
            the name will resonate all by itself. Reduced to the state of a
            term in disuse. The thing it names today will no longer be.
            But hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of the
            unnameable?
            The exhibition, therefore, is not a presentation. Nothing is
            delivered here in the present, nothing that would be
            presentable only, in tomorrow's rearview mirror, the
            late, ultimate racism, the last of many.
             
            Jacques Derrida,professor of philosophy at the Ecole des hauts
            etudes en sciences socials in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of
            Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to
            ,"The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,"
            appeared in the Summer 1982 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at
            Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Fiction of Feminine
            Desire.
Frederic Jameson
         On Magic Realism in Film
         The concept of "magic realism" raises many problems,
            both theoretical and historical. I first encountered it in the
            context of American painting in the mid-1950s; at about the same
            time, Angle Flores published an influential article (in English) in
            which the term was applied to the work of Borges;1 but Alejo
            Carpentier's conception of the real maravilloso at once
            seemed to offer a related or alternative conception, while his own
            work and that of Miguel Angel Asturias seemed to demand an
            enlargement of its application.2 Finally, with the novels of
            Gabriel García Márquez in the 1960s, a whole new realm of magic
            realism opened up whose exact relations to preceding theory and
            novelistic practice remained undetermined. These conceptual
            problems emerge most clearly when one juxtaposes the notion of
            magic realism with competing or overlapping terms. In the
            beginning, for instance, it was not clear how it was to be
            distinguished from that vaster category generally simply called
            fantastic literature; at this point, what is presumably at issue is
            a certain type of narrative or representation to be distinguished
            from realism. Carpentier, however, explicitly staged his version as
            a more authentic Latin American realization of what in the more
            reified European context took the form of surrealism: his emphasis
            would seem to have been on a certain poetic transfiguration of the
            object world itself not so much a fantastic narrative, then,
            as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived (my own
            discussion, below, will retain some affiliations with this
            acceptation). In García Márquez, finally, these two tendencies
            seemed to achieve a new kind of synthesis a transfigured
            object world in which fantastic events are also narrated. But at
            this point, the focus of the conception of magic realism would
            appear to have shifted to what must be called an anthropological
            perspective: magic realism now comes to be understood as a kind of
            narrative raw material derived essentially from peasant society,
            drawing in sophisticated ways on the world of village or even
            tribal myth. (At this point, the stronger affiliations of the mode
            would be with texts like those of Tutuola in Nigeria or the
            Magunaíma [1928] of the Brazilian writer Mário de Andrade.) Recent
            debates, meanwhile, have complicated all this with yet a different
            kind of issue: namely, the problem of the political or
            mystificatory value, respectively, of such texts, many of which we
            owe to overtly left-wing revolutionary writers (Asturias,
            Carpentier, Márques).3 In spite of these terminological
            complexities which might be grounds for abandoning the
            concept altogether it retains a strange seductiveness which I
            will try to explore further, adding to the confusion with reference
            points drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and from Freud's
            notion of the "uncanny," and compounding it by an
            argument that magic realism (now transferred to the realm of film)
            is to be grasped as a possible alternative to the narrative logic
            of contemporary postmodernism.4
             
            1. See Angel Flores, "Magical Realism in Spanish American
            Fiction," Hispania38 (May 1955): 187-92.
            2. See Alejo Carpentier, "Prólogo" to his novel El
            Reino de este mundo (Santiago, 1971); the most useful survey of the
            debate remains Roberto Gonzalez Echeverria, "Carpentier y el
            realism magico," in Otros Mundos, otros fuegos,ed. Donald
            Yates, Congreso International de Literature Iberoamericana 16 (East
            Lansing, Mich., 1975), pp. 221-31.
            3. See Angel Rama, La Novel en America Latina (Botoa, 1982), and
            especially Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, De Mitólogos y novelistas
            (Madrid, 1975), in particular the discussions of Gabriel García
            Márques and Alejo Carpentier.
            4. My own general frame of reference for
            "postmodernism" is outlined in my "Postmodernism;
            or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left
            Review146 (July-Aug. 1984): 53-92.
             
            Frederic Jameson,William A. Lane Professor of Comparative
            Literature at Duke University, is the author of The Prison-House of
            Language and The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
            Symbolic Act.He is also a member of the editorial collective of
            Social Text. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological
            Analysis" (Spring 1978) and "Ideology and Symbolic
            Action" (Winter 1978).
Stephen Greenblatt
         Loudun and London
         Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection
            Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of
            seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of
            demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the
            principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex
            materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the
            extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds
            for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to
            acknowledge the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly,
            they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the
            convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles
            performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and
            Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their
            needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through
            the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had
            already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople,
            many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the
            nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious
            arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from
            as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were
            filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to
            witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet
            performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and in their
            bizarre way decorous.
            At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd,
            the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low
            chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of
            the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be
            constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were
            possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one
            supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy
            the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate
            in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove
            the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the
            possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting
            the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent
            contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the
            devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian
            mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. "On
            stage," writes de Certeau, "there are no longer human
            beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone only
            roles" (PL, p. 133). And these "roles" in turn
            are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of
            ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to
            convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these
            masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual
            warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing
            their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of
            darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms
            the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has
            been vanquished by Jesus Christ.
             
            1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun,Collection
            Archives Series, no. 37 (Paris, 1980); all further references to
            this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text
            (translations are my own). On the relationship between exorcism and
            theater in this period, see also Henri Weber,
            "L'Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de
            la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, &raquo; Nouvelle revue du
            seizième siècle 1 (1983) : 79-101.
             
            Stephen Greenblatt,the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the
            University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of
            Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning:
            From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the
            Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and
            the poetics of culture. "Marlow, Marx, and Anti-
            Semitism," his previous contribution to ,
            appeared in the Winter 1978 issue.
Michael André Bernstein
         Image, Word, and Sign: The Visual Arts as_Evidence_in_Ezra_Pound's
            Cantos
         1. To list Pound's triumphs of recognition in the realm of
            art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to
            catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost
            uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not
            more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis
            Picabia's paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse.
            Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as
            possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art or
            literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of
            emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these
            opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The
            Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound
            scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of
            the poet's various statements and positions, and it would be
            foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But
            a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an
            inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an
            explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often
            the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a
            sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding.
            In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and
            the Visual Arts (or, for that matter, of Pound and History, Pound
            and Economics, and so forth) move beyond the quagmire resulting
            from still another frain-storm of "factual atoms"
            chronicling his various passions and dislikes.
            2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept
            Pound's brilliant discoveries and pass over his
            "howling blunders," my position would emphasize the
            need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test
            them against the material to which they are a response and for
            which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are
            times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less
            demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove
            from him the capacity to err.
            3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of
            Pound's specific statements about various artists, with each
            utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our
            own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a
            careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and
            texture of Pound's own work. The attempt to focus attention
            on The Cantos'network of artistic references its
            invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural
            achievement will yield only trivial results unless the inner
            dynamic linking Pound's various exampla and the actual role
            these play in the poem's argument become clearer in the
            process.
             
            Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic (1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of
            verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and
            literary genealogy. His previous contribution to
William Veeder
         The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein,and the Shelleys
         My study of Mary Shelley and father includes her husband because
            Percy Shelley's obsessions with patriarchy, with "
            &lsquo;GOD, AND KIND, AND LAW,' " influenced profoundly
            Mary's* art and life. Percy's idealizations of father
            in The Revolt of Islam and Prince Athanase indicated ways or
            resolving familial antagonisms which Mary adopted and developed her
            later fiction. Percy's relationship with Frankenstein is
            still more intricate. Recognizing that her husband's
            obsessions with father and self-creation were contributing to the
            deterioration of their marriage, Mary represents these obsessions
            (among many others, including her own) in Victor
            Frankenstein partly to vent in art the anger which would have
            further damaged the marriage, and party to show Percy before it was
            too late the errors of his ways. It was too late. Percy responded
            to Frankenstein in Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci with a
            reaffirmation of sonship which has been largely unrecognized by
            scholars.
            Father looms so large for both Mary and Percy Shelley that no one
            critical approach can account for him fully. At their most
            idealistic and thus most traditional the Shelleys
            encourage a critical methodology which integrates the traditional
            disciplines of biographical and close textual analyses. By taking
            this approach to Mary's later fiction and to Percy's
            The Revolt of Islam, I can not only confirm the prominence of
            father for the Shelleys but also establish the ideal against which
            their most subversive and important art was created. Reading this
            indirect, overdetermined art in light of the negative Oedipus will
            help answer important questions about Frankenstein, Prometheus
            Unbound,and The Cenci and will, I hop, add to our understanding of
            the vexed role of father in the Romantic period and in subsequent
            generations whose children we are.
             
            William Veeder,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            has published books on Yeats, Henry James, and Victorian feminism.
            His Mary Shelley and "Frankenstein": The Fate of
            Androgyny will appear in December 1985. The Art of Criticism: Henry
            James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, coedited with
            Susan M. Griffin, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: The Centenary, a
            collection of new essays on Stevenson's novel, are also
            forthcoming (1986). He is currently at work on The Serpent's
            Tale: Anglo-American Gothic Fiction, 1885-1914.
Maria Torok
         Unpublished by Freud to Fliess: Restoring and Oscillation
         The aim of the following lines is to reinstate some unpublished
            fragments into two letters written by Freud to Fliess on 12 and 22
            December 1897, respectively. These dates refer to a period in
            Freud's elaborations traditionally considered subsequent to
            his renunciation of the seduction theory. As is well known, the
            interpretation of an earlier letter to Fliess, written by Freud on
            21 September 1897, makes his revocation into the first stage of
            what has since become Freudian psychoanalysis. This "turning
            point" has allowed many an interpreter to grasp Freudian
            psychoanalysis as a theory of instinctive fantasies. Yet, the
            conventional dots, frequently used in The Origins of Psycho-
            analysis to indicate editorial omissions, raise the issue: Do
            hitherto unknown quantities prevent us from understanding what the
            precise nature of this "turning point" might be?
            In the English and subsequent German editions of the Freud-Fliess
            correspondence there are indeed some clues of uncertainty as
            regards Freud's definitive repeal of his seduction theory.
            Consider, for example, the statement from a letter dated 31 August
            1898: "The secret of this restlessness is hysteria."2
            Freud cannot rest on his new hypothesis about the nature of
            neurosis since the etiology of hysteria continues to be a secret. A
            particularly dense passage of the same letter seems to elaborate on
            the causes of Freud's agitation.
            True, I have a good record of successes, but perhaps they have been
            only indirect, as if I had applied the lever in the right direction
            for the line of cleavage of the substance; but the line of cleavage
            itself remains unknown to me. [O,p. 262]
             
            Maria Torokis the author (with Nicolas Abraham) of The Wolf-
            Man's Magic Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux
            loups),forthcoming in translation, 1986. "Unpublished by
            Freud to Fliess" is part of a book-length study she is
            completing on the genesis of Freudian concepts. Nicholas
            Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is the translator of The Wolf-Man's
            Magic Word.
Leo Bersani
         "The Culture of Redemption": Marcel Proust and Melanie_Klein
         What is the redemptive power of art? More fundamentally, what are
            the assumptions which make it seem natural to think of art as
            having such powers? In attempting to answer these questions, I will
            first be turning to Proust, who embodies perhaps more
            clearly in a sense, even more crudely than any other
            major artist a certain tendency to think of cultural symbolizations
            in general as essentially reparative. This tendency, which had
            already been sanctified as a more or less explicit dogma of modern
            high culture by Proust's time, persists, I believe, in our
            own time as the enabling morality of a humanistic criticism. I will
            argue that the notion of art as salvaging somehow damaged
            experience has, furthermore, been served by
            psychoanalysis more specifically, by a certain view of
            sublimation first proposed rather disconnectedly by Sigmund Freud
            and later developed more coherently and forcefully by Melanie
            Klein. The psychoanalytic theory I refer to makes
            normative both for an individual and for a culture the
            mortuary aesthetic of A la recherché du temps perdu.
            As everyone knows, involuntary memories play a crucial role in the
            Proustian narrator's discovery of his vocation as a writer.
            Let's begin with a somewhat untypical example of the genre,
            the passage in Sodome et Gomorrhe describing the
            "resurrection" of Marcel's grandmother on the
            first evening of his second visit to Balbec. This passage
            reformulates the importance of memory for art in terms of another
            relation about which the theoretical passages that conclude Le
            Temps retrouvé will be at once prolific and evasive: the dependence
            of art on death.
             
            Leo Bersani is professor of French at the University of California,
            Berkeley. The Forms of Violence/Narrative in Ancient Assyria and
            Modern Culture,written in collaboration with Ulysse Dutoit, is his
            most recent publication. Professor's The Freudian Body/
            Psychoanalysis and Art will be published this winter.
John Limon
         The Integration of Faulkner's Go Don, Moses
         The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider,
            the central character in William Faulkner's short story
            "Pantaloon in Black," cannot be understood. This may be
            of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he
            cannot be understood has ramifications, because "Pantaloon in
            Black," seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down,
            Moses,which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending
            on the success one has in integrating "Pantaloon in
            Black" into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down,
            Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it
            cannot be made to cohere.
            More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider
            cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses
            disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical
            operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish's idea that
            interpretations are produced (not by individuals directed by texts,
            but) by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it
            must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish
            everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the
            contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class?is
            that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and
            inevitably in their own image. But Fish's idea of an
            interpretive community is something like the Modern Language
            Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale
            school bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed (so he
            believes) for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions.
            What is, however, even English professors are members of
            communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community,
            by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but
            which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful
            criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different
            language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet:
            what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale
            school, endures, or prevails?
            The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has
            oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument
            of communication used by professor speaking to other professors.
            But in "Pantaloon in Black," Faulkner has formed a text
            in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an
            interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County.
            Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his
            story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his
            story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a
            community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community
            fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is
            that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities
            is akin to an idealist's dream of an integrated South.
             
            John Limonis assistant professor of English at Williams College. He
            is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science,on the
            history of the American novel in relation to the history of science
            and science philosophy.
Richard Shiff
         Remembering Impressions
         In his essay "Painting Memories" ( 10
            [March 1984]: 510-42), Michael Fried identifies memory as the
            privileged thematic that structures Charles Baudelaire's
            Salon of 1846. But he then limits his investigation of this topic
            by focusing on the representation of "past" art,to the
            exclusion of the recollection of "past" experience.
            Fried thus isolates the theme of memory from the dialectic of life
            and art that characterizes its performance for Baudelaire. Such
            selective analysis not only reverses Baudelaire's priorities
            but deflects his pointed comments on modernity and naiveté, which
            in turn inform the example of Edouard Manet, Fried's
            exemplary modernist painter. One wonders whether too much of
            Baudelaire and Manet is lost to this view. Perhaps the
            predilections of contemporary criticism have sanctioned
            Fried's approach. For today we hesitate to ground art in
            experience, preferring to conceive of representations as signs
            fully engendered by and engendering other signs. Baudelaire was of
            a different mind; he lived through the dawning of our own age, but
            also in the fading light of another. He was heir to a tradition
            that regarded the forms of art as powerfully motivated by the
            experience of internalized ideas and sensations; for him, a master
            artist's "signs" would appear more symbolic than
            allegorical, more immediate than mediated or distanced. (This
            distinction often, and rightfully, slips away; it will become
            evident that Baudelaire's writing encompasses both positions,
            ours and his.)
            As we deny artistic signs motivation in extralinguistic
            "experience," we aggravate that perennial problem of
            origins which Fried himself invokes. It might be reformulated in
            this manner: all painting depends on a lineage of antecedent
            painting; yet, to succeed, a new work must transcend its filial
            bondage, as it compounds the effect of the "original
            (s)" in its own originality. Vexation follows from this issue
            of the artistic source. Since memories of past art
            (representations, conventions, signs) make possible the very
            creation of art, the creative event cannot assume priority over
            memory. And the matter of primordialmemory, like the matter of an
            absolutely original art, is aporia. Fried does not pursue this
            matter (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and others have); but the
            question necessarily implies that both representations and
            memories, in constituting the "past," must always be
            distanced. Distanced not from the present, which they enter and
            likewise constitute, but from those "original"
            experiential moments they purport to (re)present.
             
            Richard Schiff is associate professor of art at the University of
            North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of Cézanne and the
            End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and
            Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (1984) and is currently working
            on a study of modernism in relation to classicism and a related
            study of photographic realism. His previous contributions to
             are "Seeing Cézanne" (Summer 1978),
            "Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" (Autumn
            1978), and, with Carl Pletsch, "History and Innovation"
            (Spring 1981).
Michael Fried
         Forget It: A Response to Richard Shiff
         The basic disagreement between Richard Shiff and me is one of
            approach and ultimately of intellectual taste. What I tried to do
            in "Painting memories" was read Charles
            Baudelaire's Salon of 1846 with a view to construing its
            central argument as rigorously as possible, which for me meant
            without appealing, except in one crucial, authorized instance, to
            other writings by Baudelaire or indeed anyone else. (I refer here
            to the reading conducted in the first half of my essay and in the
            body of the text; a few footnotes cite passages in other writings
            on art by Baudelaire, and toward the end of the essay I allude
            briefly to The Painter of Modern Life.) This seemed to me
            desirable, first, because on the strength of a long familiarity
            with the Salon of 1846 I had become convinced that it was not the
            fragmented, somewhat incoherent, less than fully mature performance
            that many previous commentators had taken it to be (and that Shiff
            himself appears to think it is) but rather that it possessed a
            problematic consistency, even systematicness, which I wanted to
            explore; and second, because I had come to feel that one of the
            principal sources of the dreariness and predictability of much
            exegesis not only of that Salonbut of Baudelaire's art
            criticism generally was the tendency of many commentators to treat
            his art writing as a single, barely differentiated mass, to be
            supplemented when desired by selected passages from the lyric
            poems. Let me be as clear as I can. I am not claiming that the only
            fruitful approach to Baudelaire's art criticism is to
            consider each of his writings in isolation from the rest. I am
            saying that the widespread tendency to read a particular Salon or
            article on the visual arts in the light of others has meant that
            insufficient attention has been paid to the workings of individual
            texts, with dismaying consequences both for our understanding of
            those texts and for our sense of the shape of Baudelaire's
            intellectual career.
             
            Michael Fried,professor of humanities and the history of art and
            director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University,
            is the author of Morris Louisand Absorption and Theatricality:
            Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at
            work on books on Gustave Courbet and on Thomas Eakins and Stephen
            Crane. His most recent contributions to  are
            "The Structure of Beholding in Courbet's Burial at
            Ornans" (June 1983) and "Paitnig Memories: On the
            Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet" (March
            1984).
Henry Staten
         Rorty's Circumvention of Derrida
         Richard Rorty's "Deconstruction and
            Circumvention" ( 11 [September 1984]: 1-21)
            is a sobering reminder of how far we have to go before anything
            like a real dialogue between deconstruction and philosophy can take
            place in this country. Our literary critics ignore too much of what
            is specifically philosophical in philosophical texts; and our
            philosophers equally blind when they read literary language.
            Perhaps it is laughably undeconstructed to make the distinctions I
            had just made. But perpahs, too, it is not so easy to get beyond
            certain oppositions as is beginning to be widely taken for granted.
            It is surprising to see Rorty encouraging such complacency, for
            Rorty himself generally thinks hard and to good purpose. He is a
            figure of unique distinction on our intellectual landscape, a
            bridge, perhaps, our only one, between deconstruction and the
            American philosophical establishment. But for that very reason it
            is sobering to see how this philosopher reads Jacques Derrida: very
            much as a philosopher reads. The overall result is ambiguous (and
            we will trace the structure of this ambiguity), but is it not
            finally to "encapsulate and circumvent" Derrida,
            leaving the native speech community immune to his critique? Let us
            see.
             
            Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct
            professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is the author
            of Wittgenstein and Derrida (1984) and is currently working on a
            study of mourning and idealization in Western literature from Homer
            to D. H. Lawrence.
Richard Rorty
         The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply_to_Henry_Staten
         Staten gets my intentions right when he suggests that I may simply
            have been saying that "the dream of philosophy is a rare but
            serious malady, now less common than it used to be, but currently
            threatening a new outbreak in the disguised form of
            deconstruction" (p. 455). I had thought I was urging that the
            appropriation of Derrida in the Anglo-Saxon "Now let's
            deconstruct literature" mode was a mistake and that there
            were some things in Derrida (not the most important things) which
            had encouraged this mistake notably the Heideggerian
            suggestion that the "text of philosophy" was at the
            heart of our culture. State, however, finds me more cunning and
            ungenerous, harsher toward Derrida, than I had imagined myself to
            be. He may have a point, but is hard for me to tell. No author is
            much good at following "the rhetorical contours" of his
            own writing, since his (quite possibly self-deceptive) beliefs
            about what he wanted to say keep leveling off the contours of what
            he actually wrote (p. 455).
            The best I can do by way of reply to the charge that I was (even if
            perhaps unconsciously) attempting to " &lsquo;encapsulate and
            circumvent' " Derrida is to take up a central ambiguity
            which Staten detects (p. 453). He says that I flit back and forth
            between "two characterizations of the history of
            philosophy": (1) "a constantly changing, self-
            deconstructing enterprise which is therefore not characterizable in
            terms of any single system of metaphors," and (2) "a
            &lsquo;metaphysical tradition' which has dreamed the dream of
            a closed, total, and transparent vocabulary which would tell the
            whole truth and thing but the truth" (p. 456).
             
            Richard Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of
            Virginia. He is the author of Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays:
            1972-1980),among other works, and is currently writing a book on
            Martin Heidegger. His previous contributions to 
            are "Deconstruction and Circumvention" (September 1984)
            and "Philosophy without Principles" (March 1985).
Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin
         Interpretation and Identity: Can the Work Survive the_World?
         Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less
            reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest
            hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest
            assured that it will never come not because the world is
            everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever
            began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost,
            and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd
            notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged,
            but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement
            with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and
            unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and
            system of categories are lost as well.
            If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The
            answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several
            worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld
            is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is
            any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that
            there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the
            world is as futile as the task of describing the number between
            twoand seven.
            The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain
            pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true,
            both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and
            "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each
            other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement
            follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of
            every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like
            these must somehow be dispelled.
             
            Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard
            University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of
            Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure
            of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent
            contribution to  is "How Buildings
            Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor
            of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She
            is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently
            writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations.
Wayne C. Booth
         Pluralism in the Classroom
         At my university we never stop reforming the curriculum, and
            we're now discussing the plurality of ways in which our
            students fulfill our requirement of a full year of "freshman
            humanities." Some of us feel that we now provide too many
            ways: neither students nor faculty members can make a good defense
            of a requirement in itself an expression of power, if you
            will that leads to scant sharing of readings or subject
            matters for the students, and to no goals or methods clearly shared
            by increasingly diverse faculty members. As we attack and defend
            this kind of flabby pluralism, we naturally find ourselves
            discussing other kinds of pluralism, and we begin to discover the
            true depth of a topic that may at first seem "merely
            practical." There may be some nouns that can be joined to the
            phrase "in the classroom" without taking on a total
            theory of education: Shakespeare in the classroom; Romanticism in
            the classroom; perhaps even ironyin the classroom. But when we try
            to discuss "pluralism in the classroom," we throw into
            the discussion every belief we may have about what education should
            be and how it should be conducted. To ask whether or in what sense
            we should be pluralists in the classroom is obviously to ask, in
            the most fundamental way possible, "What should a teacher
            teach? What should we hope that every student would learn,
            regardless of our commitment to this or that doctrine of the
            moment?"
            Most teachers, even in a time like ours when professed relativists
            pluralists abound, answer that question, at least implicitly, like
            this: One should try very hard to teach the truth not a
            "dogma," of course, perhaps not even a set of
            propositions, but at least some single right away of doing things.
            Indeed in some moods any honest teacher might confess to feeling
            lucky if students learn even one truth or one mode of working.
            "They'll meet plenty of plurality just in the nature of
            their lives." "They'll meet plenty of other
            teachers, most of them with absolutely mistaken views, and my chief
            task is to set them straight so that when they encounter nonsense
            they'll know how to deal with it." Still, when you
            press people who talk that way they of course claim that they teach
            no dogmas, only an appropriately open-minded way of dealing with
            error in the world. They may even call themselves pluralists or
            relativists. But it takes no great analytical skill to detect the
            monisms behind their claims. When pushed, they believe that they
            hold=--or might someday find some one way of working, some
            supremely powerful "killer mode" that can dispose of
            all other modes with decisive proofs. They work finally in one way
            only, pursuing, finally, one kind of truth.
             
            Wayne C. Booth is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor
            of English and of Ideas and Methods at the university of Chicago.
            His previous works on pluralism include Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979) and "Pluralism and Its
            Rivals" in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970). He
            is now completing a book on ethical criticism.
Hayden White
         Historical Pluralism
         It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary
            theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate
            critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the
            consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he
            would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony
            or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending
            circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able
            finally to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that
            he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that
            history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is
            historicism the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe
            in Friedrich Meinecke's great book on this subject, the
            perspective which, in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, is identified
            with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name
            given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is
            thehistorical perspective, contemporary historical theory and
            practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at
            contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that
            there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of
            critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good
            reason: the referent of the term "history" is as
            indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as
            the term "literature" (or for that matter,
            "philosophy" or "science") itself. So that,
            if one wished to "correct" certain critical positions
            by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper
            "sense of history," it would be just as legitimate to
            correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of
            historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the
            "sense of history" that the history of criticism
            displays over the "sense of literature." When Mitchell
            characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment
            of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he
            fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an
            atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally
            agreed upon "sense of history" to which one can appeal
            in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It
            is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of
            fact from which they draw different implications regarding the
            attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against
            ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation
            of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself.
             
            Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the
            University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to
             are "Historical Interpretation"
            (September 1982), "The Narrativization of Real Events"
            (Summer 1981), and "The Value of Narrativity in the
            Representation of Reality" (Autumn 1980).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Pluralism as Dogmatism
         It may seem a bit perverse to argue that pluralism is a kind of
            dogmatism, since pluralists invariably define themselves as
            antidogmatists. Indeed, the world would seem to be so well supplied
            with overt dogmatists religious fanatics, militant
            revolutionaries, political and domestic tyrants that it will
            probably seem unfair to suggest that the proponents of liberal,
            tolerant, civilized open-mindedness are guilty of a covert
            dogmatism. My only excuse for engaging in this exercise is that it
            may help to shake up some rather firmly fixed ideas about dogmatism
            held by those who advocate some version of pluralism. Dogmatism, I
            want to argue, has had a very had press, some of it deserved, some
            of it based in misunderstandings and ignorance. Much of that bad
            press stems, I will suggest, from the dominance of pluralism as an
            intellectual ideology since the Enlightenment. If
            "dogmatism" is a synonym for irrationality,
            infelixibility, and authoritarianism, the fault lies as much with
            pluralism as it does with any actual dogmatism. I'd like to
            begin, therefore, with a definition of dogmatism that comes, not
            from its pluralist foes, but from a historian of religion who
            treats it as a fairly neutral term, describing a complex and
            ancient feature of social institutions. This definition comes from
            E. Royston Pike's Encyclopedia of Religion and Religions:
            DOGMA(Gk., ordinance). A religious doctrine that is to be received
            on authority whether of a Divine revelation, a Church
            Council, Holy Scripture, or a great and honoured religious
            teacher and not, at least in the first instance, because it
            may be proved true in the light of reason. Almost always there is
            associated with dogma the element of Faith. The term comes from the
            Greek word for "to seem," and it meant originally that
            which seems true to anyone, i.e. has been approved or decided
            beyond cavil. In the New Testament it is applied to decisions of
            the Christian church in Jerusalem, enactments of the Jewish law,
            and imperial decrees, all of which were things to be accepted
            without argument. A little later it had come to mean simple
            statements of Christian belief and practice; and it was not until
            the 4th century, when the heretics were showing how far from simple
            the basic Christian beliefs really were, that it acquired the
            meaning of a theological interpretation of a religious fact. Then
            came the division of the Church into a Western and an Eastern
            branch, and never again was it possible to frame a dogma that might
            be universally held. The 39 Articles of the Church of England, the
            principles deduced from Calvin's "Institutes" and
            John Wesley's "Sermons," and the items that
            compose the Mormon creed may all be classed as dogmas.1
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of , is professor of
            English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology.
Ihab Hassan
         Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective
         Postmodernism once more that breach has begun to yawn! I
            return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the
            irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages
            of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism now?
            This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries
            ago "Was heist Aufklårung?" meaning,
            "Who are we now?" The answer was a signal meditation on
            historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.1 But to meditate on
            that topic today and this is my central claim is really
            to inquire &lsquo;Was heist Postmodernismus?"
            Pluralism in our time finds (if not founds) itself in the social,
            aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of
            postmodernism finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I
            submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American
            pluralists M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei
            Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen
            Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our
            moment engage that overweening query, "What is
            postmodernism?," engage and even answer it tacitly. In short,
            like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking
            postmodernism all their lives without knowing it.
            But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of
            it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has
            become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music,
            art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy,
            psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and
            even in the sciences. Indeed, postmodernism has now received the
            bureaucratic accolade of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
            in the form of a Summer Seminar for College Teachers; beyond that,
            it has penetrated the abstractions of "late" Marxist
            critics who, only a decade ago, dismissed postmodernism as another
            instance of the dreck, fads, and folderol of a consumer society.
            Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term, if not
            define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict
            cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept.
             
            1. "Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is
            the problem of the present time, of what we are, in this very
            moment," writes Michel Foucault in "The Subject and
            Power," reprinted as "Afterword" in Michel
            Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,ed. Hubert L.
            Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, 19820, p. 210. The essay also
            appeared in 8 (Summer 1982): 777-96.
             
            Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He is
            the author of, among other books, Radical Innocence (1961), The
            Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971), Paracriticisms (1975), and The
            Right Promethean Fire (1980). His latest work, Out of Egypt, is
            forthcoming in 1986.
Bruce Erlich
         Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of "Pluralism"
         Immanuel Kant might have stated the central and urgent problem
            facing contemporary literary theory as the need to seek a path
            between dogmatism and skepticism. We confront today a multiplicity
            of critical methods, each filling books and journals with no doubt
            convincing arguments for its correctness. If we cling to one,
            denying others possess truth, we are dogmatists; if, however, we
            grant that two or three or all are equally true, we admit that each
            is at the same time false in relation to the others' truth,
            and so we are skeptics. The "dogmatic employment" of
            reason, Kant noted, "lands us in dogmatic assertions to which
            other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed-that is,
            in scepticism."1
            Into this professional breach steps "pluralism" (a term
            the reader should assume throughout is in quotation marks),
            claiming it can vindicate sharply limited patterns of reading which
            nonetheless allow for diversity in the relation of word to idea
            and, so, of interpreting reader to text. This would make it
            possible to encompass within a single theory the insights which
            both camps (those with one truth, those with many) find in their
            positions. Clearly, this entices.
            But do we really understand what pluralism is, if it is at all? Its
            critical practice already exists this essay grew from a 1984
            conference which sought possible intellectual
            "foundations" of that practice but how are these
            practitioners to understand what they do? Pluralism's
            philosophic pedigree may have been neatly sketched by Nelson
            Goodman (who, however, does not use the term) as the tradition
            That began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the
            structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the
            structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now
            proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of
            the several symbols systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts,
            perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique
            truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even
            conflicting versions of world in the making.2
             
            1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,trans. Norman Kemp Smith
            (New York, 1965), p. 57; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated CPR,will be included in the text.
            2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), p. x.
            Since Lewis is not often classified among pluralists, I support
            Goodman by calling attention to Pepper having been Lewis'
            student and to Lewis' observation that he and Pepper
            "have been, so to say, continuously aware of each other, and
            of a common background of thought…. I should like to think that our
            respective views, both in theory of value and in ethics, are
            mutually supplementary rather than rival theories"
            ("The Philosopher Replies," in The Philosophy of C. I.
            Lewis, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [La Salle, Ill., 1968], pp. 670-71).
            Numerous essays from this volume (include one by Pepper) are useful
            for situating Lewis.
             
            Bruch Erlichis associate professor of English and modern languages
            at the University of Nebraska Lincoln where he teaches
            comparative literature and literary theory. He has published on
            Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, and intellectual history and is
            preparing a book on cognitive universals in tension with the
            experience of historical change, Unintelligible Limits: Time,
            meaning, and a Hermeneutic of Suffering.
Ellen Rooney
         Who's Left Out? A Rose by Any Other_Name_Is_Still_Red;_Or,_The
            Politics of Pluralism
         The practical difficulties that trouble any effort to discuss
            "pluralism" in American literary studies can be
            glimpsed in the following exchange. In a 1980 interview in the
            Literary Review of Edinburgh, Ken Newton put this question to
            Derrida:
            It might be argued that deconstruction inevitably leads to
            pluralist interpretation and ultimately to the view that any
            interpretation is as good as any other. Do you believe this and how
            do you select some interpretations as being better than others?
            Derrida replied:
            I am not a pluralist and I would never say that every
            interpretation is equal but Ido not select. The interpretations
            select themselves. I am a Nietzschean in that sense. You know that
            Nietzsche insisted on the fact that the principle of
            differentiation was in itself selective. The eternal return of the
            same was not repetition, it was a selection of the more powerful
            forces. So I would say that some are more powerful than others. The
            hierarchy is between forces and not between true and
            false.1&shy;&shy;
            The irony of Newton's identification of pluralism with the
            very interpretive irresponsibility that it accuses
            others Derrida foremost among them of embracing is
            certainly not lost on those critics who call themselves pluralists;
            it comes as no surprise to them that Derrida declines to join their
            company. Nevertheless, the breezy gloss of pluralism as "the
            view that any interpretation is as good as any other" is
            bound to seem plausible to the large numbers of readers for whom
            the word denotes a generalized tolerance the refusal of dogmatism.
            That Derrida should be called upon to dissociate himself from
            pluralism is in fact symptomatic of the profound confusion
            surrounding the term. At present, the pervasiveness of such loose
            talk compels pluralists to defend themselves regularly against this
            kind of misinterpretation. Thus, the colloquial reading of
            pluralism that construes it as mere relativism, the absence of
            principled constraints, is frequently acknowledged, if only to be
            rejected. Even Bruch Erlich must emphasize that pluralism does not
            want "a totally free critical market, for that involves the
            proliferation of a hundred flowers, what Booth dismissively terms
            &lsquo;chaotic warfare.' "2
             
            1. James Kearn and Ken Newton, "An Interview with Jacques
            Derrida," Literary Review 14 (18 Apr.-1 May 1980), p.21.
            2. Bruce Erlich, "Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-
            Contradictions of &lsquo;Pluralism,' " this volume, p.
            527; all further references to this essay will be included in the
            text.
             
            Ellen Rooney teaches English and women's studies at Brown
            University. She is currently at work on a study entitled Seductive
            Reasoning: Pluralism and the Problematic of General Persuasion.
Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin
         Interpretation and Identity: Can the Worl Survive the_World?
         Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less
            reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest
            hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest
            assured that it will never come not because the world is
            everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever
            began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost,
            and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd
            notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged,
            but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement
            with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and
            unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and
            system of categories are lost as well.
             
            If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The
            answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several
            worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld
            is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is
            any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that
            there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the
            world is as futile as the task of describing the number between
            twoand seven.
             
            The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain
            pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true,
            both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and
            "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each
            other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement
            follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of
            every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like
            these must somehow be dispelled.
             
            Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard
            University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of
            Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure
            of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent
            contribution to  is "How Buildings
            Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor
            of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She
            is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently
            writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations.
Richard McKeon
         Pluralism of interpretations and Pluralism of Objects, Actions,_and
            Statements Interpreted
         We have met in this conference to discuss "critical
            pluralism." It will be a conference or discussion if the
            participants present different conceptions of critical pluralism
            based on different conceptions of criticism. Pluralism will enter
            the discussion in two ways: in the plurality of statements, which
            will be easy to recognize, and in the plurality or identity of what
            the statements are about, which will be problematic. There are
            three possible conclusions to which the discussion may lead. Some
            of the participants may argue that only one of the opposed
            statements is about criticism and that the others may be about the
            work, but do not treat it as a literary work; these participants
            may so deny the possibility of critical pluralism. Some may present
            different modes of critical interpretation of a literary work and
            argue that they are different interpretations of the same work;
            these participants may recognize no need to differentiate different
            aspects in the work to which they interpretations are relevant.
            Finally, some may argue that the different modes of criticism apply
            to different aspects of the work which should be named differently
            and be treated by different methods, and which should be considered
            distinct objects of interpretation.
            The variety of critical methods and the variety of objects to which
            those methods can be applied are apparent when the reflexive
            relations between the pluralism of the interpretation of books and
            the pluralism of the circumstances and the matters that condition
            and constitute books are examined in a paradigm of possible forms
            and matters related to each other paradoxically. Many of the
            recurrent pairs of terms joined and differentiated in the
            literature of criticism (among them art and nature, and poetry and
            philosophy) are related paradoxically.
             
            Richard McKeon was the editor of The Basic Works of
            Aristotle,coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical
            Edition,and author of Thought, Action, and Passion. His previous
            contributions to  are "Arts of Invention and
            Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" (June 1975),
            "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).
Derek Longhurst
         A Response to Peter Rabinowitz
         Is Rabinowitz seriously suggesting that his "rules" of
            reading are equally applicable to the analysis of British and
            American forms of popular writing and their readerships between
            1920 and the 1960s? Is he seriously suggesting that Gone with the
            Wind, for example, would be "read" in the same way and
            for the same meanings in the southern states, the northern states,
            in Yorkshire and London? In this particular case the issue of
            cultural reproduction is also crucial the complex relations
            between the book and film "texts" and readerships for
            both. Is the book now read "through" the film and the
            mythos of Hollywood? Can the novel's "history" of
            the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction be seen in relation
            to experience of the Depression on the one hand and to dominant
            historical discourses of the period privileged within American
            educational institutions on the other?2
            Or, if we take a British example like A. J. Cronin, whose work was
            regarded as both "serious" and "popular" in
            the late 1930s, what happens to Rabinowitz's distinction?
            Clearly, Cronin's fiction is not "acceptable" in
            the literary canon but his example illustrates the weakness of any
            critical analysis of the popular rooted in "literary"
            assumptions. Very important questions are raised by the commercial
            success of The Citadel, not among "the people" in any
            generalized sense but among specific constituencies of
            professional, middle-class readerships in both New Deal American
            and in Britain during a period of history remarkable for the
            regrouping of the forces of social-democratic consensus
            politics an alliance between "sympathetic"
            fractions of the professional middle class and "the
            people" which culminated eventually in the postwar Labour
            party election victory. Thus readers are not only readers, and the
            processes of reading especially perhaps of popular
            fiction are not reducible to abstract rules which exclude all
            considerations of cultural=political institutions and discourses.
             
            2. This example is partly indebted to discussion with Greg Gaut and
            Jane P. Tompkins during a University of Minnesota Conference,
            "On the Social Edge" (25-27 April 1985).
             
            Derek Longhurst is principal lecturer and course leader in
            communication studies at Sunderland Polytechnic and general editor
            of the forthcoming series Culture and Popular Fiction. His
            publications include chapters in Re-Reading English and An
            Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. He is currently
            working on a book about the political thriller.
Peter J. Rabinowitz
         Assuming the Obvious: A Reply to Derek Longhurst
         Derek Longhurst's rhetorical strategies don't leave me
            much room to maneuver. By constructing my essay in such a way that
            we are opponents, he offers only two choices: I can recant or enter
            into battle. Actually, I would rather do neither; I agree with most
            of what he says and would like a chance to explore those points
            where we differ. But in order to do that, it is first necessary to
            see where our differences really lie; and Longhurst's
            response does not make it easy.
            Granted, some of his criticisms are sound. He is right that I use
            the word "we" too loosely and that I sketched out my
            argument on an extremely abstract level, which resulted in, among
            other things, a blurring of the differences between American and
            British literature. But more often than not, Longhurst attacks me
            for taking positions that I do not in fact hold. For instance, he
            suggests that I believe the categories "popular" and
            "serious" to be fixed, and that my scheme would
            therefore shatter when confronted with a text like The Citadel,
            which was regarded as "both &lsquo;serious' and
            &lsquo;popular.' " Yet my essay was intended precisely
            to offer a way to talk about such cases of which The Glass
            Key is one and while my solution may have its flaws, the
            rigidity of categories that Longhurst attacks it for is surely not
            one of them.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative
            literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Before Reading
            (forthcoming), a book about the conventions of reading, and is also
            active as a music critic for such publications as Fanfareand
            Ovation. His previous contributions to  are
            "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences"
            (Autumn 1977), "Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical
            Method" (Spring 1979), and "The Turn of the Glass Key:
            Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy" (March 1985).
James L. Battersby and James Phelan
         Meaning as Concept and Extension: Some Problems
         Hirsch's revision results from his attempt to think through
            the difficult question that underlies the whole essay: How does the
            movement of time and circumstance affect the stability of meaning?
            The first part of his answer is that the relation between original
            meaning and subsequent understanding or applications of that
            meaning is analogous to the relation between a concept and its
            extension. For example, if he reads Shakespeare's sonnet 55
            ("Not marble nor the gilded monuments") and applies it
            to his beloved, and one of us reads it and applies it to his
            beloved, "that does not make the meaning of the sonnet
            different for us, assuming that we both understand (as of course we
            do) that the text's meaning is not limited to any particular
            exemplification but rather embraces many, many
            exemplifications" (p. 210). That is, the sonnet has a status
            analogous to that of the concept "bicycle," and the two
            applications have a status analogous to that of a three-speed and a
            ten-speed bicycle. Whereas Hirsch formerly considered such
            exemplifications (for that is what these, though not all,
            applications are) part of a text's significance, he now
            considers them part of its meaning. This revision indicates that
            for Hirsch meaning is not the product of a consciousness producing
            an intrinsic genre but of a consciousness communicating something
            broader and more general than an intrinsic genre an
            intention-concept that can have numerous extensions or
            exemplifications, including many that the originating consciousness
            could not have anticipated. Formerly, Hirsch used intrinsic genre
            to describe that sense of the whole which governed the horizon of
            developing meaning and which, when the work was
            completed when all the blanks were filled in gave the
            work its specific determinate meaning. That is, determinacy of
            meaning was in large part a function of narrowing the class of
            implications; when the work was completed, the class of
            implications was restricted to those synonymous with expressed
            meaning. In short, in the old theory, meaning-intention is a
            "narrow," not a broad "concept."
             
            James L. Battersby,professor of English at Ohio State University,
            is the author of Rational Praise and Natural Lamentation: Johnson,
            Lycidas, and Principles of Criticism and Elder Olson: An Annotated
            Bibliography. He is currently at work on a study of the
            relationship between "thought" and structure in various
            genres. James Phelan is associate professor English at Ohio State
            University and the author of Worlds from Words: A Theory of
            language in Fiction. His work in progress concerns character and
            narrative progression.
Michael Leddy
         Validity and Reinterpretation
         In a recent piece in  E. D. Hirsch devotes himself
            to the reinterpretation of a distinction that he first made in 1960
            between meaning and significance. I suspect that it will be a while
            before we feel comfortable deciding what significance
            "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted" (Critical
            Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 202-25) has for us. Indeed, Hirsch
            seems uncertain as to what significance this reinterpretation has
            for him. At first he modestly proposes a "revision of that
            distinction" (p. 202), implying that he will give us
            essentially the same distinction in a somewhat different form, and
            two-thirds into the essay he notes that aside from one change, his
            account of meaning "has stayed what it was" (p. 216).
            Toward the close of the piece, he speaks of his "revised
            account of meaning" (p. 223), but in the next (and final)
            paragraph, he opines that this account is "a new and
            different theory" (p. 223). Yet this is not the last word,
            for Hirsch concludes by talking about "this change in my
            theory" (p. 224), again giving the reader the impression that
            it's still the same old theory, only somewhat different. But
            as Hirsch himself asks, "How far can an existing theory be
            adjusted before it loses its self-identity" (p. 221)? And as
            I will now ask, how well does "Meaning and Significance
            Reinterpreted" cohere with the theory of meaning that Hirsch
            proposes in Validity in Interpretation?The most curious aspect of
            this reinterpretation of meaning and significance is that Hirsch
            remains silent about more fundamental changes in his theory of
            meaning that his revision brings with it. I want to note three such
            changes, which involve key terms in Hirsch's thought either
            dropping out of the argument or finding notably different
            replacements.
             
            Michael Leddyis assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois
            University. He has published on William Burroughs and Geoffrey Hill
            and is currently working on a study of authors, readers, and
            meaning.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
         Coming with Terms to Meaning
         Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge.
            They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an
            earlier, truer Hirsch.
            Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of
            literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a
            literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of
            "bicycle" that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They
            propose that a literary work is "more appropriately conceived
            as … a Schwinn or even a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat
            and two flat tires" (p. 612). They object to my adoption of
            Sir Philip Sidney's claim that literature provides both the
            general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By
            saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and
            confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver,
            an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified" (p.
            613).This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that
            a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be
            dissevered from its particular embodiment.
             
            E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,professor of English at the University of
            Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in
            Interpretationand The Aims of Interpretation. His previous
            contributions to include "Against
            Interpretation?" (June 1983) and "The Politics of
            Theories of Interpretation" (September 1982). His most recent
            contributions is "Meaning and Significance
            Reinterpreted" (December 1984).
Sacvan Bercovitch
         The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History
         For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the
            problem of ideology in American literary history has three
            different though closely related aspects: first, the multivolume
            American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept
            of ideology as a constituent part of literary study, and, finally,
            the current revaluation of the American Renaissance. I select this
            period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and
            the epitome of our literary tradition; because it has become,
            accordingly, the focal point of the critical revision now under way
            in American studies; and because, from either of these
            perspectives, literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly
            fitting subject for the occasion. For one thing, we owe the idea of
            an American Renaissance to F. O. Matthiessen, who was a prime mover
            of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947.
            Moreover, American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist
            criticism. It reset the terms for the study of American literary
            history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired
            the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It
            is not too much to say that Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and
            the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to postwar Europe.
            What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the
            flowering of a new academic field, complete with programs of study,
            periodicals, theses, conferences, and distinguished procession of
            scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg
            Seminar.
            Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if
            American Renaissance marked the seeding-time of a new academic
            field, it was also the harvest of some three decades of literary
            study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen
            acknowledges of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington which is to
            say, the partnership in American Renaissance between the terms
            "literary" and "history"; or, in the words
            of Matthiessen's subtitle, between Art and Expression in the
            Age of Emerson and Whitman:"art," meaning a small group
            of aesthetic masterpieces, and "expression," meaning
            representative works, reflecting and illuminating the culture at
            large. It was the remarkable achievement of Matthiessen that his
            book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept
            seems to support the other. The historical designation American
            seems richer for its association with an aesthetic renaissance;
            Emerson's and Whitman's art gains substance by its
            capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it
            necessary to explain the connection. But we can see in retrospect
            that what made it work what made it, indeed, unnecessary for
            Matthiessen to explain the connection was an established
            consensus, or rather a consensus long in the making, which American
            Renaissance helped establish. I mean a consensus about the term
            "literary" that involved the legitimation of a certain
            canon, and a consensus about the term "history" that
            was legitimated by a certain concept of America.
             
            Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American
            Literature at Harvard University. He is the Author of The Puritan
            Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, among other
            works. He has also edited several collections of essays, most
            recently Reconstructing American Literary History (1986).
Norman N. Holland
         I-ing Film
         Film theorists talk enthusiastically these days in terms of
            semiotics, sutures, and systems of meaning. I think we can usefully
            frame these theories by some evidence as to how some actual readers
            make actual theories from an actual film. To that end, I would like
            to explore here what three people, Agnes, Norm, and Ted, said about
            The Story of O.It seems to me that if any film should demonstrate
            the fixity of semiotic and other codes, surely a pornographic film
            should.
            You might call this essay, then, the story of this I storying three
            other I's storying The Story of O.1 "Storying" is
            Audrey Grant's verb, and by it she intends the representing
            of an event in your own mind and telling somebody about it.2In this
            essay, then, I propose to tell you how I represent in my mind how
            these three individuals represented in their minds The Story of O.
            Sometimes we felt or thought about the film more or less alike, and
            sometimes we squarely contradicted one another. I want to ask two
            questions of these responses. First, how can we relate their
            variety to the singleness of the film? Second, how can we relate
            their variety to the generality of any codes that govern the seeing
            of films?
             
            Norman N. Hollandis Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of
            Florida. His most recent book, The I (1985), develops a widely
            useful model for thinking about humans' perceiving,
            interpreting, reading, and generally I-ing. His most recent
            contribution to  is "Interactive
            Fiction" (with Anthony J. Niesz) in the September 1984 issue.
Geoffrey Ward
         Dying to Write: Maurice Blanchot and Tennyson's "Tithonus"
         The customary assumption about dying is that one would rather not.
            The event of death itself should be postponed for as long as
            possible, and comfort may be gained from doctrines which promise a
            victory over it. We celebrate those who try to cheat it. The dying
            Henry James thought he was Napoleon, and there is something in
            that, over and above the pathos of a wandering mind, that
            exemplifies, however parodically, the mental set we expect to find
            and what we relish in those who attempt to press their own strong
            case against the disintegrative flow of time and change. We assume
            that one should struggle against death, setting such a stamp on
            life that even if the body must die, something the mind has done
            may not. Attitudes that run counter to this stubbornness are
            thought defeatist or unwholesome. In his own decline, Charles
            Baudelaire, catching sight of himself in a mirror, bowed, thinking
            himself a stranger. That confusion is more chilling than
            Jams' because it undermines the treasured integrity of the
            self: it shows that death is not an invader attacking suddenly from
            outside. We are in one sense always in its keeping. In this essay I
            shall argue that whatever revolt against death may catalyse the act
            of writing poetry, poems are intimately tied to death in ways that
            complicate and even undermine that revolt. Indeed, since the
            inception of Romanticism (within which poetry still comes into
            being), a poem in order to be a poem has had to engage not only
            with the fact that in the midst of life we are in its negation, but
            also with death's analogues: madness, trance, divisions and
            questionings of the self. The relationship between poetry and the
            disruption of the customary self may even be celebratory.
            But before investigating the relationship between poetry and death,
            we had better be sure that one can indeed die:
            At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in
            order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would
            seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any
            approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes,
            it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true,
            and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it
            does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which
            is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What
            makes me disappear from the world cannot finds its guarantee there;
            and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This
            explains why no one is linked to death by realcertitude. No one is
            sure of dying.1
            No one can think to cheat death, but to contemplate death is to
            introduce into thought the epitome of doubt. The one thing I can
            never know in advance or know demonstrably, by my very nature and
            by its, is the actual instant of my own death. Conventionally,
            "I will go when my time comes": the phrase gestures
            toward the privacy of each human death, and the Protestant tone of
            "my time" part predestination, part
            ownership barely hides the inaccessibility of death inside
            that privacy. There are two certainties in life. One is that death
            will come. The other is that no one can be sure of this. Perhaps no
            one has truly died yet.
             
            1. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock
            (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982), p. 95; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated SL,will be included in the text.
             
            Geoffrey Ward is lecturer in English at the University of
            Liverpool. He is at present completing his first critical book, The
            Poetry of Estrangement.His published articles include essays on
            symbolism in John Ashbery, Conrad's English, metaphor in
            Shelley's longer poems, the novels of Henry Green, and
            Wyndham Lewis. He has also published five volumes of poetry, mot
            recently Not the Hand Itself(1983).
Charles L. Griswold
         The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall:
            Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography
         My reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) were provoked
            some time ago in a quite natural way, by a visit to the memorial
            itself. I happened upon it almost by accident, a fact that is due
            at least in part to the design of the Memorial itself (see fig. 1).
            I found myself reduced to awed silence, and I resolved to attend
            the dedication ceremony on November 13, 1982. It was an
            extraordinary event, without question the most moving public
            ceremony I have ever attended. But my own experience of the
            Memorial on that and other occasions is far from unique. It is
            almost commonplace among the many visitors to the VVM now the
            most visited of all the memorials in Washington a fact so
            striking as to have compelled journalists, art historians, and
            architects to write countless articles about the monument. And
            although philosophers traditionally have had little to say about
            architecture in general or about that of memorials in particular,
            there is much in the VVM and its iconography worthy of
            philosophical reflection. Self-knowledge includes, I hazard to say,
            knowledge of ourselves as members of the larger social and
            political context, and so includes knowledge of that context.
            Architecture need not memorialize or symbolize anything; or it may
            symbolize, but not in a memorializing way, let alone in a way that
            is tied to a nation'shistory. The structures on the
            Washington Mall belong to a particular species of recollective
            architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is
            prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall
            struggles to the death over values. Still further, the architecture
            by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy. It
            therefore seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in so
            doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth
            recovering. It would thus be a mistake to try to view such
            memorials merely "aesthetically," in abstraction from
            all judgments about the noble and the base. To reflect
            philosophically on specific monuments, as I propose to do here,
            necessarily requires something more than a simply technical
            discussion of the theory of architecture or of the history of a
            given species of architecture. We must also understand the
            monument's symbolism, social context, and the effects its
            architecture works on those who participate in it. That is, we must
            understand the political iconography which shapes and is shaped y
            the public structure in question. To do less than this if I
            may state a complex argument in hopelessly few words is to
            fall short of the demands of true objectivity, of an understanding
            of the whole which the object is. To understand the meaning of the
            VVM requires that we understand, among other things, what the
            memorial means to those who visit it. This is why my observations
            about the dedication of the VVM and about the Memorial's
            continuing power over people play an important role in this essay.
             
            Charles L. Griswold,associate professor of philosophy at Howard
            University, is the author of Self-Knowledge in Plat's
            "Phaedrus"(1986) and has published widely in the areas
            of Greek philosophy, German Idealism, hermeneutics, and political
            philosophy. He is an editor of the Independent Journal of
            Philosophy and a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships.
            Currently he is working on a project which centers on Adam
            Smith's notion of the "self" and Smith's
            relationship to Stoicism and to the American Founding.
Henry Staten
         Conrad's Mortal Word
         Heart of Darkness is the story of a quest for truth but a quest, we
            discover, that is veiled in ironies. But just how radical are these
            ironies? When Marlow tells us that Kurtz's dying whisper
            enunciates a truth, does he give us a solid kernel around which we
            can build our further questioning, concerning, for example, whether
            Marlow preserves or betrays the truth he has been given?"
            This has been the assumption of most critics; regardless of the
            ingenuities by which the varieties of interpretation has shown that
            Marlow in the end lies or does not lie, the axis of interpretation
            has almost always been defined by Kurtz's presumed truth. Why
            should this be so? Why should Kurtz's whisper be more
            significant than, say, the cry of the Intended with which the story
            culminates? But there are presuppositions in force here so strong
            that it seems senseless to ask this question. Classic
            presuppositions: the woman is dominated by emotion and desire, and
            her cry is at the other pole from the nonlibidinal utterance of
            truth. Marlow would agree with this assessment for him, women
            are "out of touch with the truth" which you have to be
            "man enough" to face. So our truth-seeking criticism,
            which doubts much of what Marlow says, does not doubt the terms in
            which Marlow conceives of truth and its authority.
            Let us consider an example of the truth-seeking reading of Heart of
            Darkness,examining the ideology that sanctions this form of
            interpretation and showing how its presuppositions cooperate with
            Marlow's. Our specimen will be a fairly recent PMLA article
            by Garrett Stewart called "Lying as Dying in Heart of
            Darkness." Stewart's "existential" reading
            invokes an economics of truth: Kurtz truthfully confronts death,
            facing and passing judgment upon the corruption of his being that
            emerges as fulfilled in his final moment; Marlow "lives
            through" Kurtz's death and has the opportunity to
            preserve and transmit Kurtz's "legacy of
            insight"; his lie, however, "kills the meaning of a
            death," "squandering … Kurtz's delegated
            revelation on a squeamish deceit."1
             
            1. Garrett Stewart, "Lying as Dying in Heart of
            Darkness," PMLA 95 (May 1980): 330, 329, 326; all further
            references to this essay, abbreviated "L," will be
            included in the text.
             
            Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct
            associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is
            the author of Wittgenstein and Derrida.The present essay is part of
            a book in progress on mourning and idealization in Western
            literature.
Lee Bartlett
         What is "Language Poetry"?
         W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry,
            once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England
            because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction
            to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that
            while in England poets are considered members of a "clerkly
            caste," in America they are an "aristocracy of
            one." Certainly it does seem to be the individual
            poet Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O'Hara,
            Ginsberg who has altered the landscape of American poetry and
            prosody, not the group. And most American literary
            "movements," as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are
            simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together,
            and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument
            over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or
            movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a
            vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American
            poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the
            Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the
            Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel
            from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by
            definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their
            initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a
            school is often a useful fiction (Emerson knew this, as did Pound
            and Rexroth) serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a
            platform for getting a hearing.
            The most recent "group" of American poets the
            first since the anthology wars of the early sixties (when many
            powerful aesthetics were scrambling for position) really to be of
            more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of
            bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and
            poetics is the so-called "Language" school.
            Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group
            number well into three figures now and there have been important
            journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained
            fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the
            essentially hermetic character of the project (which is too
            multifaceted and diffuse to be called a project at all), there has
            been little notice of this activity by academic critics or
            reviewers.1 What I'd like to do here is briefly map a few
            major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical
            and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these
            writers in their ongoing critique of the "workshop
            poem."
             
            1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in
            Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse
            (Cambridge, 1983) and Marjorie Perloff's review "The
            Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,"
            American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 984): 15-22. All further
            references to Perloff's article, abbreviated
            "WS," will be included in the text. For a discussion of
            the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my
            chapter "American Poetry, 1940s to the Present" in
            American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983,ed. Warren French
            (Durham, N.C., 1985), pp. 349-74.
             
            Lee Bartlett,an associate professor of English, has directed the
            University of New Mexico's creative writing program for five
            years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his
            Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary
            Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a
            biography of William Everson.
David Carrier
         The Presentness of Painting: Adrian Stokes as Aestheticism
         Adrian Stokes (1902-72), long admired by a small, highly
            distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to
            Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is
            important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is
            his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a
            challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to
            the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art
            historian is the narrative of "the form, prophet-saviour-
            apostles," in which the first artist poses some problem that
            his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very
            different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that
            plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich's
            narrative antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative,
            nineteenth-century landscape function like Clement
            Greenberg's sequence old master art, early French
            modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg
            disagree about how to narrate art's history and about which
            works to include in that narrative Gombrich asserts that
            cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism
            anticipates Jackson Pollock but in each case, the art
            historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story
            and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks
            the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the
            narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable.
            Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand
            before?
            Stokes' attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a
            tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For
            Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin's sculpture aimed to "refer
            to nothing that lay beyond it." For Ezra Pound, an image
            "is real because we know it directly"; Henri Gaudier-
            Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language
            because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For
            Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue,
            "always there in its entirety before you."2 Such an
            artwork need not be interpreted because it contains "within
            itself all that is relevant to itself."3 All art is
            accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting
            double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even
            from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at
            once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the
            artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner
            points to this issue:
            There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good
            Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do
            better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on
            the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4
             
            1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of
            Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-
            1450 (Oxford, 1971), p. 75.
            2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin,trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil
            (London, 1948), p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New
            York, 1970), p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston,
            1957), p. 174.
            3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London and Glasgow, 1971), p.
            107.
            4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p.
            428.
             
            David Carrier,associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon
            University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood
            in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study
            of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art
            history.
Jerome Christensen
         "Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Deconstruction, Coleridge, and_the
            Apostasy of Criticism
         In his recent book Criticism and Social Change Frank Lentricchia
            melodramatically pits his critical hero Kenneth Burke, advocate of
            the intellect's intervention in social life, against the
            villainous Paul de Man, "undisputed master in the United
            States of what is called deconstruction." Lentricchia charges
            that "the insidious effect of [de Man's] work is not
            the proliferating replication of his way of reading … but the
            paralysis of praxis itself: an effect that traditionalism, with its
            liberal view of the division of culture and political power, should
            only applaud."1 He goes on to prophesy that
            The deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent
            intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only
            embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose
            activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the
            1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax,
            without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower
            despair. [CSC, p. 40]
            Such is Lentricchia's strenuous conjuration of a historical
            moment in which he can forcefully intervene a summons fraught
            with the pathos excited by any reference to the heady days of
            political enthusiasm during the war in Vietnam. Lentricchia
            ominously figures a scene of rueful solitude where de Manian
            lucidity breaks into the big chill. And maybe it will. But
            Lentricchia furnishes no good reason why it should. De Manian
            deconstruction is "deconstructed" by Lentricchia to
            reveal "against apparent intention, a tacit political
            agenda." And this revelation is advertised as a sure
            embarrassment to the younger practitioners of
            deconstruction sweepingly characterized as erstwhile
            political activists who have, wide-eyed, opted for a critical
            approach that magically entangles its proponents in the soul-
            destroying delights of rhetoric and reaction. Left unexamined in
            Lentricchia's story, however, is the basis for the initial
            rapport between radicalism and deconstruction. Why should
            collegiate activists have turned into deconstructionsists? Is not
            that, in Lentricchia's terms, the same question as asking why
            political activists should have turned to literary criticism (or
            indeed literature) at all? If we suppose this original turn (to
            criticism, the deconstruction) to be intentional, how could the
            initiates of this critical approach ever be genuinely betrayedinto
            embarrassment by time or by its herald, Frank Lentricchia? On the
            face of it, the traducement of a secret intention would be unlikely
            to come as a surprise, since deconstructing deconstruction is not
            only the enterprise of Marxist critics like Lentricchia but also of
            Jacques Derrida, archdeconstructor, who unashamedly identified the
            embarrassment of intention as constitutive of the deconstructive
            method. If deconstruction is at once a natural outlet for activists
            and the first step on a slippery slope that ends in apostasy (for
            surely it is that hard word which Lentricchia politely suppresses),
            it suggests a phenomenon with contours more suggestively intricate,
            if not less diabolically seductive, than the program Lentricchia
            outlines. And it is a phenomenon as worrisomely affiliative as it
            is bafflingly intricate. We need to know whether the relations
            between deconstruction and radical politics, between deconstruction
            and apostasy between deconstruction and criticism, and between
            apostasy and criticism are necessary or contingent, or neither and
            both at once.
             
            1. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change(Chicago, 1983),
            p. 38; all further references to this work, abbreviated CSC,will be
            included in the text.
             
            Jerome Christensen,professor of English at the Johns Hopkins
            University, is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of
            Language and the forthcoming Hume's Practice: The Career of
            an Enlightenment Man of Letters. He is currently at work on a study
            of Byron and the issue of strong romanticism.
Stephano Rosso
         An Interview with Paul de Man
         Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between
            your work and Derrida's?
            De Man: I'm not really the right person to ask where the
            difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to
            Derrida, I don't determine whether my work resembles or is
            different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with
            Derrida which I think is typical and important for all that
            relationship (to the extent that I can think or want to think about
            it at all) which followed closely upon my first encounter with him
            in Baltimore at the colloquium on "The Languages of Criticism
            and the Sciences of Man" had not to do with Derrida nor
            with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working
            on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence.
            It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try
            to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis
            between what Derrida does and what I'm doing. And there may
            be something in that difference between us that remained there, to
            the extent that in a very genuine sense not as denegation or
            as false modesty (though whenever one says "not out of
            denegation" one is awaking the suspicion to be even more
            denying than before … so you can't get out of that bind …
            ) my starting  point, as I think I already told you, is not
            philosophical but basically philological and for that reason
            didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon
            texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than
            Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working
            hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than
            that), that the text knows in an absolute way what it's
            doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working
            hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as
            such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated
            way, I would hold to that statement that "the text
            deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive" rather than
            being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the
            outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida's text is
            so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in
            Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn't
            need Rousseau, he doesn't need anybody else; I do need them
            very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always
            through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a
            philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference
            there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to
            see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at
            the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this
            topic (and which are together with an article by Godzich certainly
            the best things that have been written on it) says that Derrida and
            myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the
            most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction:I agree with
            that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this
            particular matter and I don't claim to be on that level …
             
            Stephano Rossoteaches English literature at the University of
            Verona (Italy) and is writing a dissertation in comparative
            literature at SUNY Binghamton. Among other works, he has
            coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e
            letteraturaand Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently
            translating Paul de Man's Resistance to Theory into Italian.
Edwin Martin
         On Seeing Walton's Great-Grandfather
         Kendall Walton says that photographs are "transparent"
            ("Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic
            Realism,"  11 [December 1984]: 246-77). By
            this he means that "we see the world through them" (p.
            251). That is,
            With the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around
            corners and what is distant or small; we can also see into the
            past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty
            snapshots of them…. We see,quite literally, our dead relatives
            themselves when we look at photographs of them. [Pp. 251, 252]
            Walton is explicit on one point: he does not mean merely that we
            have the impression of seeing ancestors, or that photographs
            supplement vision, or that they are duplicates or reproductions or
            substitutes or surrogates. Rather, "the viewer of a
            photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed"
            (p. 252). In what follows I will urge that Walton's argument
            for this view is insufficient.
            Walton is led to his conclusion by an account of the nature of
            seeing. He claims that "part of what it is to see something
            is to have visual experiences which are cause by it in a purely
            mechanical manner" (p. 261). The mechanical connection is
            important here. For "to perceive things is to be in
            contactwith them in a certain way. A mechanical connection with
            something, like that of photography, counts as contact" (pp.
            269-70). Paintings and other "handmade" representations
            fail to have the required mechanical connection; they are humanly
            mediated rather than mechanically produced. Consequently, Walton
            thinks, paintings are not transparent. On the other hand,
            "objects cause their photographs and the visual experiences
            of viewers mechanically." And "so we see the objects
            through the photographs" (p. 261).
             
            Edwin Martin is associate professor of philosophy at Indiana
            University. He is currently completing a photographic portrait of
            American tent circus life.
Kendall L. Walton
         Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin_Martin
         My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I
            see him occasionally when I look at photographs of him. They
            are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs
            they are transparent. We see things through them.
            Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing
            examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent,
            and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and
            photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far as
            photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The
            examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the
            reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be
            disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of
            (ordinary) photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility
            of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the
            issue before us and the nature of my claim.
            To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences
            caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial.
            It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are
            needed not all causes of one's visual experiences are
            objects of sight although exactly what the required
            restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important
            restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent
            of human action ("mechanical," if you like), in a sense
            which I explained (pp. 263-64). This, I argued, is what
            distinguishes photographs from "handmade" pictures,
            which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused
            just as "mechanically" as ordinary photographs are. So
            are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail
            to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are
            the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms,
            footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we
            obviously do not see the causes of these things through them,
            Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary
            photographs?
             
            Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts
            (forthcoming). His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,"Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic
            Realism," appeared in the December 1984 issue.
Richard Stern
         Penned In
         "Writers don't have tasks," said Saul Bellow in a
            Q-and-A. "They have inspiration."
            Yes, at the typewriter, by the grace of discipline and the Muse,
            but here, on Central Park South, in the Essex House's bright
            Casino on the Park, inspiration was not running high.
            Not that attendance at the forty-eight PEN conference was a task.
            It was rather what Robertson Davies called
            "collegiality." "A week of it once every five
            years," he said, "should be enough." He, Davies,
            had checked in early, Saturday afternoon, and attended every
            session. In black overcoat and black fur cap, he had a theatrical,
            Man-Who-Came-to-Dinner look. (He'd been an actor and worked
            in Minneapolis with the Guthrie Theater.) In the lobby he made a
            great impression.
            Why not? After all, weren't writers here to be seen as well
            as to see each other, to make as well as take impressions? A month
            before, I'd spent a couple of hours at the Modern Language
            Association convention. There were thousands and thousands of
            scholars and critics there. Some of the most noted make a career of
            squeezing authors out of their texts. An author, wrote one tutelary
            divinity, "constitutes the privileged moment of
            individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, [and]
            literature…."1 Not content with auctoricide,
            deconstructionist critics went after texts. "Il n'y a
            pas de hors-texte."2 Since there's nothing that
            doesn't belong to the text, texts are interchangeable. And
            it's not that superfluous, mythical being, the author, who
            decides they are, but his readers, at least those readers capable
            of erecting on his miserable pedestal the poem, the story,
            the novel a memorable explication.
            Ah well, was my thought, for some people a corpse will serve as
            well as a person. Indeed, for intellectual undertakers, hit-men,
            and cannibals, as well as for those who suffer the tyranny of
            authority, corpses are preferable to their living simulacra.
            Few authors at the PEN conference were troubled by these critical
            corpse-makers. They were here to see the authors behind the books
            they'd read, to swap stories and opinions, and to make clear
            to each other what splendid thinkers and noble humans they were
            outside of the poems and stories which had brought them here in the
            middle of winter and New York. In this city, more than any other in
            the history of the word, the word had been turned into gold. If one
            were going to abandon the typewriter for the podium, what better
            place to do it?
             
            In 1985, Richard Stern was given the Medal of Merit, awarded every
            six years to a novelist by the American Academy and Institute of
            Arts and Letters. He is the author of, among other works, the
            novels A Father's Words(1986), Other Men's Daughters
            (1973), and Stitch (1965). His third "orderly
            miscellany," The Position of the Body,will be published in
            September 1986. This essay is part of a longer work. Stern is
            professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Peter Schwenger
         Writing the Unthinkable
         It was a novel, among other things, which originated the atomic
            bomb. H. G. Wells dedicated The World Set Free,published in 1913,
            to Frederick Soddy, a pioneer in the exploration of radioactivity.
            Using Soddy's research as a base, Wells predicted the advent
            of artificial radioactivity in 1933, the year in which it actually
            took place; and he foresaw its use for what he named the
            "atomic bomb." In Wells' novel these bombs are
            used in a world war that erupts in mid-century and is so
            catastrophic that a world government is formed, initiating a new
            age powered by the peaceful use of the atom. The physicist Leo
            Szilard, a long-time admirer of Wells, read this novel in 1932, the
            year before he first intuited the possibility of a nuclear chain
            reaction. The novel seems to have become part of his own mental
            chain reaction. One that took place at an almost unconscious level
            during the spring that Szilard spent at the Strand Palace Hotel in
            London, by his own admission doing nothing. He would only
            monopolize the bath from around nine to twelve in the morning,
            since "there is no place as good to think as a
            bathtub."1 The theories that resulted from this prolonged
            immersion were introduced by references to Wells; and Szilard,
            having realized the atomic bomb, spent the rest of his life trying
            to realize the world government which, in the Wells novel, was its
            consequence.
            Literature, which was part of the genesis of nuclear weaponry,
            continues to be an inextricable aspect of its nature. For Derrida,
            in fact, we are facing
            a phenomenon whose essential feature is that of being fabulously
            textual,through and through. Nuclear weaponry depends, more than
            any weaponry in the past, it seems, upon structures of information
            and communication, structures of language, including non-
            vocalizable language, structures of codes and graphic decoding. But
            the phenomenon if fabulously textual also to the extent that, at
            the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk
            and write about it.2
            The linguistic nature of the arms race, of peace talks and
            negotiations, has been thoroughly analyzed. Likewise there is a
            growing number of books on the nature of nuclear war. But there is
            also a growing body of novels, poems, and plays making up a
            literature of nuclear holocaust. As the example of Wells'
            novel shows, this is not altogether unprecedented; nuclear
            literature predates Hiroshima. But the subject of nuclear war has,
            up till now, mainly served the purposes of science fiction; only
            rarely as in the cases of A Canticle for Leibowitz and On the
            Beach have science fiction authors risen above the lowest
            common denominator of that genre. In the 1980s, every year sees the
            publication of works which demand serious attention both as
            literature and as fictive strategies for comprehending a subject
            that is commonly called "unthinkable." Russell
            Hoban's Riddley Walker,Bernard Malamud's God's
            Grace,Maggie Gee's The Burning Book,Tim O'Brien's
            Nuclear Age these works explicitly preoccupied with nuclear
            holocaust may be supplemented by other works of the eighties with a
            persistent apocalyptic undertone, works such as Doris
            Lessing's Canopus in Argos series, Umberto Eco's Name
            of the Rose,and Mario Vargas Llosa's War of the End of the
            World. And these are only the literary manifestations of a
            widespread movement in all the arts aimed at expressing the
            dominant condition of our time.3
             
            1. Leo Szilard, Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts: Selected
            Recollections and Correspondence,ed. Spencer R. Weart and Gertrud
            Weiss Szilard (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 19.
            2. Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed
            ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)," Diacritics 14
            (Summer 1984), p. 23.
            3. Examples can be found in painting (Robert Rosenquist, Five New
            Clear Women), mixed media (Robert Morris, Restless Sleepers/Atomic
            Shroud), opera (Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach), oratorio
            (Michael Berkeley and Ian MacEwan, Or Shall We Die?), dance (Danny
            Grossman, Endangered Species), film (Testament), television (The
            Day After), and popular music (U-2, Unforgettable Fire).
             
            Peter Schwenger is associate professor of English at Mount St.
            Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The author of Phallic
            Critiques: Masculinity and Twentieth-Century Literature,he is
            working on a book-length study of nuclear holocaust literature.
Mary Ann Caws
         Literal or Liberal: Translating Perception
         Any even cursory examination of what it is to exchange words about
            X or to exchange views about Y requires hard thought about what it
            is to exchange,period. How do we invest in what we give out, and
            how do we get it back? In kind, or differently moneyed? And, more
            crucial to the topic into which I am about to make a foolhardy
            plunge, is there such a thing as free exchange? And if so, what is
            it worth?
            How do we perceive worth anyway? What relation does such perception
            of the invisible system of the initially visible coinage of
            exchange bear to present visual perception, and then to seeing? And
            what does perception matter anyway, in relation to writing,
            reading, and exchanging words? Which is primary?
            All these questions in their institutional setting, or then
            in their freedom from context can themselves be related to
            and gathered up into the notion of translation, or the carrying
            over from one side to, and into, another. All we can learn about
            speaking and the ways it is taught, reading and the ways we learn
            it, seeing and the ways it teaches us is translated and transported
            from sight and its constraints and choices to language and its own.
            How we read both is itself a subject of choice and constraint, of
            freedom and explicit value-placing, of variety and fidelity to
            certain ends.
             
            Mary Ann Caws is professor of English, French, and comparative
            literature in the Graduate School, City University of New York. She
            is past president of the Modern Language Association and the author
            of, among other works, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception,
            Mannerist to Modern (1981), Architextures in Surrealism and After
            (1981), Reading Frames in Modern Fiction (1985), and Interferences
            (in progress).
Dorothy Mermin
         The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman_Poet
         The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets.
            For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic
            selves Tennyson's Mariana and Lady of Shalott,
            Browning's Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold's Iseult of
            Brittany represent an intensification of only a part of the
            poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is
            defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the
            great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not
            write their own poems; the male poet, who stands outside the
            private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott
            could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine
            the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman
            poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and
            isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the
            Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her
            own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent
            withdrawal from the public sphere (although honor and fame might in
            time return him to it), but for a woman it meant just the opposite:
            a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine
            world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and
            create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this
            set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-
            conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not
            serve as a figure for the poet. (When Elizabeth Bishop makes the
            reversal in "The Gentleman of Shalott" the result is a
            very un-Victorian sort of comedy.) We can formulate the problem
            like this: a man's poem which contains a female self-
            projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and
            projection; in a woman's poem on the same model, the two
            would blur into one.
            Furthermore, it's not really poets that are women, for the
            Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man
            arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force
            when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic
            intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan's
            Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the
            sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw
            in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn't write poems
            because she isa poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of
            Barrett Browning's works that "a woman and her book are
            identical." In her love letters Barrett Browning herself
            worried about the problem of her identity was she her poems,
            were they she, which was Browning in love with? "I love your
            verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," he had written
            disconcertingly in his first letter, "… and I love you
            too." […] As we can see in Tennyson's The Princess, the
            lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians private,
            nonlogical, purely emotional and it is surely no accident
            that large numbers of English and American women began to publish
            poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its
            dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be
            morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private
            sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for
            overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to
            write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly
            difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional
            Victorian femininity narcissism, passivity, submission,
            silence most inimical to creative activity. Since women
            already are the objects they try to create, why should they write?
             
            9. John Woolford points this out in "EBB: Woman and
            Poet," Browning Society Notes9 (Dec. 1979): 4.
             
            Dorothy Merminis professor and chairman in the department of
            English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in
            the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth
            Barrett Browning.
Robert P. Harrison
         The Italian Silence
         During the latter half of the thirteenth century there arose around
            Tuscany a strange and unprecedented poetry, erudite, abstract, and
            arrogantly intellectual. It sang beyond courtly conventions about
            the wonders of the rational universe whose complex secrets the new
            speculative sciences were eagerly systematizing. Appropriating the
            language of natural philosophy, Aristotelian psychology, and even
            theology, love poetry developed a new theoretical understanding of
            its enterprise which allowed it to redefine love as spiritualized
            search for knowledge. This intellectualization of erotic desire
            culminates in the Florentine sitlnovisti, a handful of learned
            poets who turned love poetry into an eclectic philosophical affair.
            Guido Cavalcanti's famous canzone "Donna me
            prega" was universally considered to be not only the
            technically most perfect canzone ever written but also a rigorous
            philosophical treatise. As much as in our own day, exegeses of the
            poem were forced into the arcana of Scholastic Aristotelianism in
            order to make sense of its abstract, psychologistic definition of
            love's essence. While Cavalcanti lyricized an Averroistic
            logic of the unified intellect, his younger friend Dante was
            preparing to put all of medieval philosophy, theology, and science
            into terza rima.It was in this terza rima that medieval Paris found
            perhaps its most felicitous expression, for the Divine
            Comedyrepresents, among other things, a creative transfiguration of
            the critical discourses Paris was diffusing throughout Europe.
            What recalls that situation today is the way Paris again marks the
            center of critical thought, while in Italiy a new generation of
            poets has emerged that translates the lessons of contemporary
            philosophy into poetry. In this essay I plan to discuss some of the
            most radical or, by analogy, "stilnovistic" of these
            lyricists. For purposes of convenience I will refer to them as the
            "favorite malice" poets. The phrase comes from the
            title of an anthology of select contemporary Italian poetry,
            recently published in a bilingual English edition: The Favorite
            Malice: Ontology and Reference in Contemporary Italian Poetry.2 The
            title alludes to a passage of Friedrich Nietzsche: "It is my
            favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to betray
            itself through silence." These words from Thus Spoke
            Zarathrustra ("Upon the Mount of Olives") serves as the
            anthology's epigraphs and signal the peculiar poetics that
            brings the poets together in one volume. They are not brought
            together as a "school" but as a loose convergence of
            individual practices. The most illustrious name among the group is
            that of Andrea Zanzotto (born 1921), who belongs to an older
            generation but whom the other poets call their "youngest
            traveling companion." The "older" companions
            include Nanni Cagnone, Luigi Ballerini, Raffaele Perrotta, and
            Angelo Lumelli.
             
            Robert P. Harrison is assistant professor of Italian at Stanford
            University. He has published a book of poems, The Murano Workshop
            (1979), and articles on Dante, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and liberal
            philology. The Body of Beatriceis the title of his work in
            progress.
Jane Tompkins
         "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History
         This essay enacts a particular instance of the challenge post-
            structuralism poses to the study of history. In simpler, language,
            it concerns the difference that point of view makes when people are
            giving account of events, whether at first or second hand. The
            problem is that if all accounts of events are determined through
            and through by the observer's frame of reference, then one
            will never know, in any given case, what really happened.
            I encountered this problem in concrete terms while preparing to
            teach a course in colonial American literature. I'd set out
            to learn what I could about the Puritans' relations with
            American Indians. All I wanted was a general idea of what had
            happened between the English settlers and the natives in
            seventeenth-century New England; post-structuralism and its
            dilemmas were the furthest things from my mind. I began, more or
            less automatically, with Perry Miller, who hardly mentions the
            Indians at all, then proceeded to the work of historians who had
            dealt exclusively with the European-Indian encounter. At first, it
            was a question of deciding which of these authors to believe, for
            it quickly became apparent that there was no unanimity on the
            subject. As I read one, however, I discovered that the problem was
            more complicated than deciding whose version of events was correct.
            Some of the conflicting accounts were not simply contradictory,
            they were completely incommensurable, in that their assumptions
            about what counted as a valid approach to the subject, and what the
            subject itself was, diverged in fundamental ways. Faced with an
            array of mutually irreconcilable points of view, points of view
            which determined what was being discussed as well as the terms of
            the discussion, I decided to turn to primary sources for
            clarification, only to discover that the primary sources reproduced
            the problem all over again. I found myself, in other words, in an
            epistemological quandary, not only unable to decide among
            conflicting versions of events but also unable to believe that any
            such decision could, in principle, be made. It was a moral quandary
            as well. Knowledge of what really happened when the Europeans and
            the Indians first met seemed particularly important, since the
            result of that encounter was virtual genocide. This was the kind of
            past "mistake" which, presumably, we studied history in
            order to avoid repeating. If studying history couldn't put us
            in touch with actual events and their causes, then what was to
            prevent such atrocities from happening again?
             
            Jane Tompkinsis professor of English at Duke University. She is the
            author of Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American
            Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985) and editor of Reader-Response Criticism:
            From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (1980). Her current work
            concerns the construction of male identity in American popular
            culture.
Christopher L. Miller
         Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology
         Literary criticism at the present moment seems ready to open its
            doors once again to the outside world, even if that world is only a
            series of other academic disciplines, each cloistered in its own
            way. For the reader of black African literature in French, the
            opening comes none too soon. The program for reading Camara Laye,
            Ahmadou Kourouma, and Yambo Ouologuem should never have been the
            program prescribed for Rousseau, Wordsworth, or Blanchot. If one is
            willing to read a literature that might not be a rewriting  of
            Hegel (or even of Kant), and if the negative knowledge of recent
            theoretical criticism is questioned in the universality of its
            applications, then what is really open to a Western reader of non-
            Western literature? Claiming a break with his/her own culture and
            critical upbringing, can he/she the Other, the African, as if from
            an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in
            African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?
            The goal of breaking through the nets of Western criticism, of
            reading African literature in a nonethnocentric, nonprojective
            fashion, will remain both indisputably desirable and ultimately
            unattainable. No matter how many languages I learn or ethnologies I
            study, I cannot make myself into an African. The Western
            scholar's claim to mastery of things African, albeit
            motivated by xenophilia rather than xenophobia, risks subjugation
            of the object to a new set of Western models. J. P. Makouta-
            M'Boukou rightly scolds Western critics who refuse to take
            into account the distance between themselves and African culture,
            and who read African literature only in function of their own
            cultural context.1 Wole Soyinka, more forbiddingly, complains:
            "We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit
            ourselves to a second epoch of colonisation this time by a
            universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals
            whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension
            of their world and their history, their social neuroses and
            theirvalue systems."2
             
            1. See J. P. Makouta-M'Boukou, Introduction à l'étude
            du roman négro-africain de langue française(Abidjan, Ivory Coast,
            1980), p. 9.
            2. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World
            (Cambridge, 1976), p. x.
             
            Christopher L. Miller,Charles B. G. Murphy Assistant Professor of
            French and of African and Afro-American Studies at Yale University,
            is author of Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (1985).
            He is working at present on a study of francophone black African
            literature, for which he will have a Fulbright Africa Research
            grant.
Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon
         No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and_History_in_Derrida's_"Le
            Dernier Mot du Racisme"
         As it stands, Derrida's protest is deficient in any sense of
            how the discourses of South African racism have been at once
            historically constituted and politically constitutive. For to begin
            to investigate how the representation of racial difference has
            functioned in South Africa's political and economic life, it
            is necessary to recognize and track the shifting character of these
            discourses. Derrida, however, blurs historical differences by
            conferring on the single term apartheid a spurious autonomy and
            agency: "The word concentrates separation…. By isolating
            being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word
            corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation" (p. 292).
            Is it indeed the word, apartheid, or is it Derrida himself,
            operating here in "another regime of abstraction" (p.
            292), removing the word from its place in the discourse of South
            African racism, raising it to another power, and setting separation
            itself apart? Derrida is repelled by the word, yet seduced by its
            divisiveness, the division in the inner structure of the term
            itself which he elevates to a state of being.
            The essay's opening analysis of the word apartheid is, then,
            symptomatic of a severance of word from history. When Derrida asks,
            "Hasn't apartheid always been the archival record of
            the unnameable?" (p. 291), the answer is a straightforward
            no. Despite its notoriety and currency overseas, the term
            apartheidhas not always been the "watchword" of the
            Nationalist regime. (p. 291). It has its own history, and that
            history is closely entwined with a developing ideology of race
            which has not only been created to deliberately rationalize and
            temper South Africa's image at home and abroad, but can also
            be seen to be intimately allied to different stages of the
            country's political and economic development. Because he
            views apartheid as a "unique appellation" (p. 291),
            Derrida has little to say about the politically persuasive function
            that successive racist lexicons have served in South Africa. To
            face the challenge of investigating the strategic role of
            representation, one would have to part ways with him by releasing
            that pariah of a word, apartheid,from its quarantine from
            historical process, examining it instead in the context of
            developing discourses of racial difference.
             
            Anne McClintock is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia
            University. She is working on a dissertation on race and gender in
            British imperial culture and is the author of a monograph on Simon
            de Beauvoir. Rob Nixon,in the same program at Columbia, is working
            on the topic of exile and Third World-metropolitan relations in the
            writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul.
Jacques Derrida
         But, beyond ... (Open Letter to Anne McClintock_and_Rob_Nixon)
         Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious
            objections to make to me, as I will try to demonstrate in a moment.
            So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only
            pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong
            the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal?
            That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or
            so pages. My suspicion arose since you obviously agree with me on
            this one point, at least: apartheid,the more it's talked
            about, the better.
            But who will do the talking? And how? These are the questions.
            Because talking about it is not enough. On such a grave subject,
            one must be serious and not say just anything. Well, you, alas, are
            not always as serious as the tone of your paper might lead one to
            think. In your impatient desire to dispense a history lesson, you
            sometimes say just anything. The effect you produce is quite
            determined, but in order to arrive at it, you are willing to put
            forward any kind of countertruth, especially when, in your haste to
            object,you projectinto my text whatever will make your job easier.
            This is a very familiar scenario, as I will try to demonstrate as
            briefly as possible.
             
            Jacques Derrida,Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes
            Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of
            Philosophy,and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to
            ,"Racism's Last Word," appeared
            in the Autumn 1985 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami
            University, Ohio. She is the authorFictions of Feminine Desire.
Tzvetan Todorov
         "Race," Writing, and Culture
         "Racism" is the name given to a type of behavior which
            consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other
            people on account of physical differences (other than those of sex)
            between them and oneself. It should be noted that this definition
            does not contain the word "race," and this observation
            leads us to the first surprise in this area which contains many:
            whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon,
            "race" itself does not exist! Or, to put it more
            clearly: there are a great number of physical differences among
            human groups, but these differences cannot be superimposed; we
            obtain completely divergent subdivisions of the human species
            according to whether we base our description of the
            "races" on an analysis of their epidermis or their
            blood types, their genetic heritages or their bone structures. For
            contemporary biology, the concept of "race" is
            therefore useless. This fact has no influence, however, on racist
            behavior: to justify their contempt or aggressiveness, racists
            invoke not scientific analyses but the most superficial and
            striking of physical characteristics (which, unlike
            "races," do exist) namely, differences in skin
            color, pilosity, and body structure.
            Thus, it is with good cause that the word "race" was
            placed in quotes in the title of this issue: "races" do
            not exist. I am less sure, however, that all the contributors
            managed to avoid postulating the existence, behind this word as
            behind most words, of a thing. In his introduction Gates remarks
            that "race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective term
            of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope," and
            he goes on to describe as follows the goal of the special issue:
            "to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference
            inscribed in the trope of race, to explicate discourse itself in
            order to reveal the hidden relations of power and knowledge
            inherent in popular and academic usages of &lsquo;race'
            " ("Writing &lsquo;Race' and the Difference It
            Makes," pp. 5, 6). Up to a point, I agree with him, even if I
            cannot help pointing out (cultural difference oblige) the insistent
            allusions to certain contemporary critical theories
            ("deconstruct" and "difference,"
            "power" and "knowledge") allusions
            which furnish proof that the author of these lines possesses a
            particular knowledge and thereby sets up a particular power
            relationship between himself and the reader. This, however, is not
            the problem. The problem arises on page 15, when the same author
            declares, "We must, I believe, analyze the ways in which
            writing relates to race, how attitudes toward racial differences
            generate and structure literary texts by us and about us."
            What bothers me about this sentence is not so much that
            "generate" and "structure" allude to yet
            another critical theory as that its author seems to be reinstating
            what he himself referred to as the "dangerous trope" of
            "race": if "racial differences" do not
            exist, how can they possibly influence literary texts?
             
            Tzvetan Todorov works at the Centre National de la Recherche
            Scientifique in Paris. His most recent book in translation is The
            Conquest of America (1984). Criticism of Criticism is forthcoming.
            Loulou Mack is a free-lance writer and translator living in Paris.
Houston A. Baker, Jr.
         Caliban's Triple Play
         One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of
            academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of
            duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might
            arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled
            rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by
            traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider
            themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky
            mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time
            among mirrors, listening to explanations from the overseers,
            attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide
            acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on
            discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological
            inscriptions of a given discourse its situation on what Amiri
            Baraka calls the "real side" of economic exchange and
            world exploitative power rationalists are concerned to study
            discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms
            and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of
            ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a
            thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker's passion is
            palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the
            invisible man's tormentor, to "Get hot, boy! Get
            hot!" Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear
            to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and
            intelligently unflappable in their analyses.
            This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts
            a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my
            opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two
            actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual
            approaches to a common subject namely, notions of duality. My
            claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse,
            devoted to, say, "the Other" and conceived in dualistic
            terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos
            whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other's
            sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to
            discover the dynamics of "othering" engaged in by a
            self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully
            analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by
            their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field (indeed,
            one might say, after the manner of deconstruction, a field full of
            Western metaphysical folk).
             
            Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of
            Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet
            whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is
            also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature
            and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem
            Renaissance.
Harold Fromm
         The Hegemonic Form of Othering; or, The Academic's_Burden
         I knew I was in for trouble, that the going would be rough, when I
            removed the wrapper from the "Race," Writing, and
            Difference issue of  and observed the word
            "race" in quotation marks. Something deep was clearly
            brewing. And any doubts were quickly removed when I turned to the
            opening remarks of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. "Who," he
            asked me, "has seen a black or a red person, a white yellow,
            or brown?" ("Writing &lsquo;Race' and the
            Difference It Makes," p. 6). There was a question that
            spelled trouble, a glove in the face if I ever saw one. Here I was,
            crude, unregenerate, lacking the hypersensitivity that prevents
            someone like Gates from making such infra dig distinctions; here I
            was, daring to use words without quotation marks, actually
            believing that I referred to something identifiable when I spoke of
            black people, Americans, musicians, and whatnot, and being told
            that it was all just my own narcissistic and preemptive fantasy.
            Here I was, faced with the impossible choice of keeping permanently
            quiet or of perpetuating ruthless violence of denying the
            individuality of all of God's creation not only by
            referring to knives, cats, my brother, or Indians, but simply by
            referring at all. But why, I wondered, was only the word
            "race" in quotation marks? Why not every single word in
            the entire issue of ? For to refer, it seems, is to
            colonize, to take things over for one's own brutal use, to
            turn everything else into a mere Other. There was Gates engaging in
            the academic's favorite pastime, épater les bourgeois, and
            here was I, a hopeless bourgeois, just asking for a put-down.
             
            Harold Fromm is an independent scholar who has taught for many
            years in university English departments. He has published articles
            on Leonard and Virginia Woolf as well as on literary theory,
            politics, and professionalism. His most recent work concerns the
            Brontës.
Mary Louise Pratt
         A Reply to Harold Fromm
         Though I doubt it has put a Rolls Royce in anybody's garage,
            the criticism industry is a reality not to be overlooked. Academics
            have a responsibility to stay self-aware and self-critical about
            their own and their profession's interests. All academic
            activity has a careerist dimension, but it obviously cannot be
            explained by that dimension alone, and in this sense Fromm's
            point is simply reductive. But of course it is not all academic
            activity that Fromm is objecting to, only some and notably mine.
            The image of academic colonization suggests one has stepped beyond
            some legitimate borders and laid claim to territory rightfully
            inhabited by others. Whose world was invaded by my essay, or by the
            "Race," Writing, and Difference issue in general? Mr.
            Fromm's, evidently. Fromm wants a world where words stand
            still and refer, and don't get changed. In particular, to use
            his own examples, he wants a world where blacks are blacks, whites
            are whites, Americans are Americans, knives are knives, brothers
            are brothers, and Indians are Indians (Is it the wild west? or
            maybe just Chicago).
             
            Mary Louise Prattis an associate professor in the Department of
            Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in Comparative Literature at
            Stanford University. She is the author of Toward a Speech-Act
            Theory of Literary Discourse.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
         Talkin' That Talk
         Our decision to bracket "race" was designed to call
            attention to the fact that "races," put simply, do not
            exist, and that to claim that they do, for whatever misguided
            reason, is to stand on dangerous ground. Fromm understands this all
            too well, it seems, judging from the satirical tone of his
            response. Were there not countries in which the belief in racial
            essences dictates social and political policy, perhaps I would have
            found Fromm's essay amusing and our gesture merely one more
            token of the academic's tendency to create distinctions which
            common sense alone renders unnecessary. The joke, rather, is on
            Fromm: one's task is most certainly not to remain
            "permanently quiet"; rather, our task is to utilize
            language more precisely, to rid ourselves of the dangers of
            careless usages of problematic terms which are drawn upon to
            delimit and predetermine the lives and choices of human beings who
            are not "white." Fromm's response only reinforces
            Todorov's worry about not bracketing "race" every
            time it occurs in our texts, because "race" (as each
            essay subtly shows) simply does not exist.
             
            Henry Louis Gates, Jr.is professor of English, comparative
            literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has
            edited several books and has written Figures in Black and The
            Signifying Monkey.
Françoise Meltzer
         Editor's Introduction: Partitive Plays, Pipe Dreams
         There is the famous anecdote about Freud: upon being reminded by a
            disciple that to smoke cigars is clearly a phallic activity, Freud,
            cigar in hand, is said to have responded, "Sometimes a good
            cigar is just a good cigar." The anecdote demonstrates, it
            seems to me, a problematic central to psychoanalysis: the
            discipline which insists on transference and, perhaps even more
            significantly, on displacement as fundamental principles,
            ultimately must insist in turn on seeing everything as being
            "really" something else. Such an ideology of
            metamorphosis is so much taken for granted that unlike the rest of
            the world, which generally has difficulty in being convinced that a
            pipe, for example, is not necessarily a pipe at all, psychoanalysis
            needs at times to remind itself, in a type of return to an
            adaequatio, that it is possible for a cigar really to be a cigar.
            Psychoanalysis, in other words, has not only an economy which is
            hydraulic (mirroring the nineteenth-century physics from which it
            springs), but has as well an economy of seepage: each apparent
            object, whether in dream, literature, or psychic narrative,
            splashes over onto at least one "something else." Not
            only is there always a remainder, but the remainder generally
            proliferates, multiplies, from more than one quotient, such that
            the original "thing" in question becomes merely the
            agent for production. Its status as thing-in-the-world is easily
            lost.
            Such seepage has, of course, appeared almost everywhere.
            Psychoanalysis has infiltrated such diverse areas as literature (to
            which it owes its myths), linguistics, philosophy, anthropology,
            history, feminism, psychology, archeology, neurology, to name some.
            And it is in the notion of "some," perhaps, that lies
            the crux of the problem. For there is in psychoanalysis an overt
            conviction that it exists as the ultimate totality, of which
            everything else is a part. Not content to see itself as one in a
            number of enterprises, the psychoanalytic project has at its
            foundation a vision of itself as the meaning which will always lie
            in wait; the truth which lies covered by "the rest."
            Jacques Derrida has, of course, pointed to this tendency.
            Psychoanalysis, he noted, wishes a peculiar logic for itself, one
            in which "the species would include the genus."1
            Moreover, says Derrida in the same essay, once psychoanalysis has
            discovered itself, what it then again proceeds to discover around
            it is always itself.2 What happens, then, is that psychoanalysis
            becomes a ubiquitous subject, assimilating every object into
            itself. But it is also a Subject which sees itself as omnipresent,
            omniscient, and without a center precisely the terms in which
            God has been described. It is not then by chance that the
            unconscious is likened to a divinity: always present but revealing
            itself only obliquely and at privileged moments, the unconscious
            takes the place of the Judeo-Christian God. It is within every
            being, but inaccessible unless it "chooses" to manifest
            itself. And in a peculiar reversal of the notion of the partitive,
            psychoanalysis would have the unconscious reveal itself in fleeting
            moments and fragments, thereby suggesting its fullness and
            totality; and it would have "other" intellectual
            enterprises be only apparent totalities which are revealed through
            psychoanalysis alone to be "really" incomplete because
            they exist without recognizing the unconscious and its mother,
            psychoanalysis itself.
             
            1. Jacques Derrida, "Graphesis," "The Purveyor of
            Truth," trans. Willis Dominggo et al., Yale French Studies52
            (1975): 32.
            2. See the syllogism with which Derrida opens his "Purveyor
            of Truth," p. 31. Part of what I am calling the
            "syllogism" appears at the beginning of Stephen
            Melville's article in the present issue.
Dominick LaCapra
         History and Psychoanalysis
         The focus of this essay will be on Freud, although my approach is
            informed by certain aspects of "post-Freudian"
            analysis. In the works of Freud, however, history in the ordinary
            sense often seems lost in the shuffle between ontogeny and
            phylogeny. When Freud, in the latter part of his life, turned to
            cultural history, he was primarily concerned with showing how the
            evolution of civilization on a macrological level might be
            understood through or even seen as an enactment
            of psychoanalytic principles and processes. And he openly
            acknowledged the speculative nature of his inquiry into prehistory,
            "archaic" society, and their putative relation to the
            civilizing process.
            One might nonetheless argue that throughout Freud's work
            there are theoretical bases and fruitful leads for a more delimited
            investigation of specific historical processes for which
            documentation is, to a greater or lesser extent, available. This
            kind of investigation is, moreover, required to test the pertinence
            of Freud's speculative and at times quasi-mythological
            initiatives. At present one can perhaps do little more than
            tentatively suggest how such an investigation might proceed and the
            sorts of issues it might conceivably illuminate. For its
            elaboration has been relatively underdeveloped in the research of
            those who looks to Freud for guidance.
             
            Dominick LaCapra is GGoldwin Smith Professor of European
            Intellectual History at Cornell University. His most recent books
            are "Madame Bovary" on Trial(1982), Rethinking
            Intellectual History (1983), and History and Criticism (1985). He
            has just completed a book-length manuscript entitled
            "History, Politics, and the Novel."
Arnold I. Davidson
         How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A_Reading_of_Freud's_Three
            Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
         I have two primary aims in the following paper, aims that are
            inextricably intertwined. First, I want to raise some
            historiographical and epistemological issues about how to write the
            history of psychoanalysis. Although they arise quite generally in
            the history of science, these issues have a special status and
            urgency when the domain is the history of psychoanalysis. Second,
            in light of the epistemological and methodological orientation that
            I am going to advocate, I want to begin a reading of Freud's
            Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,one whose specificity is a
            function of my attachment to this orientation, to a particular way
            of doing the history of psychoanalysis. Despite the enormous number
            of pages that have been written on Freud's Three Essays,it is
            very easy to underestimate the density of this book, a density at
            once historical, rhetorical, and conceptual. This underestimation
            stems in part from historiographical presumptions that quite
            quickly misdirect us away from the fundamental issues.
            In raising question about the historiography of the history of
            science, I obviously cannot begin at the beginning. So let me begin
            much further along, with the writings of Michel Foucault. I think
            of the works of Foucault, in conjunction with that of Gaston
            Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, as exemplifying a very
            distinctive perspective about how to write the history of science.
            In the English-speaking world, perhaps only the work of Ian Hacking
            both shares this perspective and ranks with its French counterparts
            in terms of originality and quality. No brief summary can avoid
            eliding the differences between Bachelard, Canguilhem, Hacking, and
            Foucault; indeed, the summary I am going to produce does not even
            fully capture Foucault's perspective, which he called
            "archaeology."1 But this sketch will have to do for the
            purposes I have in mind here, whose ultimate aim is to reorient our
            approach to the history of psychoanalysis.
             
            1. The sketch that follows reproduces, with some omissions and
            additions, the beginning of my "Archeology, Genealogy,
            Ethics," in Michel Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Hoy
            (London, 1986), pp. 221-34.
             
            Arnold I. Davidsonis assistant professor in the department of
            philosophy, the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science,
            and the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the
            University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on the
            history and epistemology of nineteenth-century psychiatric theories
            of sexuality.
Nicholas Rand and Maria Torok
         The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads Theory
         All disciplines have their histories in addition to their theories.
            In general, the history of a set of problems is treated separately
            from the nature of the problems themselves. The axioms of a given
            discipline may be the object of external inquiry but are not
            usually subject to historical examination. In this way,
            psychoanalysis has been investigated, even challenged, by a variety
            of other disciplines: biology, linguistics, history, philosophy,
            literature, and so forth. One may ask whether psychoanalysis can
            also become its own object, effectively distancing itself from
            itself. Will historical scrutiny provide criticism from within and
            thereby alter the nature of psychoanalysis?
            It has been our observation that the history of the creation of
            psychoanalysis and of the psychoanalytic movement suggests
            deficiencies and omissions within psychoanalytic theory. This
            implies something far beyond the simple idea that no serious
            examination of theoretical problems can occur without an
            understanding of their history. Not only the past but the future of
            psychoanalysis, both as a theory and as a clinical practice, may
            well depend on the conscious assessment and assimilation of its own
            history. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis: History Reads
            Theory" is intended in part as an introduction to Nicolas
            Abraham's "Notes on the Phantom" which will, in
            turn, illuminate the theoretical and practical scope of this essay.
            A history of Freudian psychoanalysis could be written based on the
            voices of dissenting insiders, without including schismatics such
            as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and others who
            eventually developed independent systems of thought. The detailed
            interpretation of such firsts is already a consecrated approach to
            psychoanalytic history. But much remains to be learned from the
            internal criticism of those who have participated in Freud's
            movement or have sought sympathetically to understand the birth and
            progress of Freudian psychoanalysis. Most of the disagreements
            concern theoretical and clinical issues or the clocked access to
            documents that are essential to the history assessment of
            psychoanalysis. This is Ludwig Marcuse's case as he writes to
            Ernest Jones on 10 October 1957.1
             
            1. Ludwig Marcuse is the author of Freud und sein Bild vom Menschen
            [Freud and his image of man] (Frankfurt, 1956).
             
            Nicholas Rand, assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is completing a book on the notion of
            hiding in literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Maria Torok
            is the author (with Nicholas Abraham) of The Wolf Man's Magic
            Word (Le Verbier de L'Homme aux loups),recently published in
            translation. "The Secret of Psychoanalysis" is part of
            a book-length study Rand and Torok are writing on Freud and
            psychoanalytic theory.
Nicolas Abraham
         Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's_Metapsychology
         The belief that the spirits of the dead can return to haunt the
            living exists either as a tenet or as a marginal conviction in all
            civilizations, whether ancient or modern. More often than not, the
            dead do not return to reunite the living with their loved ones but
            rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with
            disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the departed may return,
            but some are predestined to haunt: the dead who have been shamed
            during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets to the
            grave. From the brucolacs, the errant sprits of outcasts in ancient
            Greece, to the ghost of Hamlet's vengeful father, and on down
            to the rapping spirits of modern times, the theme of the
            dead who, having suffered repression by their family or
            society, cannot enjoy, even in death, a state of
            authenticity appears to be omnipresent (whether overtly
            expressed or disguised) on the fringes of religions and, failing
            that, in rational systems. It is a fact that the
            "phantom," whatever its form, is nothing but an
            invention of the living. Yes, an invention in the sense that the
            phantom is meant to objectify, even if under the guise of
            individual or collective hallucinations, the gap that the
            concealment of some part of a loved one's life produced in
            us. The phantom is, therefore, also a metapsychological fact.
            Consequently, what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left
            within us by the secrets of others.
            Because the phantom is not related to the loss of a loved one, it
            cannot be considered the effect of unsuccessful mourning, as is the
            case of melancholics or of all those who carry a tomb within
            themselves. It is the children's or descendants' lot to
            objectify these buried tombs through diverse species of ghosts.
            What comes back to haunt are the tombs of others. The phantoms of
            folklore merely objectify a metaphor active within the unconscious:
            the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one.
            Here we are in the midst of clinical psychoanalysis and still
            shrouded in obscurity, an obscurity, however, that the nocturnal
            being of phantoms (if only in the metapsychological sense) can,
            paradoxically, be called upon to clarify.
             
            The most recently published book of essays by Nicolas Abraham(1919-
            75) is Rythmes de l'oeuvre, de la traduction et de la
            psychanalyse (1985). "Notes on the Phantom" is the
            preliminary statement of his theory of transgenerational haunting.
            Nicholas Rand,assistant professor of French at the University of
            Wisconsin Madison, is the English-language editor of
            Abraham's works.
Sander L. Gilman
         The Struggle of Psychiatry with Psychoanalysis: Who Won?
         What if Wittgenstein and Popper were right after all? What is
            psychoanalysis is not "scientific," not scientific by
            any contemporary definition including Adolf
            Grünbaum's but what if it works all the same?1 What if
            psychoanalysis is all right in practice, but the theory isn't
            scientific? Indeed, what if "science" is defined
            ideologically rather than philosophically? If we so redefine
            "science," it is not to dismiss psychoanalysis but to
            understand its origin and impact, to follow the ideological
            dialectic between the history of psychiatry, its developing as a
            medical "science," and the evolving self-definition of
            psychoanalysis which parallels this history.
             
            We know that Freud divided psychoanalysis into three quite discrete
            areas first, a theory, a "scientific structure";
            second, a method of inquiry, a means of exploring and ordering
            information; and last, but certainly not least, a mode of
            treatment. Let us, for the moment, follow the actual course of
            history, at least the course of a history which can be described by
            sorting out the interrelationship between psychoanalysis and
            psychiatry, and assume that we can heuristically view the mode of
            treatment as relatively independent of the other two aspects of
            psychoanalysis. What if the very claims for a
            "scientific" basis for psychoanalytic treatment and by
            extension the role of the psychoanalyst as promulgated by Freud and
            his early followers were rooted in an ideologically charged
            historical interpretation of the positivistic nature of science and
            the definition of the social role of the scientist? This may seem
            an odd premise to begin an essay on the mutual influence of
            psychoanalysis and psychiatry, but it is not stranger than the
            actual historical practice.
             
            Psychoanalysis originated not in the psychiatric clinic but in the
            laboratories of neurology in Vienna and Paris.2 Its point of origin
            was not nineteenth-century psychiatry but rather nineteenth-century
            neurology. That origin points to a major difference between the
            traditional practice of nineteenth-century psychiatry and modern
            clinical psychiatry in our post-positivistic age. Psychiatry in
            nineteenth-century Europe, in Vienna as well as in Paris, was an
            adjunct to the world of the asylum. Indeed, the second great battle
            (after Pinel's restructuring of the asylum) which nineteenth-
            century psychiatry waged was the creation of the
            "alienist" as a new medical specialty. The alienist was
            the medical doctor in administrative charge of the asylum, rather
            than a medical adjunct to the lay asylum director as had earlier,
            in the age of "moral treatment," been the practice.
             
            Sander L. Gilman is professor of human studies in the departments
            of German literature and Near Eastern studies, Cornell University,
            and professor of psychiatry (history) at the Cornell Medical
            College. He is the author of numerous books on intellectual and
            literary history. His most recent study is Jewish Self-Hatred
            (1986). Forthcoming is his study Oscar Wilde's London and the
            English edition of his Conversations with Nietzsche.His previous
            contribution to  is "Black Bodies, White
            Bodies: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late
            Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature" (Autumn
            1985).
Jane Gallop
         Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism
         In the early seventies, American feminist literary criticism had
            little patience for psychoanalytic interpretation, dismissing it
            along with other forms of what Mary Ellmann called "phallic
            criticism."1 Not that psychoanalytic literary criticism was a
            specific target of feminist critics, but Freud and his science were
            viewed by feminism in general as prime perpetrators of patriarchy.
            If we take Kate Millett's Sexual Politics2 as the first book
            of modern feminist criticism, let us remark that she devotes ample
            space and energy to attacking Freud, not of course as the
            forerunner of any school of literary criticism, but as a master
            discourse of our, which it to say masculinist, culture. But,
            although Freud may generally have been a target for feminism,
            feminist literary critics of the early seventies expended more of
            their energy in the attack on New Criticism. The era was, after
            all, hardly a heyday for American psychoanalytic criticism;
            formalist modes of reading enjoyed a hegemony in the literary
            academy in contrast with which psychoanalytic interpretation was a
            rather weak arm of patriarchy.
            Since then, there have been two changes in this picture. In the
            last decade, psychoanalytic criticism has grown in prestige and
            influence, and a phenomenon we can call psychoanalytic feminist
            criticism has arisen.3 I would venture that two major factors have
            contributed to this boom in American psychoanalytic criticism.
            First, the rise of feminist criticism, in its revolt against
            formalism, has rehabilitated thematic and psychological criticism,
            the traditional mainstays of psychoanalytic interpretation. Because
            feminism has assured the link between psychosexuality and the
            socio-historical realm, psychoanalysis now linked to major
            political and cultural questions. Glistening on the horizon of
            sociopolitical connection, feminism promises to save psychoanalysis
            from its ahistorical and apolitical doldrums.
            The second factor that makes psychoanalytic reading a growth
            industry in the United States is certainly more widely recognized:
            it is the impact of French post-structuralist thought on the
            American literary academy. There is, of course, the direct
            influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis which promotes language to a
            principal role in the psychoanalytic drama and so naturally offers
            fertile ground for crossing psychoanalytic and literary concerns.
            Yet I think, in fact, the wider effect in this country has come
            from Derridean deconstruction. Although deconstruction is not
            strictly psychoanalytic, Freud's prominent place in Derridean
            associative networks promises a criticism that is, finally,
            respectably textual and still, in some recognizable way, Freudian.
            Although this second, foreign factor in the growth of American
            psychoanalytic criticism seems far away from the realm of homespun
            feminist criticism, I would content that there is a powerful if
            indirect connection between the two. I would speculate that the
            phenomenal spread of deconstruction in American departments of
            English is in actuality a response to the growth of feminist
            criticism. At a moment when it was no longer possible to ignore
            feminist criticism's challenge to the critical establishment,
            deconstruction appeared offering a perspective that was not in
            opposition to but rather beyond feminism, offering to sublate
            feminism into something supposedly "more radical."
             
            Jane Gallop,professor of humanities at Rice University, is the
            author of Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot,
            and Klossowski (1981), The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and
            Psychoanalysis(1982), and Reading Lacan (1985). She wrote the
            present essay while awaiting the birth of her first child.
Ernesto Laclau
         Psychoanalysis and Marxism
         To think the relationships which exist between Marxism and
            psychoanalysis obliges one to reflect upon the intersections
            between two theoretical fields, each composed independently of the
            other and whose possible forms of mutual reference do not merge
            into any obvious system of translation. For example, it is
            impossible to affirm though it has often been done that
            psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of
            historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted,
            by and large, as a negation of the validity and the pertinence of
            any theory of subjectivity (although certainly not of the category
            of "subject"). Thus, no simple model of supplement or
            articulations is of the slightest use. The problem is rather that
            of finding an index of comparison between two different theoretical
            fields, but that, in turn, implies the construction of a new field,
            within which the comparison would make sense.
            This new field is one which may be characterized as "post-
            Marxist" and is the result of a multitude of theoretico-
            political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the
            categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called
            a "de-struction of the history of ontology." For
            Heidegger, this "de-struction" did not signify the
            purely negative operation of rejecting a tradition, but exactly the
            opposite: it is by means of a radical questioning which is situated
            beyond this tradition but which is only possible in relation
            to it that the originary meaning of the categories of this
            tradition (which have long since become stale and trivialized) may
            be recovered. In this sense, effecting a "de-struction"
            of the history of Marxism implies going beyond the deceptive
            evidence of concepts such as "class,"
            "capital," and so on, and re-creating the meaning of
            the originary synthesis that such concepts aspired to establish,
            the total system of theoretical alternatives in regard to which
            they represented only limited options, and the ambiguities inherent
            in their constitution itself the "hymen" in the
            Derridean sense which, although violently repressed, rise up
            here and there in diverse discursive surfaces. It is the systematic
            and genealogical outline of these nuclei of ambiguity which
            initially allows for a destruction of the history of Marxism and
            which constitutes post-Marxism as the field of our current
            political reflection. But it is precisely in these surfaces of
            discursive ambiguity that it is possible to detect the presence of
            logics of the political which allows for the establishment of a
            true dialogue, without complacent metaphorization, between Marxism
            and psychoanalytic theory. I would like to highlight two points,
            which I consider fundamental, concerning these discursive surfaces.
             
            Ernesto Laclau is a lecturer in the Department of Government and
            director of the Graduate Program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis
            at the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics and
            Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and, with Chantal Mouffe,
            Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
            Politics (1985). Amy G. Reiter-McIntoshis a lecturer and Ph.D.
            candidate at the University of Chicago.
Peter Brooks
         The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
         Psychoanalytic literary criticism has always been something of an
            embarrassment. One resists labeling as a "psychoanalytic
            critic" because the kind of criticism evoked by the term
            mostly deserves the bad name it largely has made for itself. Thus I
            have been worrying about the status of some of my own uses of
            psychoanalysis in the study of narrative, in my attempt to find
            dynamic models that might move us beyond the static formalism of
            structuralist and semiotic narratology. And in general, I think we
            need to worry about the legitimacy and force that psychoanalysis
            may claim when imported into the study of literary texts. If
            versions of psychoanalytic criticism have been with us at least
            since 1908, when Freud published his essay on "Creative
            Writers and Day-dreaming," and if the enterprise has recently
            been renewed in subtle ways by post-structuralist versions of
            reading, a malaise persists, a sense that whatever the promises of
            their union, literature and psychoanalysis remain mismatched
            bedfellows or perhaps I should say playmates.
            The first problem, and the most basic, may be that psychoanalysis
            in literary study has over and over again mistaken the object of
            analysis, with the result that whatever insights it has produced
            tell us precious little about the structure and rhetoric of
            literary texts. Traditional psychoanalytic criticism tends to fall
            into three general categories, depending on the object of analysis:
            the author, the reader, or the fictive persons of the text. The
            first of these constituted the classical locus of psychoanalytic
            interest. It is now apparently the most discredited, though also
            perhaps the most difficult to extirpate, since if the disappearance
            of the author has been repeatedly announced, authorial mutants
            ceaselessly reappear, as, for instance, in Harold Bloom's
            psychomachia of literary history. Like the author, the fictive
            character has been deconstructed into an effect of textual codes, a
            kind of thematic mirage, and the psychoanalytic study of the
            putative unconscious of characters in fiction has also fallen into
            disrepute. Here again, however, the impulse resurfaces, for
            instance in some of the moves of a feminist criticism that needs to
            show how the represented female psyche (particularly of course as
            created by women authors) refuses and problematizes the dominant
            concepts of male psychological doctrine. Feminist criticism has in
            fact largely contributed to a new variant of the psychoanalytic
            study of fictive characters, a variant one might label the
            "situational-thematic": studies of Oedipal triangles in
            fiction, their permutations and evolution, of the roles of mothers
            and daughters, of situations of nurture and bonding, and so forth.
            It is work often full of interest, but nonetheless methodologically
            disquieting in its use of Freudian analytic tools in a wholly
            thematic way, as if the identification and labeling of human
            relations in a psychoanalytic vocabulary were the task of
            criticism. The third traditional field of psychoanalytic literary
            study, the reader, continues to flourish in ever-renewed versions,
            since the role of the reader in the creation of textual meaning is
            very much on our minds at present, and since the psychoanalytic
            study of readers' responses willingly brackets the impossible
            notion of author in favor of the acceptable and also verifiable
            notion of reader. The psychoanalytic study of the reader may
            concern real readers (as in Norman Holland's Five Readers
            Reading) or the reader as psychological everyman (as in Simon O.
            Lesser's Fiction and the Unconscious). But like the other
            traditional psychoanalytic approaches, it displaces the object of
            analysis from the text to some person, some other psychodynamic
            structure a displacement I wish to avoid since, as I hope to
            make clear as I go along, I think psychoanalytic criticism can and
            should be textual and rhetorical.
             
            Peter Brooks is the Tripp Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, where he is also director of the Whitney Humanities
            Center and chairman of the French department. His most recent book
            is Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative,which
            has recently been reissued in paperback. His work in progress
            concerns psychoanalysis and story-telling.
Stephen Melville
         Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance
         Psychoanalysis has, in the very nature of its object, an interest
            in and difficulty with the concept of place as well as an interest
            in and difficulty with the logic of place, topology. The
            Unconscious can thus seem to give rise to a certain prospect of
            mathesis or formalization; and such formalization, achieved, would
            offer a ground for the psychoanalytic claim to scientific knowledge
            relatively independent of empirical questions and approaching the
            condition of mathematics. This might then seem to have been
            Lacan's wager in organizing the researches of his écolearound
            works of theoretical elaboration rather than clinical study;
            certainly some such notion must underlie Miller's claim to be
            "axiomatic."1
            In this paper I want to explore some of Lacan's
            formalizations as they are unfolded in the seminar Encore.(I will
            also draw some material from the interview transcript Télévision
            and Lacan's appearances at Yale University in 1975.)2 I will
            in effect be looking at the place of place or places in
            psychoanalysis in particular, I will be looking at the place
            of jouissance in Lacan's psychoanalysis and at the places of
            what Lacan punningly calls jouis-sens. The joint problematic here
            might be called one of "enjoymeant," combining the
            logic of pleasure with the pleasure of logic. For Lacan, questions
            of jouissance,however punned, are questions of unity and selfhood,
            so in examining the reciprocal play of pleasure and sense I will be
            examining how Lacanian psychoanalysis secures itself in place. This
            last topic touches implicitly in Encoreon questions of legacy and
            inheritance, so in the end I will also have something to say about
            the limits Lacan's formalizations would impose on our
            enjoyment of Freud. I should note in advance that
            Encore,Lacan's seminar of 1972-73, is an extraordinarily
            compact and involuted text, even by his standards, and of a
            corresponding richness, weaving sustained meditations on such
            figures as Georges Bataille, Roman Jakobson, Kierkegaard, and
            Aquinas with "mathemystical" digressions on sexuality,
            discourse, Borromean knots, and the like. The reading offered here
            is perforce schematic.
             
            1. By and large the evidences of the Lacanian clinic are closed to
            us in consequence of Lacan's insistence on theoretical
            elaboration. But it should not go unremarked that much of the work
            of Lacan's school seems to have focused on areas
            traditionally recalcitrant to psychoanalytic
            treatment alcoholism, retardation, and psychosis and
            that such an emphasis is responsive to traditional empirically
            minded critiques of the limits of psychoanalysis.
            2. It should perhaps be noted in this context that the project of a
            genuinely public presentation of Lacan's seminars seems to
            have been abandoned in favor of the more circumscribed circulation
            of texts through the Lacanian journal Ornicar?
             
            Stephen Melvilleis assistant professor of English at Syracuse
            University. He is the author of Philosophy Beside Itself: On
            Deconstruction and Modernism (1986) and is currently completing a
            series of essays on postmodern art and criticism.
Michael Riffaterre
         The Intertextual Unconscious
         Literature is open to psychoanalysis as is any other form of
            expression this much is obvious. Less so is the relevancy of
            analysis to the specificity of literary texts, to what
            differentiates them from other linguistic utterances; in short, the
            literariness of literature.
            The analyst cannot avoid this problem of focus. If he did, he would
            treat verbal art as a document for purposes other than an
            understanding of its defining difference. He would simply be
            seeking one more set of clues to the workings of the human mind, as
            the sociologist or historian exploits literature to explore periods
            or societies through their reflection in its mirror.
            The only approach to the proper focus must be consistent both with
            the analyst's method and with the natural reader's
            practice. The analyst requires free association on the part of the
            analysand, and he matches this free flow of information with an
            attention equally open to all that is said. It is only after a
            passive stage of "evenly-hovering attention," or, as
            the French nicely call it, écoute flottante,that he seizes upon
            clues to build a model of interpretation. These clues are revealed
            to him by anomalies such as parapraxes and repetitions or deviant
            representations, as well as formal coincidences between what he
            hears and the corpus of observations on linguistic behavior
            accumulated since Freud. The reader, on the other hand, is faced
            with a text that is strongly organized, overdetermined by
            aesthetic, generic, and teleological constraints, and in which
            whatever survives of free association is marshaled toward certain
            effects. The reader himself is far from passive, since he starts
            reacting to the text as soon as his own way of thinking, and of
            conceiving representation, is either confirmed or challenged. The
            text tends therefore not to be interpreted for what it is, but for
            what is selected from it by the reader's individual
            reactions. A segmentation of the text into units of significance
            thus occurs, and it is the task of the critic to verify the
            validity of this process. In pursuing this goal he must restrict
            himself to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by
            textual features rather than by the reader's idiosyncrasies,
            by those elements the perceptions of which does not depend on the
            latter and that resist erasure when they are in conflict with such
            individual quirks. The analyst's advantage in identifying
            such features is that he is trained to recognize the above-
            mentioned anomalies and to explain them by repression and
            displacement, that is, by the traces left in the surface of the
            text by the conflict between its descriptive and narrative
            structures and the lexicon and grammar that we call the
            unconscious.
             
            Michael Riffaterre,University Professor at Columbia University and
            a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, is the
            editor of Romantic Review.His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Syllepsis" (Summer 1980) and
            "Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive
            Discourse" (September 1984).
Stanley Cavell
         Freud and Philosophy: A Fragment
         Other of my intellectual debts remain fully outstanding, that to
            Freud's work before all. A beholdenness to Sigmund
            Freud's intervention in Western culture is hardly something
            for concealment, but I have until now left my commitment to it
            fairly implicit. This has been not merely out of intellectual
            terror at Freud's achievement but in service of an idea and
            in compensation for a dissatisfaction I might formulate as follows:
            psychoanalytic interpretations of the arts in American culture
            have, until quite recently, on the whole been content to permit the
            texts under analysis not to challenge the concepts of analysis
            being applied to them, and this seemed to me to do injustice both
            to psychoanalysis and to literature (the art that has attracted
            most psychoanalytic criticism). My response was to make a virtue of
            this defect by trying, in my readings of film as well as of
            literature and of philosophy, to recapitulate what I understood by
            Freud's saying that he had been preceded in his insights by
            the creative writes of his tradition; that is, I tried to arrive at
            a sense for each text I encountered (it was my private touchstone
            for when an interpretation had gone far enough to leave for the
            moment) that psychoanalysis had become called for, as if called for
            in the history of knowledge, as if each psychoanalytic reading were
            charged with rediscovering the reality of psychoanalysis. This
            still does not seem to me an irrelevant ambition, but it is also no
            longer a sufficient response in our altered environment. Some of
            the most interesting and useful criticism and literary theory
            currently being produced is decisively psychoanalytic in
            inspiration, an alteration initiated for us most prominently by the
            past two or so decades of work in Paris and represented in this
            country by to pick examples from which I have profited in
            recent months Neil Hertz on the Dora case, Shoshana Felman on
            Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw," and Eve
            Kosofsky Sedgwick on homophobia in Our Mutual Friend.1 And now my
            problem has become that I am unsure whether I understand the
            constitution of the discourses in which this material is presented
            in relation to what I take philosophy to be, a constitution to
            which, such as it is, I am also committed. So some siting of this
            relation is no longer mine to postpone.
             
            1. See Neil Hertz, "Dora's Secrets, Freud's
            Techniques," in In Dora's Case:
            Freud Hysteria Feminism,ed. Charles Bernheimer and
            Claire Kahane (New York, 1985), pp. 221-42; Shoshana Felman,
            "Turning the Screw of Interpretation," Yale French
            Studies 55/56 (1977): 94-207; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
            "Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual
            Friend," Raritan2 (Winter 1983): 126-51.
             
            Stanley Cavell,professor of philosophy at Harvard University, is
            the author of many works, including Must We Mean What We Say?, The
            Senses of "Walden," The Claim of Reason,and, most
            recently, Themes Out of School.He spent last spring at Hebrew
            University in Jerusalem as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced
            Studies. His most recent contributions to  are
            "Politics as Opposed to What?" (September 1982) and
            "The Division of Talent" (June 1985).
Jean Starobinski
         Acheronta Movebo
         It is doubtless appropriate to read The Interpretation of Dreams
            according to the image of the journey which Sigmund Freud describes
            in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess:
            The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First
            comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees),
            where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray. Then
            there is a cavernous defile through which I lead my
            readers my specimen dream with its peculiarities, its
            details, its indiscretions and its bad jokes and then, all at
            once, the high ground and the open prospect and the question:
            "Which way do you want to go?"1
            This walk has nothing of the nonchalant about it. Rather, it is
            strewn with tests and trials, as is usually the case in the
            "myth of the hero" or of the
            "conquistador," which we know played a major role in
            Freud's thought and in that of his disciples. The progress,
            in epic poetry, moves toward a discovery, the founding of a city,
            by means of difficult stages and combats. Every
            "discourse" capable of attaining a goal distant from
            its prolegomena finds its appropriate metaphor in the hero's
            progress, or in the voyage of initiation. Discursivity then becomes
            the intellectual equivalent of the epic's trajectory. At the
            time of its publication, Freud found his book insufficiently
            probing, and imperfect in its discursivity. He criticized himself
            for having failed to link properly his arguments (Beweisführung).
            Doubt was momentarily cast on the achievement of the main goal….
            But such severity was not to persist.
            But one can also read the work by discerning its framing devices.
            Several authors mentioned in the first chapter reappear at the
            work's conclusion. Such a return is far from fortuitous; it
            is the result of an extremely well-calculated strategy. Another
            framing system which has been noticed by many readers is the one,
            shortly before the end of the book, which returns to a line from
            Virgil that Freud had placed as an epigraph on the title page:
            Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.This line, because of
            its repetition at two crucial points in the book, traces its
            message in the form of an emblem. When it breaks in, it makes
            explicit that the dream mechanism is the return of the repressed:
            In waking life the suppressed material in the mind is prevented
            from finding expression and is cut off from internal perception
            owing to the fact that the contradictions present in it are
            eliminated one side being disposed of in favor of the other;
            but during the night, under the sway of an impetus towards the
            construction of compromises, this suppressed material finds methods
            and means of forcing its way into consciousness.
                      Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.2
             
            1. Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 6 Aug. 1899, Freud, The Origins
            of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes,
            1887-1902,ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, trans.
            James Strachey (New York, 1954), p. 290.
            2. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,ed. and trans. Strachey (New
            York, 1965), p. 647; my emphasis. The Latin is translated in n. 1
            on that page of Freud's text: "If I cannot bend the
            High Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions." All further
            references to this work, abbreviated I,will be included in the
            text. Another framing device is created by the theme of the
            prophetic dream, discussed at the outset of the first chapters and
            taken up again, with the ambivalence of denial and concession, in
            the final paragraph of the book.
             
            Jean Starobinski,professor emeritus at the University of Geneva,
            has devoted studies to Montaigne, Diderot, Rousseau, Saussure, and
            modern French poets. As an M.D., he is familiar with psychoanalysis
            and participates in the editorial board of La Nouvelle Revue de
            Psychanalyse (Paris). Some of his recent research deals with the
            history of melancholia; his most recent books are Montaigne in
            Motion (1985) and Rousseau (forthcoming). He was awarded the Balzan
            Prize in 1984.
Robert von Hallberg
         Editor's Introduction
         In recent literary interpretation there is renewed interest in the
            political meaning, explicit or implicit, intentional or
            inadvertent, of all sorts of texts. One often now reads that some
            novel, play, poem, or essay is only apparently unrelated to
            political issues contemporary with either the text's
            production or our current reading of it. This sort of
            interpretation, which is fast becoming conventional, sometimes
            slides too easily, I think, toward evaluation: on the one hand,
            insofar as a text is shown to veil its author's self-interest
            (often understood as the interest of a class or gender) with claims
            to larger concerns, the critic nudges this title a little out of
            the canon of currently engaging texts; on the other, a text
            expressive of a progressive political position is retrieved from
            the neglect it suffered from critics who veiled their self-interest
            (that is, the interest of their class or gender) with misleading
            talk of aesthetic standards. Either way, self-interest is now
            thought of as the most authentic motive an interpreter can divulge
            in a text. This kind of political interpretation can be defended as
            a healthy reaction to what is remembered as a time, now more than
            twenty years gone, when extrinsic criteria were disavowed and
            literature was said to be valuable primarily as literature.But how
            far has this reaction gone beyond formalism on the one hand and
            ideological conformity on the other toward fresh, rich terms for
            evaluative criticism? Not far, I think. Without strong evaluative
            criticism it seems unlikely, as E. D. Hirsch has argued, that
            academic literary criticism can intervene in the institutions of
            literary instruction, or indeed in the production and reception of
            the poetry of our contemporaries, which is my own large interest
            (insofar as I have any).
            It should be said too that the current trend toward political
            interpretation owes a good deal to our own narrow professional
            self-interest: as fewer institutional and economic resources have
            been directed toward the study of literature in the 1970s and
            1980s, we can all remember fondly the importance that ideas,
            especially political ideas, seemed to hold in the 1960s. Some
            recent political interpretation seems to be motivated not just by a
            desire to maintain faith with the concerns of the 1960s, but as
            well by a need of scholars of humanities to generate terms that
            render the study of literature or culture
            generally obviously important. The political shifts of the
            late 1960s and early 1970s took money, jobs, and even a sense of
            consequence away from humanities departments. The recent move is to
            restore at least a sense of consequence to literary criticism.
            However worthy that objective, there is no reason to think that
            self-legitimation will lead to the development of evaluative
            standards appropriate to the study and enjoyment of poetry in
            American in 1987.
Robert Pinsky
         Responsibilities of the Poet
         Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when
            contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described
            as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility
            as poets.
            That is, there are things writers owe the art of poetry work,
            perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe
            themselves emotional truthfulness, attention toward
            one's own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said
            to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what
            is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate though more
            limited way of putting the question than such familiar terms
            as "political poetry."
            Another recurring topic is what might be called Poetry Gloom. I
            mean that sourness and kvetching that sometimes come into our
            feelings about our art: the mysterious disaffections, the querulous
            doubts, the dispirited mood in which we ask ourselves, has
            contemporary poetry gone downhill, does anyone at all read it, has
            poetry become a mere hobby, do only one's friends do it well,
            and so forth. This matter often comes up in the form of questions
            about the "popularity" or "audience" of
            poetry.
            Possibly the appetite for poetry really was greater in the good old
            days, in other societies. After the total disaster at Syracuse,
            when the Athenians, their great imperialist adventure failed, were
            being massacred, or branded as slaves with the image of a horse
            burned into the forehead, a few were saved for the sake of
            Euripides, whose work, it seems, was well thought of by the
            Syracusans. "Many of the captives who got safe back to
            Athens," writes Plutarch,
            Are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their
            acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how some of them had been
            released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of
            his poems and others, when straggling after the fight, had been
            relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics.
             
            Robert Pinskyteaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His
            most recent book of poems, History of My Heart,was awarded the
            William Carlos Williams Prize. His other books include Sadness and
            Happiness, An Explanation of America,and a volume of criticism, The
            Situation of Poetry. Mindwheel,his narrative entertainment for
            computer, has been issued by Brøderbund Software.
Anne Burnett
         The Scrutiny of Song: Pindar, Politics, and Poetry
         Pindar's songs were composed for men at play, but his poetry
            was political in its impulse and in its function. The men in
            question were rich and powerful, and their games were a display of
            exclusive class attributes, vicariously shared by lesser mortals
            who responded with gratitude and loyalty (for example, Pythia 5.43-
            44). Victories were counted as princely benefactions (compare
            Olympia5.3 and 15, 7.94, 8.87, Isthmia6.69) and laid up as city
            treasure like the wealth deposited in the treasuries at Delphi
            (Pythia6.5). Athletic victory was thus both a manifestation and an
            enhancement of aristocratic domination, which meant that the poet
            who praised those who boxed and raced in pan-Hellenic games
            necessarily praised the social structure that depended on them.
            Pindar understood his political function and was proud of
            it "I would consort with victors"
            (Olympia1.115b).1 He believed in athletic contest as a model for
            all human life. He believed in the aristocratic system:
            "Inherited governance of cities lies properly with the
            nobility" (Pythia 10.71-72). He believed also that praise
            poetry could regulate as well as laud that system, and he believed
            finally that such poetry was itself incorruptible. Games, song, and
            princely rulers were all parts of a single brilliant order, and
            this truth had a linguistic reflection, for the bit that tames a
            horse, the meter of a poetic line, and the moderation of a ruler
            were all called by the same name metron."Measure
            (metron) inheres in everything" (Olympia13.47 and
            throughout).
             
            1. All translations are my own.
             
            Anne Burnettis professor of classical languages and literature at
            the University of Chicago. Her most recent publications are Three
            Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (1983) and The Art of
            Bacchylides(1985). A monograph on choral poetry, with focus on the
            Sicilian poet Stesichorus, is forthcoming.
Michael André Bernstein
         "O Totiens Servus": Saturnalia and Servitude in Augustan_Rome
         To pose the question of evaluating political poetry is, of course,
            itself already a polemical move, since it insists on distinctions
            that command neither general critical consent nor methodological
            specificity. Repudiating the pertinence of such concerns to poetry
            has been, after all, the principal thrust of some of the most
            influential texts in modern literary theory. Indeed, considered
            historically, the struggle to separate aesthetic from both moral
            and political considerations can be seen as constituting the
            inaugural, grounding act of poetics as a distinct discipline. In
            such a view, the words of a poem, by their very nature, are
            radically divorced from their usage in the quotidian world of
            shared human activities, so that although a text may contain
            political themes among its material poetica,insofar as it succeeds
            as a work of art these must function purely as internal and
            autonomous elements in the structure of the piece, not as arguments
            seeking to participate in a wider discourse. Because the language
            of poetry is unique and self-sufficient, thematic considerations
            are strictly irrelevant, and the issue of evaluation is identical
            regardless of the ostensible subject matter of the poem. Political
            poetry, in other words, is a meaningless term: a work is either a
            poem or it is not, and any attempt to include political concerns in
            its creation or evaluation is simply to abandon the domain of art
            for what Mallarmé dismissed as the debased idiom of "les
            journaux."1
            Yet the very need to keep insisting on so categorical a distinction
            reveals that contamination is always possible, that the chasm may
            prove only a threshold habitually traversed by the words of any
            poem. And in fact, for every instance of a Mallarméan insistence
            upon the autonomy of the poem, there exists a counterpolemic
            stressing the link between word and world and, more pertinently
            still, between the language of verse and a search for values
            applicable to the communal experiences of both author and readers.2
            But as I remarked earlier, the very heterogeneity of these
            arguments tends to deprive them of any methodological specificity,
            and all too often discussions of political poetry have done little
            more than catalog judgments about the ideological stance of a given
            work according to a critic's fixed conception of which
            attitudes merit approval and which deserve censure. There is a
            crucial distinction between reading political poetry and reading
            poetry politically. In the latter case, the concern is less with
            the characteristics, let alone the evaluation, of political poetry
            per se than which judging how effectively the poem either champions
            or contests positions whose independent authority is always already
            guaranteed and which, in principle, are only to be illustrated, not
            questioned or modified, by literary texts.
             
            1. Mallarmé's formulation here is both categorical can
            powerful: "cette donnée exacte, quíl faut, si l'on fait
            de la literature, parler autrement que les journaux"
            (Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondence,ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd James
            Austin, 11 vols. [Paris, 1959-85], 3:67).
             
            Michael André Bernstein,associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic(1980) and Prima della Rivoluzione (1984), a volume of
            verse. He is currently completing a book on the Abject Hero and a
            study, Talent and the Individual Tradition in Modern Poetry.His
            previous contributions to  are "When the
            Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections upon the Abject
            Hero" (Winter 1983) and "image, Word, and Sign: The
            Visual Arts as Evidence in Ezra Pound's Cantos" (Winter
            1986).
Janel Mueller
         The Mastery of Decorum: Politics as Poetry in_Milton's_Sonnets
         If we supply a missing connection in the master text of English
            Renaissance poetic theory, we can bring the dilemma posed by
            political poetry into sharp relief. Sidney's Defence of
            Poesie seeks to confirm the supremacy of the poet's power
            over human minds by invoking the celebrated three-way distinction
            between poetry, philosophy, and history in the Poetics.According to
            Sidney, the proper question to ask of poetry is not "whether
            it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set
            down" but "whether it be better to have it set down as
            it should be, … for your own use and learning." On this
            criterion, the philosopher shows himself too devoted to
            "knowledge" that "standeth upon the abstract and
            general," to the "precept," to "what should
            be." The historian attends too much to "the particular
            truth of things and not to the general reason of things," to
            the "example," to "what is." Only the poet
            "coupleth the general notion with the particular
            example" in "the speaking picture of poesy," thus
            synthesizing through his "imaginative and judging
            power" the best that the philosophical and historical domains
            can offer. "Aristotle himself," concludes Sidney,
            "plainly determineth this question, saying that poetry … is
            more philosophical and more studiously serious than history …
            because poesy dealeth with … the universal consideration, and the
            history with … the particular." Yet in mounting his Defence
            of Poesie,Sidney fails to give due force to a related and equally
            important distinction drawn from the Poetics.Aristotle ranks poetry
            below philosophy and, by implication, history as
            well at the crucial juncture where ontology and epistemology
            meet. He exclusively credits philosophical universals with rational
            "necessity." Poetic universals are recognized as having
            imaginative "likelihood," but no more than this.1 Under
            this second three-way distinction, the domain proper to poetry
            turns out to be neither the realm of historical fact nor that of
            philosophical truth but some half-region of the truthlike, the
            verisimilar, disjoint from the plane of knowledge.
            […]
            Milton coped with the questions intrinsic to political poetry
            during the decade from 1642 to 1652 when he rose to prominence as a
            pamphleteer on public issued and concurrently pioneered the writing
            of political sonnets in English. This essay examines the responses
            he made, in part in his prose but mainly in the composition of
            seven sonnets. Political poems in a root sense, these sonnets
            concern themselves with human agency channeled into the functions
            of the state, with power manifested through governance. After
            exploratory and uneven beginnings, the group as a whole goes a fair
            way toward vindicating the enterprise of political poetry and
            offering one set of criteria for a good political poem.
             
            1. The core distinctions are drawn by Aristotle in chap. 9, secs.
            2-4, of the Poetics;also see chap. 1, sec. 1 of the Topicson the
            distinction between demonstration, based on reasoning from true
            knowledge, and dialectic, based on reasoning from what is generally
            accepted as probable. The quotations in this paragraph are from
            Sidney: A Defence of Poetry,ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford, 1966),
            pp. 35, 32, 33, 35.
             
            Janel Muelleris professor of English and humanities at the
            University of Chicago. She has published mainly on poetry and prose
            of the earlier English Renaissance, culminating in her book The
            Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style,
            1380-1580.An interest in Milton, however, has drawn her more
            recently to work in the later part of this period. She is writing a
            book on nature, culture, and gender in Milton's major poems.
Elizabeth Helsinger
         Clare and the Place of the Peasant Poet
         One might say that Clare is almost by virtue of that label alone a
            political poet. "Peasant poet" is a contradiction in
            terms from the perspective of English literary history, or of the
            longer history of the literary pastoral. The phrase must refer to
            two different social locations, and as such makes social place an
            explicit, problematic concern for the middle-class readers of that
            poet's work. To Clare's publisher and patrons in the
            1820s, as to his editors in the 1980s, the language, the forms, the
            sentiments, and even the punctuation of his poetry are further
            markers of class difference for an audience invited to read him as
            a peasant poet. In recent collections concerned to recover the
            politics of English poetry these signs of difference are highly
            valued.2 They seem to mark Clare's work as what Fredric
            Jameson terms "strong" political art, that is,
            "authentic cultural creation … dependent for its existence on
            authentic collective life, on the vitality of the
            &lsquo;organic' social group."3
            At the time his poems were published class difference in English
            rural life was a political issue sufficiently charged to make
            publisher and patrons wish to minimize (though not obliterate) its
            marks in Clare's poetry. On the one hand, a clearly
            understood hierarchy was the form of social stability that rural
            scenes staged for their urban middle-class audiences. Evidence of
            class difference confirmed the survival of this hierarchy and the
            reader's position in it. Clare's poetry of place
            affirmed a system of social as well as geographical differences
            felt as a traditional and essential aspect of English
            national identity. On the other hand, however, the countryside was
            precisely where the erosion of the hierarchical relations of
            deference and responsibility was particularly noticeable, and
            disturbing, in the years after 1815. Sporadic outbreaks of protest
            against low wages and unemployment in 1816, 1822, and 1830 realized
            dramatically for the middle and upper classes what one might call a
            rural version of the process Marx was later to term alienation: the
            known and familiar inhabitants of the rural scene laborers,
            village artisans were suddenly made strange to their middle-
            and upper-class neighbors, so much so that many observers were
            convinced that they must be strangers, intruders from another pace
            (and another class).4 The elements of difference, or strangeness,
            in Clare's poetry the marks of his identity as rural
            laborer thus also risked awaking specific anxieties among his
            early readers. Clare's editor and publisher, John Taylor,
            punctuated, regularized meter, and replaced some (though not all)
            of Clare's unfamiliar local vocabulary. Nonetheless, his two
            most important early patrons, the evangelical aristocrat Lord
            Radstock and the middle-class Mrs. Emmerson, objected to some lines
            as "radical slang" and others as "vulgar."
            The language of class risked rejection as politically (and
            sexually) subversive. Especially in an already politicized rural
            scene, the peasant poet could not be a neutral figure.
             
            2. Both A Book of English Pastoral Verse,ed. John Barrell and John
            Bull (new York, 1975) and The Faber Book of Political Verse,ed. Tom
            Paulin (London, 1986) restore Clare's original orthography
            and lack of punctuation to support the label "peasant
            poet."
            3. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass
            Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 140.
             
            Elizabeth Helsinger is associate professor of English and general
            studies at the University of Chicago and a coeditor of Critical
            Inquiry.Her Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder was published in
            1982. The present essay is part of a book in progress on
            representations of the rural scene in Victorian England.
Susan Schweik
         Writing War Poetry Like a Woman
         In World War II, however, that lonely masculine authority of
            experience the bitter authority derived from direct exposure
            to violence, injury, and mechanized terror was rapidly
            dispersing among generally populations. Graves, notes, with some
            discomfort, that the Second World War soldier "cannot even
            feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of
            his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher."5 American culture was,
            obviously, characterized by far greater disjunctions between male
            and female "experience" of war than the British blitz
            society Graves describes, and the modern tradition of soldier
            poetry, with its ironic emphasis on unmendable gaps between the
            soldier author and the civilian reader, retained its strong
            influence. Still, public discussions of war and literature in the
            United States dwell frequently on the new conjunctions between
            civilians and soldiers, front and home front, and men and women,
            focusing on their shared morale or effort as well as on their
            common deprivation and vulnerability.
            In a war newly perceived as "total," [Marianne]
            Moore's work could exemplify the power of a representative
            civilian voice. It could also represent modernism provisionally
            embracing realist and didactic functions, coming round to
            correcting earlier trends toward self-referentiality. Thus Richard
            Eberhart, arguing in his introduction to a well-known anthology of
            war poetry that "the spectator, the contemplator, the opposer
            of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed
            combatants," praises Moore for abandoning the
            "complacencies of the peignoir" to write "In
            Distrust of Merits."6 His phrasing links Moore with another
            civilian war poet, Wallace Stevens; by dressing Moore in
            Stevens' Peignoir in order to show her doffing it, he
            represents her as a formerly feminine object of desire who has
            emerged from the coquetries of her sex into a new, superior,
            gender-free authority Now, Eberhart argues, "the bloodshed of
            which she writes has caused her to break through the decorative
            surface of her verse" to a "different kind of
            utterance." For Eberhart, the poem's value lies in its
            violation of Moore's usual mannered aestheticism. She
            "breaks through" a feminine surface, as if puncturing
            skin, but the result is not a wound but a mouth: a "different
            kind of utterance," in which "the meaning has dictated
            the sincerity."7Oscar Williams, in the preface to a
            comparable anthology, also reads the poem as a model of transparent
            earnestness, offering it as a solution to the problem of Edna St.
            Vincent Millay, the "bad" woman war poet who is
            excoriated in these discussions as often as Moore is extolled.
            Describing one of Millay's war poems as "a sentimental
            piece of verse written by an American civilian, designed to be read
            by … people themselves out of danger because they are protected by
            a wall of living young flesh, much of which will be mangled,"
            Williams contrasts Moore's "In Distrust of
            Merits":
                        But with true poets the poetry is in the pity …
            I ask the reader to study closely a war poem peculiarly fitted to
            illustrate my present thesis. It is also written by a woman, a
            civilian. "In Distrust of Merits," by Marianne Moore,
            is the direct communication of honest feeling by one ready to
            search her own hear to discover the causes of war and accept her
            full share of responsibility for its effects.8
             
            5. Graves, "The Poets of World War II," p. 310.
            6. Richard Eberhart, "Preface: Attitudes to War," in
            War and the Poet: An Anthology of Poetry Expressing Man's
            Attitudes to War from Ancient Times to the Present,ed. Eberhart and
            Selden Rodman (New York, 1945), pp. xv, xiii.
            7. Ibid., p. xiii.
            8. Oscar Williams, ed., The War Poets: An Anthology of the War
            Poetry of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1945), p. 6.
             
            Susan Schweik is assistant professor of English at the University
            of California, Berkeley. She is at work on a book manuscript
            entitled A Word No Man Can Say for Us: American Women Poets and the
            Second World War.
Rob Nixon
         Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest
         The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in
            Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated
            anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of
            both international back consciousness and more localized
            nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of
            African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence;
            the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the
            latter phase of the Kenyan "Mau Mau" revolt, the
            Katanga crisis in the Cong, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising
            and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the
            civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of
            1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War.
            This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African
            intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage.
            Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were
            the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous
            enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards
            as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in
            insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers.
            In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited
            European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectual chose to
            utilize a European text as a strategy for (in George
            Lamming's words) getting "out from under this ancient
            mausoleum of [Western] historic achievement."1 They seized
            upon The Tempest as a way of amplifying their class for
            decolonization within the bounds of the dominant cultures. But at
            the same time these Caribbeans and Africans adopted the play as a
            founding text in an oppositional lineage which issued from a
            geopolitically and historically specific set of cultural ambitions.
            They perceived that the play could contribute to their self-
            definition during a period of great flux. So, through repeated,
            reinforcing, transgressive appropriations of The Tempest,a once
            silenced group generated its own tradition of "error"
            which in turn served as one component of the grander
            counterhegemonic nationalist and black internationalist endeavors
            of the period. Because that era of Caribbean and African history
            was marked by such extensive, open contestation of cultural values,
            the destiny of The Tempestat that time throws into uncommonly stark
            relief the status of value as an unstable social process rather
            than a static and, in literary terms, merely textual attribute.
             
            Rob Nixon is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia University.
            He is working on the topics of exile and Third World-metropolitan
            relations in the writing of V. S. and Shiva Naipaul. His previous
            contribution to  (with Anne McClintock) is
            "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in
            Derrida's &lsquo;Le Dernier Mot du Racisme' "
            (Autumn 1986).
Alicia Ostriker
         Dancing at the Devil's Party: Some Notes on_Politics_and_Poetry
         My education in political poetry begins with William Blake's
            remark about John Milton in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
            "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels
            &amp; God, and at liberty when of Devils &amp; Hell, is because he
            was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing
            it."1 The statement is usually taken as a charming misreading
            of Milton or as some sort of hyperbole. We find it lumped with
            other readings which supposedly view Satan as the hero of Paradise
            Lost,such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's in A Defence of
            Poetry,although neither Blake nor Shelley says anything of the
            kind.2
            I consider Blake's statement simply accurate. I think it the
            best single thing anybody has ever said about Paradise Lost.If not
            clear as a bell, then at least as compressed as diamonds. The
            insouciant opening gesture takes for granted what to Blake (and to
            me) is obvious" that the poetry qua poetry is better, more
            exciting, more energetic in the sections dominated by Stan, worse,
            duller, less poetic in the sections dominated by God. As a lover of
            poetry Blake has evidently struck a perplexity. Why (he asks
            himself) does Milton's Satan excite me and this God bore me
            even though he plainly intends me to adore God and scorn Satan? The
            answer could have been that Milton "wrote in fetters"
            where constrained by theology and the danger of lapsing into
            inadvertent sacrilege, but "at liberty" otherwise.
            Other critics have claimed that it is impossible to make God talk
            successfully in a poem, but the Book of Job is enough to refute
            that position. Why did Milton choose to make God talk at all? Dante
            cleverly avoided that difficulty.
            The second half of Blake's sentence not only solves the
            Paradise Lost problem but proposes a radical view of all poetry
            which might be summarized as follows: All art depends on opposition
            between God and the devil, reason and energy. The true poet (the
            good poet) is necessarily the partisan of energy, rebellion, and
            desire, and is opposed to passivity, obedience, and the authority
            of reason, laws, and institutions. To be a poet requires energy;
            energetic subjects make the best material for poems; the truer
            (better) the poetry, the more it will embody the truths of Desire.
            But the poet need not think so. He can be of the devil's
            party without knowing it.
             
            1. William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,"
            Complete Poems,ed. Alicia Ostriker (New York, 1977), p. 182.
            2. Let one instance serve: Marjorie Hope Nicolson wonders whether
            the members of the "&lsquo;Satanic School' of Milton
            criticism" (Blake, Shelley, Byron) have read past books 1 and
            2 of Paradise Lost(John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His
            Poetry [New York, 1963], p. 186).
             
            Alicia Ostriker,professor of English as Rutgers University, is the
            author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's
            Poetry in America. Her most recent book of poetry is Imaginary
            Lover.
Anne McClintock
         "Azikwelwa" (We Will Not Ride): Politics and Value_in_Black_South
            African Poetry
         On the winter morning of 16 June 1976, fifteen thousand black
            children marched on Orlando Stadium in Soweto, carrying slogans
            dashed on the backs of exercise books. The children were stopped by
            armed police who opened fire, and thirteen-year-old Hector Peterson
            became the first of hundreds of schoolchildren to be shot down by
            police in the months that followed. If, a decade later, the meaning
            of Soweto's "year of fire" is still contested,1
            it began in this way with a symbolic display of contempt for the
            unpalatable values of Bantu education, a public rejection of the
            "culture of malnutrition" with which blacks had been
            fed.2 The local provocation for the Orlando march was a ruling that
            black children be taught arithmetic and social studies in
            Afrikaans the language of the white cabinet minister,
            soldier, and pass official, prison guard, and policeman. But the
            Soweto march sprang from deeper grievances than instruction in
            Afrikaans, and the calamitous year that passed not only gave rise
            to a rekindling of black political resistance but visibly
            illuminated the cultural aspects of coercion and revolt.
            The children's defacement of exercise books and the breaking
            of school ranks presaged a nationwide rebellion of uncommon
            proportion. The revolt spread across the country from community to
            community, in strikes, boycotts, and street barricades. It
            represented in part the climax of a long struggle between the
            British and Afrikaans interlopers for control over an unwilling
            black populace and was at the same time a flagrant sign of the
            contestation of culture, an open declaration by blacks that
            cultural value, far from shimmering out of reach in the
            transcendent beyond, would now be fought for with barricades of
            tires, empty classrooms, and precocious organization.
             
            1. At least three general analyses of the Soweto uprising have
            emerged: deeper African National Congress involvement in the
            community; strains on the educational system, unemployment and
            recession, with greater industrial militancy stemming from the
            strikes in the early seventies; and the emergence of Black
            Consciousness ideology. See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South
            Africa Since 1945 (Johannesburg, 1983), pp. 321-62.
            2. See M. K. Malefane, " &lsquo;The Sun Will Rise':
            Review of the Allahpoets at the Market Theatre,
            Johannesburg," Staffrider (June/July 1980); reprinted in
            Soweto Poetry,ed. Michael Chapman, South African Literature
            Studies, no. 2 (Johannesburg, 1982), p. 91. Soweto Poetry will
            hereafter be cited as SP.
             
            Anne McClintockis a Ph.D. candidate in English at Columbia
            University. She is the author of a monograph on Simone de Beauvoir
            and is working on a dissertation on race and gender in British
            imperial culture. Her previous contribution to 
            (with Rob Nixon), "No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and
            History in Derrida's &lsquo;Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,'
            " appeared in the Autumn 1986 issue.
Jerome J. McGann
         Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes
         What is the significance of that loose collective enterprise,
            sprung up in the aftermath of the sixties, known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
            Writing? To answer this question I will be taking, initially, a
            somewhat oblique route. And I shall assume an agreement on several
            important social and political matters: first, that the United
            States, following the Second World War, assumed definitive
            leadership of a capitalist empire; second, that its position of
            leadership generated a network of internal social contradictions
            which persist to this day (the collision of imperialist demands
            with the isolationist and revolutionary nationalism of American
            ideology); third, that this postwar period has been characterized,
            at the international level, by an extended cold war shadowed by the
            threat of a global catastrophe, whether deliberate or accidental.
            Whatever one's political allegiances, these truths, surely,
            we hold as self-evident.
            Postwar American poetry is deployed within that general arena, and
            to the degree that it is "political" at all, it
            reflects and responds to that set of overriding circumstances.1 In
            my view the period ought to be seen as falling into two phases. The
            first phase stretches from about 1946 (when Robert Lowell's
            Lord Wear's Castle appeared) to 1973 (when Lowell capped his
            career with the publication of History). This period is dominated
            by a conflict between various lines of traditional poetry, on one
            hand, and the countering urgencies of the "New American
            Poetry" on the other. In the diversity of this last group
            Donald Allen argued for a unifying "characteristic":
            "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic
            verse."2
            Of course, this representation of the conflict between
            "tradition" and "innovation" obscures
            nearly as much as it clarifies. The New American poets were, in
            general, must moe inclined to experimentalism than were writers
            like Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, or Donald
            Justice. But Allen's declaration can easily conceal the
            academic and literary characteristics of the innovators. Robert
            Duncan and Charles Olson, for example, key figures in the New
            American Poetry, can hardly not be called "literary" or
            even "academic" poets. If they opened certain new areas
            in the field of poetic style, no less could and has been said of
            Lowell, even in his early work. And if Frank O'Hara seems the
            antithesis of academic work, John Ashbery is, in his own way, its
            epitome. Yet both appear in Allen's New American Poetry
            anthology. Moreover, who can say, between O'Hara and Ashbery,
            which is the more innovative of the two so different are
            their styles of experimentation?
             
            1. Black and feminist writing in the United States often confines
            the focus of the political engagement to a more restricted national
            theater. Nevertheless, even in these cases engagement is
            necessarily carried out within the global framework I have sketched
            above.
            2. The New American Poetry: 1945-1960,ed. Donald M. Allen (New
            York, 1960), p. xi.
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University
            of Virginia. His most recent critical work, Buildings of Loss: The
            Knowledge of Imaginative Texts,will appear in 1987. "Some
            Forms of Critics Discourse" (March 1985) and "The
            Religious Poetry of Christina Rosetti" (September 1983) are
            among his previous contributions to .
Reginald Gibbons
         Political Poetry and the Example of Ernesto Cardenal
         In Latin America Cardenal is generally regarded as an enduring
            poet. He brought a recognizably Latin American material into his
            poetry, and he introduced to Spanish-language poetry in general
            such poetic techniques as textual collage, free verse lines shaped
            in Poundian fashion, and, especially, a diction that is concrete
            and detailed, textured with proper names and the names of things in
            preference to the accepted poetic language, which was more
            abstract, general, and vaguely symbolic. But what is notable in
            Spanish-language poetry is not only Cardenal's
            "craft," in the sense given this word by Seamus Heaney
            to mean manipulation of poetic resources; there is also this
            poet's "technique," which in Heaney's sense
            means a "definition of his stance toward life."2
            Cardenal's characteristic poetic stance has been admired
            because he addresses the political and social pressures that
            shape and often distort, damage, or destroy life and
            feeling. This is apparent even in the earliest poems Cardenal has
            chosen to preserve. "Raleigh," for example, is a
            dramatic meditation from 19493 in which the treasure-hunting
            explorer marvels at the expanse and wealth of the American
            continents and out of sheer pleasure recounts some of the triumphs
            and hardships of his travels. Although his alertness and wonder
            make him sympathetic, this Raleigh's vision of the New World
            as a limitless source of wealth is forerunner to the economic
            exploitation of the land and people.
            One might ask, What are the political and social circumstances
            which, rather than distorting and damaging life and feeling,
            nurture and preserve them? Perhaps one might answer that,
            paradoxically, destructive conditions of life have many times
            proven insufficiently powerful to prevent the creation of poetry.
            And some poetry has even arisen in reaction to the destructive:
            such conditions produce resistance, which, if it cannot heal the
            spirit, can lend it strength. One might answer further that it is
            not Cardenal's or any artist's responsibility to
            establish what circumstance will form a fruitful matrix for art,
            but only to work as honestly and as hard as political, social, and
            artistic circumstances will permit.
             
            2. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1969-1978 (New
            York, 1980), p. 47.
            3. The date is from Joaquín Martin Sosa, "Breve guía (para
            uso) de lectores," preface to Poesía de uso,p. 9.
             
            Reginald Gibbonsis the editor of TriQuarterly magazine and teaches
            at Northwestern University. His most recent books are his third
            volume of poems, Saints,one of the winning books in the National
            Poetry Series (1986), and two edited collections of
            essays The Writer in Our World (1986) and, with Gerald Graff,
            Criticism in the University(1985). He is at work on a critical
            study of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as new poems and
            fiction. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry,"Poetic Form and the Translator," appeared in
            the June 1985 issue.
Rudolf Arnheim
         Art among the Objects
         With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the
            objects. There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the
            beginning. Art did not separate one kind of thing from the others
            but was rather a quality common to them all. To the extent to which
            things were made by human beings, art did not necessarily call for
            the skill of specialists. All things took skill, and almost
            everybody had it.
            This is the way an essayist in the eighteenth century might have
            begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical
            past would sound naïve and misleading, mainly because we have come
            to pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them
            from the rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from
            what is supposed not to be art a hopeless endeavor, which has
            more and more disfigured our image of art by extirpating it from
            its context. We have been left with the absurd notion of art as a
            collection of useless artifacts generating an unexplainable kind of
            pleasure.
            Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come
            primarily from those of us who, established on the island of
            artistic theory and practice, look around at what else there is in
            the world to see; rather it will come from those who are curious
            about what human beings meet, make, and use, and who in the course
            of their explorations run into objects prominently displaying the
            property we call art. Psychologists, sociologists, and
            anthropologists have been driven to view art in the context of
            nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization.
            As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview
            study, The Meaning of Things,by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene
            Rochberg-Halton, in which three generations of families from the
            Chicago area were questioned about their favorite
            possessions.1&shy; Pictures, sculptures, and all sorts of craft
            work turned up at a more or less modest place in the inventory of
            the home, and the reasons given for their value make wholesome
            reading for specialists in aesthetics.
             
            1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The
            Meaning of Things: Symbols in the Development of the Self
            (Cambridge, 1981).
             
            Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor
            emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting
            professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983.
            His most recently published book is New Essays on the Psychology of
            Art. At present he is preparing a new edition of The Power of the
            Center,a theory of visual composition first published in 1982.
E. H. Gombrich
         "They Were All Human Beings--So Much Is Plain":_Reflections_on
            Cultural Relativism in the Humanities
         In the fourth section of Goethe's Zahme Xenien we find the
            quatrain from which I have taken the theme of such an old and new
            controversy, which, as I hope, concerns both Germanic studies and
            the other humanities:
                        "What was it that kept you from us so
            apart?"
                        I always read Plutarch again and again.
                        "And what was the lesson he did impart?"
                        "They were all human beings so much is
            plain."1
                        In the very years when Goethe wrote these lines, that
            is in the 1820s, Hegel repeatedly gave his lectures on the
            philosophy of history. Right at the beginning he formulated the
            opposite view which I should like briefly to characterize as
            "cultural relativism."
            Every age has such peculiar circumstances, such individual
            conditions that it must be interpreted, and can only be
            interpreted, by reference to itself…. Nothing is shallower in this
            respect than the frequent appeal to Greek and Roman example which
            so often occurred among the French at the time of their Revolution.
            Nothing could be more different than the nature of these peoples
            and the nature of our own times.2
                        What is at issue here is not, of course, Hegel's
            assertion that ages and peoples differ from each other. We all know
            that, and Goethe, the attentive reader and traveler, also knew, for
            instance, that the Roman carnival differed in its character from
            the celebrations of the Feast of Saint Rochus at Bingen, both of
            which he had described so lovingly. What makes the cultural
            historian into a cultural relativist is only the conclusion which
            we saw Hegel draw, that cultures and styles of life are not only
            different but wholly incommensurable, in other words that it is
            absurd to compare the peoples of a region or an age with human
            beings of other zones because there is no common denominator that
            would justify us in doing so.
             
            1.                                 &lsquo;Was hat dich nun von uns
            entfernt?'
                                                Hab immer den Plutarch gelesen.
                                                &lsquo;Was has du den dabei
            gelernt?'
                                                Sind eben alles Menschen
            gewesen.'
             
            Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Såmtlich Werke. Jubilåums-ausgabe in 40
            Bånden(Stuttgart, 1902-7) 4:73; with commentary.
            2. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorselungen über die
            Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke,20 vols. (Frankfurt-am-Main,
            1969-79), 12:17.
             
            E. H. Gombrichwas director of the Warburg Institute and Professor
            of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of
            London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The
            Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The
            Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, Tributes,
            Aby Warburg,and New Light on Old Masters.His previous contributions
            to include "The Museum: Past, Present and
            Future" (Spring 1977), "Standards of Truth: The
            Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and
            "Representation and Misrepresentation" (December 1984).
Paul Feyerabend
         Creativity--A Dangerous Myth
         According to one of the rivals, "poets do not create from
            knowledge but on the basis of certain natural talents and guided by
            divine inspiration, just like seers and the singers of
            oracles."1 There is "a form of possession and madness,
            caused by the muses, that seizes a tender and untouched soul and
            inspires and stimulates it so that it educates by praising the
            deeds of ancestors in songs and in every other mode of poetry.
            Whoever knocks on the door of poetry without the madness of the
            muses trusting that technique alone will make him a whole poet does
            not reach his aim; he and his poetry of reason disappear before the
            poetry of the madman."2 Even knowledge cannot arise in a
            purely rational way. In his seventh letter Plato explains how
            "from a long and dedicated pursuit of the subject and from
            close companionship, [understanding] suddenly, like fire being
            kindled by a leaping spark, is born in the soul and straightaway
            finds nourishment in itself."3 Thus understanding or building
            a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical
            knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and
            directs it, toward theoretical insight in one case, toward artistic
            achievement in the other.
            The view adumbrated in these quotations is very popular today.
            Interestingly enough it seems to receive support form the most
            rigorous and most advanced parts of the sciences. This rigor, it is
            pointed out, is but a transitory stage in a process which has much
            in common with what Plato envisaged. Of course, it is necessary to
            make some changes: Plato's knowledge was stable while
            scientific knowledge progresses. Plato assumed that outside
            forces madness, divine inspiration impinge on the soul
            while the moderns let the appropriate ideas, images, emotions arise
            from the individual soul itself. But there seem to exist many
            reasons to recommend a Platonism that has been modified in this
            way.
            In the following essay I shall try to show that the reasons that
            have been given are invalid and that the view itself the view
            that culture needs individual creativity is not only absurd
            but also dangerous. To make my criticism as concrete as possible I
            shall concentrate on e specific group of arguments in its favor.
            And to make it as clear as possible I shall use arguments trying to
            show the role of individual creativity in the sciences. If these
            clear and detailed arguments fail, then the rhetoric emerging from
            more foggy areas will altogether lose its force.
             
            1. Plato, Apology of Socrates 22c. Translations, unless otherwise
            noted, are my own
            2. Plato, Phaedrus 245a.
            3. Plato, Epistles 341c, d.
             
            Paul Feyerabendstudied singing and opera production in Vienna,
            history of theater and theatrical production at the Institute for
            the Methodological Reform of the German Theater in Weimar, and
            physics, astronomy, and philosophy in Vienna. He has lectured on
            aesthetics, the history of science, and philosophy in Austria,
            Germany, England, New Zealand, and the United States. At the moment
            he holds a joint appointment at the University of California,
            Berkeley, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His
            books include Against Method (1975), Erkenntnis für freie Menschen
            (1981), and Philosophical Papers (1981). Forthcoming works are
            Farewell to Reason and Stereotypes of Reality.
Susan Gubar
         Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of
            Female Violation
         It is hardly necessary to rent I Spit on Your Graveor Tool Box
            Murders for your VCR in order to find images of sexuality
            contaminated by depersonalization or violence. As far back as
            Rabelais' Gargantua,for example, Panurge proposes to build a
            wall around Paris out of the pleasure-twats of women [which] are
            much cheaper than stones": "the largest … in
            front" would be followed by "the medium-sized, and last
            of all, the least and smallest," all interlaced with
            "many horney joy-dinguses" so that fortification would
            be impregnable, except for the "ordure and excretions"
            of the flies it would doubtlessly attract.1 Two centuries later,
            one of Rabelais' compatriots, the Marquis de Lade, described
            the rage of a sexually initiated daughter against a woman who
            refuses to consider her "pleasure-twat" "cheaper
            than stones." The Sadeian heroine first sodomizes her
            puritanical mother with an artificial penis, then has her infected
            with syphilis, and finally performs infibulations to prevent the
            infected semen from leaking out: "Quickly, quickly, fetch me
            needle and threat! … Spread your thighs, Mama, so I can stitch you
            together."2
            One century later in England, the author of My Secret Life
            explained that, when in a state of sexual excitement, "he is
            ready to fuck anything," from his sister to his grandmother,
            from a ten-year-old, to a woman of sixty, for a standing prick has
            no conscience." To this credo, he adds the admonition,
            "Woe be to the female whom he gets a chance at, if she does
            not want him,for he will have her if he can."3 The sexually
            aroused man in the contemporary American film Looking for Mr.
            Goodbar curses the woman who does not want him as much as she wants
            a room of her own and the freedom to choose a succession of male
            lovers. After he resentfully determines to have her when he gets
            the chance ("All you got to do is lay there. Guy's got
            to do all the work"), he rapes her and finally knifes her to
            death, exclaiming "That's what you want, bitch, right?
            That's what you want."
            However these individual works are labeled, such passages remind us
            of the long history of pornography, a gender-specific genre
            produced primarily by and for men but focused obsessively on the
            female figure. In their depictions of female sexuality, narratives
            from Gargantua to La Philosophie dans le boudoir, My Secret
            Life,and Looking for Mr. Goodbar explain why definitions of the
            pornographic have recently moved away from "obscenity,"
            a term that generally refers to the sexually stimulating effects of
            a picture, a novel, or a film on the male reader/observer, and
            toward "dehumanization," a word that is used to evoke
            the objectification of women. As Irene Diamond has demonstrated,
            during the past decade the generally held assumption that
            pornography is about male sexuality has been qualified by those who
            argue that "the &lsquo;what' of pornography is not sex
            but power and violence, and the &lsquo;who' of concern are no
            longer male consumers and artists but women."4
             
            1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,trans. Jacques Le
            Clercq (New York, 1936), bk. 2, chap. 15. I have used this
            translation because it is employed in Helene Iswolsky's
            translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). With no analysis of gender,
            Bakhtin's exclusive focus on the grotesque wipes out the
            significance of Rabelais' sexual imagery.
            2. Marquis de Sade, quoted in a brilliant reading of this text by
            Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography
            (New York, 1978), p. 127; all further references to this work ,
            abbreviated SW,will be included in the text.
            3. My Secret Life ([1984?]; New York, 1966), p. 361.
            4. Irene Diamond, "Pornography and Repression: A
            Reconsideration," in Women: Sex and Sexuality,ed. Catharine
            Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago, 1980), p. 132.
             
            Susan Gubar is professor of English and women's studies at
            Indiana University, Bloomington. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert,
            she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
            the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and co-edited both
            Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and the
            Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in
            English.This fall they will publish the first volume of a three-
            volume work, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
            the Twentieth Century. Her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry is " &lsquo;The Blank Page' and the Issues of
            Female Creativity" (Winter 1981).
Frank Lentricchia
         Patriarchy Against Itself--The Young Manhood of Wallace Stevens
         In what is advertised as a "controversial coast to coast
            bestseller," most men who were asked "How would you
            feel if something about you were described as feminine or
            womanly?" said (surprise) they'd be angry. Consider
            these voices from The Hite Report on Male Sexuality:
            Enraged. Insulted. Never mind what women are really like I
            know what he's saying: he's saying I should be
            submissive to him.
            To be called "like a woman" by another man is to be
            humiliated by him, because most men consider women to be weak, and
            a man doesn't want to be considered weak.
            Chagrined. I may appear soft, but I carry a big stick. So watch
            out.
            If I was described as having something "like a
            woman's," I would be outraged. I would defend my
            masculinity almost automatically. I wouldn't like being
            compared to a woman's anything.1
            About two seconds of reflection should be enough to convince most
            of us that what is offered in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality as
            the representative testimony of contemporary American men is, in
            fact, representative: our relations with women are problematic,
            those with ourselves something worse. What Shere Hite does not call
            attention to is an intriguing recurrence in many of the responses:
            the question is heard as a charge and it is imagined to be coming
            from another male. The basic point now seems to me inescapable,
            though to say "inescapable" is in no way to say that
            the history of literary theory and criticism has found it so (or
            that I have always found it so). One way of understanding that
            history is to read it as a series of ingenious escapes from the
            basic point which is economic and sexual (in that order: the order
            of repression) and which goes something like this: What we know as
            "femininity" is internally linked to what we know as
            "masculinity" because both designations are highly
            motivated cultural constructions of biological difference that do
            powerful social work at the moment when they are lived, when they
            constitute the barely conscious and barely reflected upon substance
            of belief. The political synonym for "belief" is
            "ideology" in the particular sense of
            "ideology" as a constructed thing which nevertheless
            feels natural and is never (or is only rarely) experienced as a
            thing bearing interested human intention. The basic ideological
            point has to do with social engenderment, and it means, among other
            things, if you're male, that you must police yourself for
            traces of femininity. If you're male it means, among other
            things, that the great dread is not so much that another man might
            call you feminine or womanly (in our culture, a pretty dreadful
            prospect), but that you might have to call yourself feminine or
            womanly. The political issue of gender has recently been the
            special concern of feminist criticism and eventually, after a long
            look at Wallace Stevens, I'll address feminism directly, in
            what may be its institutionally most potent form.
             
            1. Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York, 1982),
            p. 64.
             
            Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. This
            essay is part of a forthcoming book, Ariel and the Police: Michel
            Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens.He has also published
            Criticism and Social Change (1983) and After the new Criticism
            (1980).
Joan DeJean
         Fictions of Sappho
         I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by
            returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking's
            notion of a "poetics of abandonment." Lipking's
            article was included in an issue of  entitled
            Canons,in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist
            perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on
            literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence,
            sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent
            reformulation of the canon. It may be, as Viktor Shklovsky
            suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love,that literary theory is
            the novel's successor, in which case the resurrection of
            Ovid's abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore,
            for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are
            today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom
            have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given
            the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation,
            it is perhaps inevitable that some of today's male literary
            critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers.
            Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign
            women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the
            cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner
            that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has
            provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary
            canons but to critical canons as well.
            In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic
            investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy
            deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of
            recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the
            authors of The Madwoman in the Attic:"Sandra Gilbert and
            Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth
            century as if into a mirror" ("AS," p. 68; my
            emphasis). Thus Gilbert and Gubar Lipking also cites the
            examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers become the most
            recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary
            critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my
            analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier
            centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking's
            article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring.
            "In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right
            issues." Lipking may be calling for "a poetics of
            abandonment" not in response to a perceived maternal
            deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to
            abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female
            theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly
            difficult time proving their legitimacy.
             
            Joan DeJeanis professor of French at Princeton University. Her most
            recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade,and
            she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of
            Sappho: Sappho's Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937.
Joyce Carol Oates
         Soul at the White Heat: The Romance of_Emily_Dickinson's_Poetry
         Emily Dickinson is the most paradoxical of poets: the very poet of
            paradox. By way of voluminous biographical material, not to mention
            the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that we
            know everything about her; yet the common experience of reading her
            work, particularly if the poems are read sequentially, is that we
            come away seeming to know nothing. We could recognize her
            inimitable voice anywhere in the "prose" of her
            letters no less than in her poetry yet it is a voice of the
            most deliberate, the most teasing anonymity. "I'm
            Nobody!" is a proclamation to be interpreted in the most
            literal of ways. Like no other poet before her and like very few
            after her Rilke comes most readily to mind, and, perhaps,
            Yeats and Lawrence Dickinson exposes her heart's most
            subtle secrets; she confesses the very sentiments that, in society,
            would have embarrassed her dog (to paraphrase a remark of
            Dickinson's to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, explaining her
            aversion for the company of most people, whose prattle of
            "Hallowed things" offended her). Yet who is this
            "I" at the center of experience? In her astonishing
            body of 1,775 poems Dickinson records what is surely one of the
            most meticulous examinations of the phenomenon of human
            "consciousness" ever undertaken. The poet's
            persona the tantalizing "I" seems, in
            nearly every poem, to be addressing us directly with perceptions
            that are ours as well as hers. (Or his: these
            "Representations of the Verse," though speaking in
            Dickinson's voice, are not restricted to the female gender.)
            The poems' refusal to be rhetorical, their daunting intimacy,
            suggests the self-evident in the way that certain Zen koans and
            riddles do while being indecipherable. But what is challenged is,
            perhaps, "meaning" itself:
                        Wonder is not precisely Knowing
            And not precisely Knowing not 
            A beautiful but bleak condition
            He has not lived who has not felt 
            Suspense is his maturer Sister 
            Whether Adult Delight is Pain
            Or of itself a new misgiving 
            This is the Gnat that mangles
            men                                         [1331, ca. 1874]1
             
            1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,ed. Thomas H. Johnson
            (Boston, 1960); subsequent references in the text to the poems will
            cite the Johnson number and the date assigned by Johnson to each
            poem.
             
            Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Lecturer at
            Princeton University and the author most recently of the booklength
            essay On Boxing. "Soul at the White Heat" will be
            included in her book of essays, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and
            Opportunities,to be published in the spring of 1988.
Helen Vendler
         The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
         Bishop was both fully at home in, and fully estranged from, Nova
            Scotia and Brazil. In Nova Scotia, after Bishop's father had
            died, her mother went insane; Bishop lived there with her
            grandparents from the age of three to the age of six. She then left
            to be raised by an aunt in Massachusetts, but spent summers in Nova
            Scotia till she was thirteen. Subsequent adult visits north
            produced poems like "Cape Breton," "At the
            Fishhouses," and "The Moose"; and Bishop
            responded eagerly to other poets, like John Brinnin and Mark
            Strand, who knew that landscape. Nova Scotia represented a harsh
            pastoral to which, though she was rooted in it, she could not
            return. Brazil, on the other hand, was a place of adult choice,
            where she bought and restored a beautiful eighteenth-century house
            in Ouro Prêto. It was yet another pastoral, harsh in a different,
            tropical way a pastoral exotic enough to interest her
            noticing eye but one barred to her by language and culture (though
            she made efforts to learn and translate Portuguese and was
            influenced by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade).
            Foreign abroad, foreign at home, Bishop appointed herself a poet of
            foreignness, which (as Rich justly says) is, far more than
            "travel," her subject. Three of her books have
            geographical names "North and South,"
            "Questions of Travel," and "Geography
            III" and she feels a geographer's compulsions
            precisely because she is a foreigner, not a native. Her early
            metaphor for a poem is a map, and she scrutinized that metaphor, we
            may imagine, because even as a child she had had to become
            acquainted through maps with the different territories she lived in
            and traveled back and forth between. In the poem "Crusoe in
            England," Bishop's Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his
            island, has nightmares of having to explore more and more new
            islands and of being required to be their geographer:
                                                I'd have
                                    nightmares of other islands
                                    stretching away from min, infinities
                                    of islands, islands spawning islands,
                                    …………………………………………
                                                knowing that I had to live
                                    on each and every one, eventually,
                                    for ages, registering their flora,
                                    their fauna, their geography.
            This recurrent anxiety marks the end of one of Bishop's
            earlier dreams that one could go home, or find a place that
            felt like home. In "A Cold Spring," a book recording
            chiefly some unhappy years preceding her move to Brazil, there had
            yet survived the dream of going home, in a poem using the Prodigal
            Son as surrogate. He deludes himself, by drinking, that he can be
            happy away, but finally his evening horrors in exile determine him
            to return:
                                    Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
                                    he felt the bats' uncertain
            staggering flight,
                                    his shuddering insights, beyond his
            control,
                                    touching him. But it took him a long time
                                    finally to make his mind up to go home.
                                                                       
                        ["The Prodigal Son"]
             
            Helen Vendler is Kenan Professor of English at Harvard University.
            She has written books on Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, and Keats, and is
            now working on a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She has
            recently edited the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry.
Leo Lowenthal
         Sociology of Literature in Retrospect
         I soon discovered that I was quite isolated in my attempts to
            pursue the sociology of literature. In any case, one searched
            almost in vain for allies if one wanted to approach a literary text
            from the perspective of a critical theory of society. To be sure,
            there were Franz Mehring's articles which I read with
            interest and profit; but despite the admirable decency and the
            uncompromising political radicalism of the author, his writings
            hardly went beyond the limits of a socialist journalist who wrote
            in essentially the same style about literature as about political
            and the economy. George Lukács had not yet published his impressive
            series of essays on Marxist aesthetics and interpretation of
            literature. Of course, I was deeply touched and influenced by his
            fine little book, The Theory of the Novel (1920), which I
            practically learned by heart. Besides Levin Schücking's small
            volume on the sociology of literary taste, the only other major
            influence I can recall was George Brandes' monumental work on
            the literary currents of the nineteenth century.
            Nonetheless, I had the courage, not to say hubris, to plan an
            ambitious, socially critical series on French, English, Spanish,
            and German literature, the beginning of which was to be formed by
            the above-mentioned studies. My attention was especially focused on
            the writes and literary schools which the German literary
            establishment either punished by total silence (for example,
            "Young Germany" and Friedrich Spielhagen) or raised up
            into the clouds of idealistic babble (Goethe and the Romantics) or
            relegated to quasi-folkloric anthropology (C. F. Meyer and
            Gottfried Keller).
            In these studies, I limited myself to the narrative forms of
            literature; for reasons which I hold to be sociologically and
            artistically valid, I believe that novels and stories represent the
            most significant aspect of German literature in the nineteenth
            century. While I in no way feel ashamed of these documents of my
            youth, I am conscious of their weaknesses. If I were to write them
            over again, I would certainly be less sure of some of the direct
            connections I drew between literature and writers on the one hand,
            and the social infrastructure on the other. In later publications I
            attempted to analyze with greater circumspection the mediation
            between substructure and superstructure, between social currents
            and ideologies; but my views on the social world and the necessity
            to combine social theory and literary analysis have not changed in
            any essential way. In the last decades the sociology of literature
            has become progressively more fashionable. The writings of my
            contemporaries have often amazed me because some frequently
            in unnecessarily complicated and esoteric language are so
            concerned with "mediation" that the connections between
            social being and social consciousness became almost obscured.
             
            Leo Lowenthal is professor emeritus of sociology at the University
            of California, Berkeley. He is also professor emeritus at the
            University of Frankfurt in West Germany. His collected works have
            been published in five volumes in German (1980-87) and in a
            parallel English edition. Lowenthal's autobiographical
            writings, edited by Martin jay, will appear in the fall of 1987
            under the title An Unmastered Past.Lowenthal's present
            studies deal with German postmodernism. Ted. R. Weeksis a graduate
            student at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in
            imperial Russian history.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality
         Some years ago a collection of historical and philosophical essays
            on sex was advertised under the slogan: Philosophers are interested
            in sex again. Since that time the history of sexuality has become
            an almost unexceptionable topic, occasioning as many books and
            articles as anyone would ever care to read. Yet there are still
            fundamental conceptual problems that get passed over imperceptibly
            when this topic is discussed, passed over, at least in part,
            because they seem so basic or obvious that it would be time badly
            spent to worry too much about them. However, without backtracking
            toweard this set of problems, one will quite literally not know
            what one is writing the history of when one writes a history of
            sexuality.
            An excellent example of some of the most sophisticated current
            writing in this field can be found in Western Sexuality,a
            collection of essays that resulted from a seminar conducted by
            Philippe Ariès at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
            in 1979-80.1 As one would expect, Western Sexualityis characterized
            by a diversity of methodological and historiographical
            approaches social history, intellectual history, cultural
            history (which one historian I know refers to as the history of bad
            ideas), historical sociology, the analysis of literary texts, and
            that distinctive kind of history practiced by Michel Foucault and
            also in evidence in the short essay by Paul Veyne. One perspective
            virtually absent from this collection is the history of science,
            and since I believe that the history of science has a decisive and
            irreducible contribution to make to the history of sexuality, it is
            not accident that I am going to focus on that connection. But the
            history of sexuality is also an area in which one's
            historiography or implicit epistemology will stamp, virtually
            irrevocably, one's first-order historical writing. It is an
            arena in which philosophical and historical concerns inevitably run
            into one another.
             
            1. Philippe Ariès and Adnré Béjin, eds., Western Sexuality:
            Practice and Percept in Past and Present Times(Oxford, 1985).
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is assistant
            professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General
            Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of
            Science at the University of Chicago. His previous contribution to
            ,"How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A
            Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of
            Sexuality," appeared in the Winter 1987 issue.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction
         In "Against Theory" we argued that a text means what
            its author intends it to mean. We argued further that all attempts
            to found a method of interpretation on a general account of
            language involve imagining that a text can mean something other
            than what its author intends. Therefore, we concluded, all such
            attempts are bound to fail; there can be no method of
            interpretation. But the attempt to imagine that a text can mean
            something other than what its author intends is not restricted to
            writers interested in interpretive method. In fact, the denial that
            meaning is determined by intention is central to projects as
            indifferent to method as hermeneutics and deconstruction. For
            hermeneutics, a text means that its author intends but also
            necessarily means more, acquiring new meanings as readers apply it
            to new situations. For deconstruction, an author can never succeed
            in determining the meaning of a text; every text participates in a
            code that necessarily eludes authorial control. Since both these
            projects are committed to the view that a text from mean something
            other than what its author intends, they are also committed to the
            view that a text derives its identity from something other than
            authorial intention. The text is what it is, no matter what meaning
            is assigned to it by its author and no matter how that meaning is
            revised by its readers.
            What gives a text its autonomous identity? On most accounts, the
            answer is linguistic conventions the semantic and syntactic
            rules of the language in which the text is written. One of our aims
            in the present essay is to criticize the particular notions of
            textual identity advanced by hermeneutics and deconstruction, but
            our more general target is the notion that there can be any
            plausible criteria of textual identity that can function
            independent of authorial intention. Because there can be no such
            criteria, nonmethodological versions of interpretive theory are as
            incoherent as methodological ones and, like the methodological
            ones, should be abandoned.
             
            Steven Knapp is associate professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, and is the author of Personification and the
            Sublime: Milton to Coleridge.Walter Benn Michaels,professor of
            English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of
            The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism.
Robert Zaller
         Philip Guston and the Crisis of the Image
         The twentieth century began with the deconstruction of the image,
            as it is ending with the effort to restore it. Cubism, dada, and
            abstract expressionism took apart what, in their various ways, pop
            art, magic realism, and neoexpressionism have tried to put back
            together. Tonality in music and narrative in literature have
            undergone similar change.1 What has been at stake in each case has
            been the redefinition of a center, a normative or ordering
            principle as such. Yeats intuited this general phenomenon in his
            famous observation that "the center cannot hold," and
            though whether one applauds or, with Yeats, condemns the result, it
            is undeniable that the crisis of contemporary culture has been in
            large part experienced as a deprivation of norms.
            This sense of deprivation has been most apparent in the plastic
            arts. The fashioning of images has been one of the primary impulses
            of human art. It has been the basis of most systems of visual
            representation and constitutes the earliest record we have off art
            itself. Its loss or abandonment has been in good part responsible
            for the bewilderment and hostility much of the general public
            continues to express toward modern art.
            The experience of this loss, however, has not been confined to the
            public alone. For many artists, the sense of modern art's
            expressive potential has been tempered by an anxiety about its
            ultimate direction.2 For these artists, the image had not been
            transcended but rather rendered inaccessible, and implicitly or
            explicitly they sought its restoration. At the same time, they were
            keenly aware that there could be no return to exhausted modes of
            representation, no looking back except as parody or quotation.3
             
            1. Among the studies comparing changes across the arts in the early
            twentieth century are Georges Edouard Lemaître, From Cubism to
            Surrealism in French Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), and Bram
            Dijkstra, The Hieroglyphics of a New Speech: Cubism, Stieglitz, and
            the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, N.J.,
            1969). More recently, visualization in cubist art and relativity
            theory has been compared in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth
            Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art(Princeton, N.J.,
            1983). For a general overview, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of
            Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). Marxist
            critics, notably Walter Benjamin, have long insisted on the
            relationship between modernism in the arts and the crisis of the
            traditional order.
            2. This is clearly visible in the work and writing of pioneers such
            as Kandinsky and Klee or, to take a later case, Adolph Gottlieb.
            The correspondence between Kandinsky and Schönberg is illuminating
            as well.
            3. Much of the neoimagistic art of the past twenty-five years falls
            into these categories, and thus signals a prolongation rather than
            a resolution of the crisis. Pop art was clearly an art of parody,
            while work of an artist such as Malcolm Morley might almost be
            taken as an illustration of Benjamin's thesis about the work
            of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. His
            "imitations," like those of Robert Lowell in verse,
            betray a deep anxiety about mastery and tradition. Much the same
            can be said for such musical compositions as Lukas Foss'
            "Baroque Variations" and "Phorion" or
            Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia," to name but a random
            few among many.
             
            Robert Zaller is professor of history and head of the department of
            history and politics at Drexel University. He was formerly on the
            faculties of Queens College (CUNY), the University of California at
            Santa Barbara, and the University of Miami. His books include The
            Parliament of 1621: A Study in Constitutional Conflictand The
            Cliffs of Solitude: A Reading of Robinson Jeffers.
James Lawler
         Daemons of the Intellect: The Symbolists and Poe
         Poe's influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many
            occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is
            Eliot's "From Poe to Valéry," a Library of
            Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry's death.2
            Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature irresponsible
            in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, "the
            intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty";
            "all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than
            believed" ("FPV," p. 335). How, then, we ask, did
            he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue
            of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make
            much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen
            years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems thirty
            years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and
            Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the
            Marginalia.Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he
            had learned English for one sole reason: "to read Poe
            better."3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot
            is content to remark that the French poets "were not
            disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware"
            ("FPV," p. 336). He underlines, however, that Poe
            showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who
            adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète
            maudit,Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in
            whom he discovered "a method and an occupation that of
            observing himself write" ("FPV," p. 341). So Poe
            had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect
            of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this
            last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox:
            "with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet," he writes,
            "the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not
            developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind
            playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold
            convictions" ("FPV," p. 341).
            Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause
            and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be
            thought the product of monstrous error. And yet "from Poet to
            Valéry" and the complementary studies in English or French of
            the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew
            the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in
            the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents
            that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles,
            not only because Poe was "ce poète incomparable, ce
            philosophe non refute" (Baudelaire)4 and, therefore, worthy
            of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future
            thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they
            found a figure of radical independence classicist, visionary,
            logician supreme whom they explained by convergent tropes of
            daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence
            of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our
            knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of
            Poe's action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive
            rewriting by which "à l'égal de nos maître les
            plus chers ou vénérés," as Mallarmé put it5 he entered
            the mainstream of French poetry.
             
            2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review2 (Autumn 1949):
            335; all further references to this work, abbreviated
            "FPV," will be included in the text.
            3. Mallarmé, "Autobiographie," Oeuvres completes,p.
            662.
            4. Baudelaire, "Le Poème du hachisch," Oeuvres
            complètes,1:427.
            5. Mallarmé, "Scolies," Oeuvres completes,p. 223.
             
            James Lawler,Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of
            French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on
            nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books
            are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet
            as Analyst,and René Char: The Myth and the Poem.He is currently
            completing a study of Buadelaire's Les Fleurs du mal.
Conrad L. Rushing
         "Mere Words": The Trial of Ezra Pound
         The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left
            questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound's
            life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating
            the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary.
            There is a lightness in Pound's writing that speaks of a
            being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his
            economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views,
            as well as his concern for other writers, he is of the
            world inthe world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied
            to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable
            in Confucian China as in Dante's Florence or twentieth-
            century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan
            Cantoswhile jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was
            in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could
            not understandthe charges against him. Can such an impairment and
            such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what
            of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could
            Pound have been convicted of treason?
            In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred
            to as "the trial of Ezra Pound" and to show that
            Pound's case should have been brought to trial within one or
            two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a
            reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if
            found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term
            would have been so evident that he would have likely spent
            considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the
            mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the
            similarities and differences between Pound's case and three
            other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after
            World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce,was tried shortly
            after the close of the war and well before Pound's competency
            hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have
            led Pound's lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until
            the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The
            other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert
            Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in
            1943.
             
            3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as
            "Lord Haw Haw." He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3
            Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the "radio
            traitors." He began his programs, "This is Jairmany
            calling," and would then prophesy the destruction of English
            towns and cities. The name "Lord Haw Haw" was created
            by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and
            to make him appear idiotic.
             
            Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an
            occasional lecturer in law at the University of California,
            Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the
            California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry
            Center.
William M. Chace
         Ezra Pound: "Insanity," "Treason," and Care
         The British journalist Christopher Hitchens has recently noted that
            the extraordinary excitement created by l'affaire Pound,an
            excitement sustained for now some forty years, is partly the result
            of having no fewer than three debates going on whenever the
            poet's legal situation and his consequent hospitalization are
            discussed. As Hitchens says, those questions are: "First, was
            Pound guilty of treason? If not, or even if so, was he mad? Third,
            was he given privileged treatment for either condition?"1
             
            I propose to discuss all three issues in a way that fairly reflects
            the fact that I am neither a physician nor a lawyer. What I know of
            the state of medical expertise, both today and in the period of
            time from 1943 (when Pound was indicted on nineteen counts of
            treason) to 1958 (when he left St. Elizabeths), leads me, as a
            layman, to believe that there is an enormous latitude of
            understanding among medical professionals as to the precise meaning
            of "insanity." At one extreme, for some distinguished
            physicians, the term means almost nothing. They see it as a legal
            term and as therefore irrelevant to them; some of them follow the
            line of reasoning developed by Thomas Szasz over his long writing
            career, namely that "mental illness" if not illness in
            any ordinary sense of the term.2 For other medical practitioners,
            it does mean something, but only when it is redefined into much
            smaller subcategories and enriched with much more precise
            terminology, and when the given patient and his full range of
            circumstances are considered.
            What I know of the legal understanding of insanity (and here I
            speak as a Californian who has seen some of the most unusual kinds
            of terrible crime explained away as "madness" while
            other, apparently similar, crimes have not been eligible for that
            designation) is that there has been and is now little firm
            agreement about "insanity" or "madness."
            Equally competent juries and courts have been able to set down
            findings that are more or less plausible on their face but do not
            seem to comport at all with each other. I tentatively conclude that
            whatever "insanity" now is in the United States, and
            whatever it was when Pound was found unfit to stand trial in 1945,
            the standard is not the lucid simplicity of the M'Naghten
            test, namely, the ability of the accused to understand the
            difference between "right" and "wrong."
            Human mind, self-awareness, and motivations are vastly more
            complicated than such a test would imply.
             
            1. Christopher Hitchins, "American Notes," Times
            Literary Supplement,21 Oct. 1983, p. 1160.
            2. See Thomas Szasz, Insanity (New York, 1987) for a synthesis of
            his ideas as formulated in some eighteen books.
             
            William M. Chace is professor of English and Vice Provost for
            Academic Planning and Development at Stanford University. He is
            author of The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
            (1973), Lionel Trilling: Criticism and Politics(1980), and
            scholarly essays on writers including Wyndham Lewis, D. H.
            Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence, and James Joyce. He is now working on a
            study of the ways in which American culture in this century has
            been subjected to critical analysis.
Richard Sieburth
         In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The_Poetry_of_Economics
         … Pound's Imagist economy often mixes metaphors of
            capitalization with metaphors of expenditure. Words, he writes in
            an early essay, are like cones filled with energy, laden with the
            accumulated (or capitalized?) "power of tradition."
            When correctly juxtaposed, these words "radiate" or
            "discharge" or spend this energy (SP,p. 34), just as
            the Image (in one of Pound's most famous formulations)
            releases "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
            of time" (LE,p. 4). The precise relation of accumulation to
            expenditure in Pound's Imagism is never really elaborated.
            For clarification one would probably have to look toward his
            theories of sexuality, which hint at a proportion between spermatic
            retention and intensity of ejaculation. "The liquid solution
            [of sperm and/or thought]," he writes in his 1921
            "Postscript" to Gourmont's Natural Philosophy of
            Love,"must be kept at right consistency; one would say the
            due proportion of liquid to viscous particles, a good circulation;
            the actual quality of the sieve or separator, counting perhaps most
            of all; the balance of ejector and retentive media" (PD,p.
            214).13 Similar physiological metaphors will shape Pound's
            later economic writings of the thirties and forties. Money will
            function as a kind of "sieve" or
            "separator" (depending on how porous its mediation is),
            and usury will be described as malevolent form of retention, an
            "obstruction" to the proper circulation of money and
            goods. Economic justice will therefore involve the institution of a
            correct "balance" or "measure" between
            accumulation and expenditure, between "ejector" and
            "retentive media." From Pound's later Confucian
            perspective, excess in either direction whether it take the
            form of "smeary hoarding" or extravagant
            squandering always leads to evil and disorder.14
            Excess is of course what Pound's Imagist economy most
            militantly seeks to eliminate from contemporary poetry. Pound
            writes in 1912, "As to Twentieth-century poetry … it will be
            harder and saner … &lsquo;nearer the bone.' It will be as
            much like granite as it can be … It will not try to seem forcible
            by rhetorical din, and luxurious riot. We will have fewer painted
            adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of it…. I want it austere,
            direct, free from emotional slither" (LE,p. 12). The
            vocabulary of this passage combines a discernibly American,
            puritanical suspicion of ornament with a functionalist asceticism
            that we have come to recognize as a characteristic feature of the
            international style of high modernism.15 From a postmodernist
            vantage point, however, we might well question just why the
            category of excess or surplus represented by "rhetorical
            din," "luxurious riot," or "emotional
            slither" should be so inevitably construed as negative or
            uneconomic. Georges Bataille, for one, provides a provocative
            refutation of this ideology in La Part maudite.The economics he
            there seeks to define (which is at the same time a linguistics, an
            erotics, and an anthropology) would instead be based on the
            valorization of excess, or of what he terms "la dépense
            improductive," nonproductive expenditure. Bataille's
            "economy of excess" turns on "la perte du
            proper," that is, the loss of the literal (or
            "proper") to the figurative, the loss of purity (or
            propriety) to scatological defilement, and the loss of personal
            identity (one's "proper" self) to a sacred
            expropriation by the Other.
             
            13. See also Kevin Oderman's comments on the importance of
            delay and deferral to Pound's troubadour "eroticism of
            dalliance" in " &lsquo;Cavalcanti': That the Body
            Is Not Evil," Paideuma 11 (Fall 1982): 257-79. If, according
            to Pound, the "classic aesthetic" involves
            "plastic to coitus, plastic plus immediate
            satisfaction," Cavalcanti's cult of Amor instead
            privileges mental (or spermadic) reterntion, "the fine thing
            held in the mind," that is, erotic or mnemonic
            capitalization. See LE,pp. 150-53.
            14. Rabaté, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology,pp. 217-23, similarly
            links Pound's "Postscript" to Gourmont to his
            later economics.
            15. Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Baton
            Rouge, La., 1969), pp. 177-78.
             
            Richard Sieburth is associate professor of French at New York
            University. He is the author of Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy
            de Gourmont(1978) and translator of Friedrich Hölderlin's
            Hymns and Fragments(1984). He is currently preparing an edition of
            Pound's writings on France.
Mark Roskill
         Van Dyck at the English Court: The Relations_of_Portraiture_and
            Allegory
         Anthony van Dyck's period of service to the Stuart court
            stretches from 1632, when he was appointed "principalle
            Paynter in ordinary to their Majesties" and knighted, to his
            death at the end of 1641. After an earlier visit of a few months,
            beginning in December 160, van Dyck had gone to Italy to improve
            himself; there he had defected from the service of James I. On his
            return to England this was forgiven, and in the early years he was
            mainly employed in making portraits of the royal family and
            household. Later he was again absent from England, spending an
            entire year beginning in July 1634 back in Antwerp. During the last
            six years van Dyck spent in England, his clientele widened further;
            it is chiefly the portraits of this latter period that I will
            consider here.
            These portraits have been approached and evaluated in two basic
            ways. First of all, they have been taken to demonstrate the
            adaptation of van Dyck's preexisting skills, especially his
            command of the "grand style," to the requirements of a
            court and aristocracy which prized grace and elegance as hallmarks
            of breeding and quality, and which at the same time welcomed the
            trappings of grandeur and the subtleties of variation, in costume,
            post, and gesture, that the artist could build into his
            presentation for their predilection.1 Second, where critical
            considerations have come up, these paintings have been evaluated in
            terms of whether the adoption of mannered and decorative traits now
            betokens a decline from the artist's previous work, or
            whether it represents rather a different kind of achievement which
            gave rise, at its best, to equally outstanding successes in
            conveying refined and subtly enhanced distinction.2
            But both these approaches agree in finding no intellectual content
            in the works in question, either of van Dyck's own devising
            or based on interests and concerns in which his subjects partook.
            This absence of implication to the portraits is seem as fitting
            with thea rtist's tendency to make creative decisions on an
            ad hoc basis, as evidenced by his preference for rapidly made
            drawings from the life over the use of oil sketches and by the
            pentimenti that his finished works reveal.3 It is also seen as
            fitting with the whole pattern cultural as well as social and
            economic of his relationship to the Stuart aristocrazy, for
            which these images were fashioned.
             
            1. See esp. Ellis Water house, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790
            (Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 49-50 (where the basic documentation for
            the years in England is given); and cf. more recently Christopher
            Brown, Van Dyck(Oxford, 1982 , p. 192 (on Lord John and Lord
            Bernard Stuart).
            2. See, for example, Erik Larsen, intro. to L'opera completa
            di Van Dyck 1626-1641 (Milan, 1980), p. 8 and Oliver Millar, intro.
            to exhibition catalog Van Dyck in England(National Portrait
            Gallery, London, Nov. 1982-Mar. 1983), p. 27 and esp. p. 31
            (attributing a decline, only toward the close of a long career, to
            illness and the pressure of commissions).
            3. See Millar, Van Dyck in England,p. 31, citing the miniaturist
            Richard Gibson on the "Sketches made from the life,"
            mainly lost, and cat. no. 12, on the pentimenti found in the 1633
            Charles I on Horseback.
             
            Mark Roskill is professor of the history of modern art at the
            University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His most recent book is The
            Interpretation of Cubism (1985). Previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "On the Recognition and Identification of
            Objects in Paintings" (Summer 1977) and "A Reply to
            John Reichert and Stanley Fish" (Winter 1979).
Alan Shapiro
         The New Formalism
         […] Open the pages of almost any national journal or magazine, and
            where ten years ago one found only one or another kind of free
            verse lyric, one now finds well rhymed quatrains, sestinas,
            villanelles, sonnets, and blank verse dramatic monologues or
            meditations.1 In a recent issue of the New Criterion,Robert Richman
            describes this rekindled interest in formal verse among younger
            poets as a return to the high seriousness, eloquence, and technical
            fluency that characterized the best achievements of American poetry
            forty years ago.2 As Mr. Richman numbers me among the younger poets
            working in form, I ought to be as cheered by these developments as
            he is. Yet I am anything but cheered. And not because I don't
            want to belong to club that would have me as a member, though this
            may be a part of it; but because I suspect that what Mr. Richman
            hails as a development may in fact be nothing but a mechanical
            reaction, and that the new formalists, in rejecting the sins of
            their experimental fathers may end up merely repeating the sings of
            their New Critical grandfathers, resuscitating the stodgy,
            overrefined conventions of the "fifties poem,"
            conventions which were of course sufficiently narrow and
            restrictive to provoke rebellion in the first place. Any reform,
            carried to uncritical extremes by lesser talents who ignore rather
            than try to assimilate the achievements of their predecessors, will
            itself require reformation. If James Wright, say, or Robert Bly,
            produced more than their fair share of imitators, if they even
            imitate themselves much of the time, they nonetheless have written
            poems all of us can and ought to learn from. Maybe we have had too
            much of the "raw" in recent years. But the answer to
            the raw is not the overcooked. Besides, it's dangerous to
            think we have to choose exclusively between free verse and form.
            The wider the range of styles and forms that we avail ourselves of,
            the more enriched, more flexible and inclusive our expressive
            resources will be. It's as important for those who work in
            form to be familiar with the experiments and innovatins of the last
            hundred years as it is for those who work in looser measures to be
            familiar with traditional verse forms that go back beyond the
            twentieth century.
             
            Alan Shapiro's most recent book of poems, Happy Hour,was
            published this year.
Catharine R. Stimpson
         Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its_Cultural_Consensus
         Like every great word, "representation/s " is a stew. A
            scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a
            representation can be an image visual, verbal, or aural.
            Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a
            narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence,
            "Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification
            clinic in Florida." Or, a representation can be the product
            of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth the world and
            justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, "Nancy
            Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman." In the past twenty
            years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart.
            This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a
            feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic.
            That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is
            the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts,
            especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the
            logic of a new cultural consensus.
            In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus
            about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that
            consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians,
            everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier
            and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of
            convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between
            the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere,
            were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete,
            cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or
            less knew that when I exclaimed, "Nancy Reagan wears a
            hat," it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic
            community to understand me than for a stranger to do so.
            Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of
            representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between
            "reality" and its "description"
             or "image."
             
            Catharine R. Stimpsonis professor of English and dean of the
            Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on
            a book about Gertrude Stein.
Yve-Alain Bois
         Piet Mondrian, New York City
         The association between New York City's all-over structure
            and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and
            identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my
            opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian's neoplastic works
            are constituted by an opposition between the variable (position,
            dimension, and color of the plane) and the invariable (right angle,
            the so-called "constant rapport"). On the other hand,
            the type of identity produced in New York City relies on
            repetition,a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole
            range of paintings predating neoplasticism. New York City differs
            from the "classic" neoplastic works, as well as from
            the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good
            deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this
            last point that Masheck doesn't entirely grasp the amplitude
            of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.
            In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go
            backthe 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two
            years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only
            in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie
            paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution
            of Mondrian's work during the years immediately preceding the
            foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der
            Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white
            background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions
            in Color, A and B (1917, Seuphor 290-914). Mondrian, who had not
            yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements
            (which are the result of a cubist disjunction between line and
            color), tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical
            dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate
            consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next
            step was the five Compositions (also in 1917), all entitled
            "With Colored Planes" (Seuphor 285-89). Here all
            superimposition was eliminated, as well as all "line."
            In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided
            without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The
            colored rectangles (less numerous) are on the way to alignment. In
            spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the
            background is hollowed out behind them.
             
            3. See James Johnson Sweeney, "Mondrian, the Dutch and De
            Stijl," Art News 50 (Summer 1951): 63. Meyer Schapiro made a
            similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. (However,
            his article on Mondrian appeared much later. See
            "Mondrian," in Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th
            Centuries: Selected Papers [New York, 1978], p. 256.)
            4. When I refer to a number accompanied by "Seuphor,"
            it refers to the "catalog by group" included in Michel
            Seuphor's book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis
            Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre,2d ed. (Paris,
            1970).
             
            Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns
            Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on
            twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently
            working on Mondrian's neoplastic years and on a history of
            axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the
            University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau's
            "Psychanalyse et marxisme" (Winter 1987).
Robert Scholes
         Deconstruction and Communication
         "Signature Event Context" (which I henceforth,
            following Derrida himself, refer to as "Sec") offers a
            critique of previous theories of communication, a critique of
            previous theories of communication, a critique that seems to open
            the way toward a new and freer notion of reading. My response to
            this view will be to point out that the proffered freedom is quite
            illusory, partly because off certain problems in the theory itself
            but especially because there is no path open from that theory to
            any practice, a point that is merely underscored by Derrida's
            own practice in response to being read by Searle.
            Derrida's argument in "Sec" can be summarized in
            the following way: A written text can survive the absence of its
            author, the absence of its addressee, the absence of its object,
            the absence of its context, the absence of its code and still
            be read. The argument also includes the stipulation that, as argued
            more fully elsewhere but briefly here as well, what is true of
            writing is also true of all other forms of communication: that they
            are all marked, fundamentally, by the differencethat constitutes
            arche-writing and is so palpable in actual written texts.
            My summary is, I hope, at least tolerably fair and accurate. (It is
            impossible to hope for more, since, as Richard Rorty admiringly
            remarks, Derrida "is … so skillful at fishing both sides of
            every stream."2) I believe that this summary of
            "Sec"'s argument also describes, in however
            compressed a form, what many American teachers and critics think
            they have learned from Derrida: namely, that reading can be freed
            from responsibility to anything prior to the act of reading, and,
            specifically, from those things named in the summary. As Derrida
            puts it himself: "writing is read, and &lsquo;in the last
            analysis' does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to
            the decoding of a meaning or truth" ("SecM," p.
            329).
             
            2. Richard Rorty, "The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A
            Reply to Henry Staten,"  12 (Winter 1986):
            464.
             
            Robert Scholesis Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown
            University, where he directs the Center for Modern Culture and
            Media. His last book was Textual Power. His next, with Nancy R.
            Comley and Gregory L. Ulmer, will be a text book called Text Book.
Susan Gillman
         "Dementia Americana": Mark Twain, "Wapping Alice," and the_Harry_K.
            Thaw Trial
         My argument is that faced with such reversal of stereotypical
            female roles, the culture (whether in the discourse of the Thaw
            trial itself, or of the journalistic accounts of the trial, of
            Twain's autobiographical tale) relies on both the institution
            of the law and the custom of storytelling to reassure itself about
            boundary confusions between guilt and innocence, man and
            woman, seductress and seducer, fact and fiction. The Thaw trial,
            however, shows that the law itself could not resolve any of those
            ambiguities, a predicament which, I will argue, Twain entertains
            and creates in his own fictional courtroom but flees from in his
            response to the actual trial.
            My argument thus depends upon establishing particular dialogue
            between these two cases of seduction, for neither Twain's nor
            the journalistic accounts alone tell the story that the two
            together do. Both cases speak in common to two aspects of
            fictionality. One is a mode of social differentiation, the sexual
            and legal categories (passive/aggressive, victim/victimizer,
            innocence/guilt) essential to both cases, but whose actual
            application was, for different reasons in each, momentarily
            suspended. It was impossible to decide, for example, whether Evelyn
            Thaw or Alice or Twain himself, for that matter, should be
            classified as victim or victimizer, as playing the active or
            passive role in their respective narratives. The temporary
            suspension of these categories, I will argue, does not invalidate
            them or brand them as "fictive," but rather reveals
            them as culturally constructed and culturally applied, in
            Twain's words "fictions of law and custom" (a
            phrase applied to racial difference in The Tragedy of
            Pudd'nhead Wilson,published in 1984). In both cases, the
            response to this moment when cultural categories cannot be
            definitively applied is a process of storytelling a second
            aspect of fictionality that attempts to construct coherent
            narratives about those suspended "fictions of law and
            custom." Although Twain's "Alice" case
            opens in 1877, not until it connects with the Thaw trial in 1907
            does the full story, as I have just briefly outlined it, emerge. It
            is precisely that double story that this esay will tell: the story
            of how Twain's personal compulsions met up with his
            culture's in the act of reporting, representing,
            interpreting, and finally making its own events mean.
             
            Susan Gillman is assistant professor of literature and American
            studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This essay is
            part of a forthcoming book, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in
            Mark Twain's America.
Robin Sheets
         Pornography and Art: The Case of "Jenny"
         In contrast to [Susan] Sontag, who used the tools of literary
            criticism to evaluate sexually explicit fiction, I will use the
            conventions of pornography to interpret a dramatic monologue in
            which an expected sexual encounter fails to take place. In
            analyzing Rossetti's "Jenny," I will employ an
            interpretive model based on the work of [Steven] Marcus, [Susan]
            Griffin, and [Andrea] Dworkin. Despite different assumptions about
            sexuality Marcus is a Freudian, Griffin believes in a
            mystical eros residing in the psyche and waiting to be
            rediscovered, Dworkin regards heterosexuality as a construct for
            subjugating women and masking men's homoerotic
            drive they share several ideas applicable to
            "Jenny." (1) Although pornography features, and indeed
            perpetuates, various kinds of masculine power, especially the
            powers of money, class, and culture, it purports to be ahistorical
            in order to obscure its status as ideology. (2) It depicts male
            sexuality as fear-laden aggression resulting in very little
            pleasure; thus it is not liberating on either a political or a
            personal basis. (3) Pornography does not include
            "others." Women are present only to be silenced,
            objectified, treated as screens on which a man projects his
            fantasies. Marcus, Griffin, and Dworkin are all concerned with what
            Suleiman calls "the representational or fantasmatic
            content" of pornography and "the political (in the
            sense of sexual politics) implications of that content." The
            risks of emphasizing the representational most especially,
            the denigration of language and style that result from
            Dworkin's approach can, as Suleiman says, be mitigated
            by careful attention to a particular text (see P,pp. 122-30).
            In Rossetti's poem, a young man attempts to purchase a
            night's pleasure with a London prostitute named Jenny. After
            she thwarts his plans by falling asleep, he spends the night
            meditating about her beauty, speculating about her past, present,
            and future, and thinking about the causes of prostitution. Although
            Rossetti's subject matter is consistent with the etymological
            definition of pornography as "writing about
            prostitutes," he avoids the explicit depiction of sexual
            activity which has been the common element in most modern accounts
            of the genre. Indeed, the only physical contact between the
            narrator and Jenny occurs at daybreak when he places coins in her
            hair and gives her a parting kiss.
             
            Robin Sheets is associate professor of English at the University of
            Cincinnati. She has written on Thackeray, George Eliot, and other
            Victorian writers and is coauthor of The Woman Question: Society
            and Literature in Britain and American, 1837-1883.
Oscar Kenshur
         Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological
            Criticism
         An attempt to warrant specific readings and to discredit others
            through appeal to the authority of the "text itself" …
            must be recognized for what it is: a political strategy for reading
            in which the critic's own construction of the "text
            itself" is mobilized in order to bully other interpretations
            off the field.
             
            This passage, from an article by a contemporary English literary
            theorist, is typical of a genre of assertions that may, at first
            glance, seem to have less to do with critical theory than with pop
            psychology. For the writer, like other writers in this genre, may
            appear to be making a psychological observation to the effect  that
            the disposition to claim that one's interpretations of texts
            are "correct" and other interpretations are
            "incorrect" is the function of an arrogant belligerence
            (and perhaps, by implication, that those who eschew such
            objectivist claims are characterized by meekness and humility). But
            such a psychological observation is closely related to a somewhat
            more dignified and elaborate sort of claim, namely, that the
            objectivist notion that there can be a standard of correctness in
            the interpretation of texts can be shown to have specific
             and unsavory political implications. And although
            contemporary polemicists who refer to connections between
            objectivist theory and right-wing tendencies generally omit to
            demonstrate the existence of such a relationship, it is possible to
            suppose that their omission, rather than reflecting a preference
            for invective over analysis, is tied to implicit references to
            analyses that have already been carried out.
             
            An ideal arena for such ideological analysis is the seventeenth
            century, the period during which early modern epistemology and the
            scientific movement laid the foundations for modern notions about
            objective knowledge, and during which philosophers were quite
            willing to discuss both their epistemological principles and their
            political convictions. Provided with such a wealth of raw
            materials, the contemporary scholar with an interest in ideological
            analysis need not attribute political opinions to theorists, but
            need only uncover the deeper ideological connections between views
            that were publicaly expressed. And if the relationship between
            objectivism and politics is one that can be revealed by darwing out
            the implications of the epistemological theory itself, then the
            results of an ideological analysis of early modern objectivism
            should, mutatis mutandis,be applicable to twentieth-century
            varieties. In the light of these considerations, it is quite apt
            that Michael Ryan, in attempting to merge deconstruction with
            ideological analysis in his Marxism and Deconstruction,uses as his
            paradigmatic case an analysis of Hobbes' views on metaphor
            and on sovereignty.
             
            Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at
            Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Open Form and
            the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of
            Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
            (1986), and he is currently at work on Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a
            study of tensions between epistemological and ethico-political
            commitments during the early-modern period.
James Elkins
         Art History without Theory
         The theories I have outlined suggest that by displacing but not
            excluding theory, art historical practice at once grounds itself in
            empiricism and implies an acceptance of theory's claim that
            it cannot be so grounded. But beyond descriptions like this, the
            theories are not a helpful way to understand practice because they
            cannot account for its persistence except by pointing to its
            transgressions and entanglements in self-contradiction. Nor does it
            help to say, pace Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, and Stanley
            Fish, that strong theory can have no consequences, because the
            reason theory has no consequences in this instance is not the
            impossibility of theory's transcendence (practice believes it
            to be transcendent), but a combination of the conventions, desires,
            and beliefs of practicing historians.14 Theoretical approaches must
            bypass the concerns of practice because practice has no position
            which can be argued alongside theory's positions. There are
            two reasons why a "Defense of Empiricism in Art
            History" has not been written. First, art historical practice
            does not incorporate even a local or heuristic theory to explain or
            discuss itself. Second, its "position" is not a latent
            theory, waiting to be eloquently stated, but something which is
            presupposed in a vague and variable manner by the art historical
            texts themselves. (The conventions, desires, and beliefs are not
            positions but inferences, conjectures based on the texts and the
            ways we speak about them.) Art historical practice, for example,
            has an objectivist intention: it takes itself to be (or to
            approach) "a science, with definite principles and
            techniques," which can exclude theory and generate texts by
            appealing only to previous nontheoretical texts and to the facts.15
            This intention is rarely stated, exasperatingly slippery to
            formulate clearly, and even incoherent when it is applied to
            existing texts; but this is so precisely because it works by not
            being included in the texts. If some version of it were stated at
            the outset of a monograph, it would cast doubt on the entire
            enterprise and lead the reader to conclude incorrectly that
            practice is dependent on theory, and uncertain theory at that. In
            its unstated form, the objectivist intention allows narrative
            practice to continue unimpeded.
             
            James Elkins is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago.
            This article is from a work in progress concerned with the
            influence of writing conventions on the history of art.
Donald E. Pease
         Patriarchy, Lentricchia, and Male Feminization
         So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He
            has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted
            Bloom's literary history as well as the essentialist feminism
            associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose
            of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males.
            The "feminization" of literary studies by patriarchal
            figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of
            Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their
            feminization, like that of the Stevens who felt positivelylady-
            like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not
            disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a
            feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of
            the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the
            difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a
            feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the
            different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this
            conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an
            oppressive patriarch can drop away.
            This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural
            sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes.
            It might begin when we recall that the model for the
            culture's "Emmeline Grangerfords" was Harriet
            Beecher Stowe's Little Eva. The social change Little Eva
            helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders.
             
            Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at
            Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and
            literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the
            coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance
            Reconsidered,and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American
            Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts,which won the Mark H.
            Ingraham Prize in 1987.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
         The Man on the Dump versus the United_Dames_of_America;_or,_What
            Does Frank Lentricchia Want?
         That the pattern into which Lentricchia seeks to assimilate Stevens
            is politically charged becomes clearest when we turn to the
            following oddly incomprehensible statement: "In the literary
            culture that Stevens would create, the &lsquo;phallic' would
            not have been the curse word of some recent feminist criticism but
            the name of a limited, because male, respect for literature"
            (p. 767). At the point where he makes this assertion, Lentricchia
            has been persuasively demonstrating that Stevens was
            "encouraged … to fantasize the potential social authority of
            the literary as phallic authority" (p. 767). But suddenly the
            critic's measured discourse is disrupted by obviously
            personal feelings about the "curse word of some recent
            feminist criticism" and by a dazzlingly illogical definition
            of "respect for literature." (If male respect for
            literature is limited, does that mean that female respect for
            literature is unlimited? If respect for literature is limited and
            male, do women unlimitedly disrespect literature?) Such a
            disruption suggests that, in making his apparently objective
            argument about Stevens, Lentricchia has some other not so hidden
            agenda and, of course, his peculiar decision to link his
            discussion of Stevens with an attack on The Madwoman in the Attic
            further supports this conclusion. What most strikingly reinforces
            the point, however, is the hysterical or perhaps, with some
            recent feminist linguists, we should say
            "testerical" rhetoric in which he couches his
            assault on our work.14
             
            14. The term "testeria," for male
            "hysteria," is proposed by Juli Loesch in
            "Testeria and Penisolence A Scourge to
            Humankind," Aphra: The Feminist Literary Magazine,4, 1
            (Winter 1972-73): 43-45; quoted in Casey Miller and Kate Swift,
            Words and Women: New Language in New Times(New York, 1977), pp. 60-
            61.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at Princeton University, and
            Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana University, are
            coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
            the Twentieth Century, Volume I: The War of the Words(1987), the
            first installment of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the
            Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
            Imagination(1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of
            Literature by Women: The Tradition in English.
Frank Lentricchia
         Andiamo!
         fl: Dad, what's testeria?
            Dad: Figlio! What happened to your Italian? It's TesaREEa!
            Capisce?
            fl: Yes.
            Dad: Tell me.
            fl: A store where they sell that stuff.
            Dad: In big jars!
            fl: Let's go there!
             
            Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. His
            latest book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James,
            Wallace Stevens,has just been published. He is also general editor
            of the Wisconsin Project on American Writers.
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Philippe Desan, and Wendy
            Griswold
         Editors' Introduction: Mirrors, Frames, and Demons: Reflections on
            the Sociology of Literature
         The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes,
            elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field
            or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual
            and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects
            the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the
            sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of
            intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction:
            the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each
            other. Scholars and critics of all kinds congregate under this
            outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they
            do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide
            range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology
            of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other
            would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate
            agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For
            the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more
            approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of
            literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of
            literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to
            all intellectual inquiry.
            The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is
            combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of
            social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There
            is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological
            practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular
            intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These
            practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary
            intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently
            interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to
            constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines.
            In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less
            logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even
            so and this is another paradox of the sociology of
            literature any sociological conception of literature is best
            situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional
            setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over
            disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force.
             
            Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the
            University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary
            France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan,whose Naissance de
            la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was
            published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of
            Chicago. Wendy Griswold,associate professor of sociology at the
            University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals:
            City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980.
Robert Weimann
         Text, Author-Function, and Appropriation in Modern Narrative:
            Toward a Sociology of Representation
         To talk about the sociology of literary representation is, first
            and foremost, to propose to historicize representational activity
            at that crucial point where its social and linguistic dimensions
            intersect.1 The troublesome incongruity between these two
            dimensions need not be minimized, but it can be grappled with as
            soon as the presuppositions of either the hegemony of the subject
            or that of language itself are questioned. In this view, the
            position of George Lukács (not to mention that of Erich Auerbach or
            even that of the more traditional sociologist of literary
            referentiality) tends to ignore the state of extreme vulnerability
            and recurrent jeopardy in which representation has always found
            itself, just as Michel Foucault's diametrically opposed view
            of the ultimate hegemony of discourse obliterates or displaces a
            lot of unbroken contemporary representational practice. Even more
            important, both these quite different approaches may be said to
            appear monistic in that the gaps and links between what is
            representing what is represented are viewed either in terms of
            closure and continuity or in terms of rupture and discontinuity.
            But as I shall proceed to glance at some representational
            strategies in the late modern period, the question needs to be
            faced whether it is not precisely in these gaps and links, and in
            the way in which, simultaneously, the gaps are closed and the links
            are broken up, that historical activity can be seen to assert
            itself.
            If the contradiction of system and event, of predetermination and
            performance can be seen to affect representational activity, and if
            this contradiction can at all be formulated in terms of a
            sociological Erkenntnisinteresse,issue of historicity must be
            discussed on more than one level: not only on the level of what is
            represented (which would reduce this project to some genealogy of
            the signified) but also on the level of rupture between them as
            well as their interdependence) together and to attempt to
            interconnect the semiotic problematic of signification and the
            extratextual dimension of representativeness, as involving
            changeful relations of writing, reading, social reproduction, and
            political power. In this view, the use of signs, although never
            quite reducible to a referential function, must be reconsidered and
            this question needs to be asked: under which conditions and in
            which respects would it be possible to talk of sociology in that
            area of instability itself which marks the relations between
            signifier and signified, between the author's language and
            the reader's meaning?
             
            Robert Weimann is professor of English and American literature at
            the Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte, Akademie der Künste,
            Berlin DDR. His books in English include Shakespeare and the
            Popular Tradition in Theater and Structure and Society in Literary
            History. His most recent book-length study in German is Shakespeare
            und die Macht der Mimesis: Repråsentation und Autoritåt im
            Elisabethanischen Theater.
Sandy Petrey
         The Reality of Representation: Between Marx and Balzac
         The starting point for my reading of the exchanges between Marx and
            Balzac is the repetition in The Eighteenth Brumaireof a striking
            image employed in Colonel Chabert to represent the force of
            ideology as experienced by a man forcibly set outside the
            conventions it endorses. Balzac first: "The social and
            judicial world weighted on his breast like a nightmare."3
            Marx's appropriation occurs in a much-quoted meditation on
            the past as impediment to the future.
            Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they
            please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
            themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and
            transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead
            generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4
            What is the (material) weight of an (immaterial) nightmare, and why
            do Balzac and Marx agree that invoking it is a valid means to
            express humanity's relation to its history?5
             
            4. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York,
            1963), p. 15; my emphasis. Further references to this work,
            abbreviated EB,will be included in the text.
            5. In French and German: "Le monde social et judiciare lui
            pesait sur la poitrine comme un cauchemar"; "Die
            Tradition aller toten Geschlechter lastet wie ein Alp auf dem
            Gehirne der Lebenden." This strikes me as so obvious a
            borrowing that I have to wonder why it does not seem to be
            generally known. On contributing factor may be that the standard
            French translation of The Eighteenth Burmairegives a fanciful
            version of the sentence in Marx: "La tradition de toutes les
            generations mortes pèse d'un poids très lourd sur le cerveau
            des vivants" (Marx, Le 18 brumaire de Louis Bonaparte [Paris,
            1969], p. 15). Does this poids très lourd come from a misreading of
            ein Alpas eine Alp?
             
            Sandry Petrey is professor of French and comparative literature at
            the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The author of
            History in the Text: Quatrevingt-Treize and the French
            Revolution,he is completing a book entitled Realism and Revolution.
Terry Eagleton
         Two Approaches in the Sociology of Literature
         There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of
            literature can be justified. The first form of justification is (in
            the epistemological sense of the term) realist: literature is in
            fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical
            account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically
            deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact
            shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of
            contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and
            desirable from a particular political standpoint.
            Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them.
            Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an
            important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that
            a specifically "sociological" treatment of literary
            works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line
            endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that
            to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily
            to deny the work's sociality. "Social product"
            would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as
            "economic product" would seem too crippingly narrow. A
            problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature,
            then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed.
            The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a
            feminist reading of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism,since
            few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central
            way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the
            Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class
            in Treasure Island,perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context
            of the British shop stewards' movement and celebrating his
            antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to
            holding that these issues were "in fact" crucial to the
            text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to
            light because they were crucial to history and society in general.
             
            Terry Eagleton's recent works include collected
            essays Against the Grainand William Shakespeare as well
            as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the
            ideology of the aesthetic.
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
         Molière and the Sociology of Exchange
         The method chosen here draws on concepts borrowed from sociology
            and anthropology. This double conceptual approach is necessary for
            a society divided between values inherited from medieval
            Christianity and precapitalist practices. Seventeenth-century
            France did not think of itself as a class society but as a society
            of orders. Since sociology is a system of knowledge whose concepts
            are taken from an imaginary construct, it is thus more suited to
            analyzing bourgeois society than societies in transition.6 In
            trying to measure the past with the aid of tools forged in and for
            contemporary societies, the sociologist runs the risk of only
            measuring an artifact, produced by his theories in the field of
            history. Hence the need for the anthropological concepts, including
            the notion of exchange, among others, whether material (the
            exchange of goods), symbolic (the exchange of signs), or sexual
            (the exchange of women).
            This approach will bring to light the contradictions underlying the
            society of the ancient régime. Whereas an ordinary sociohistorical
            approach views the reign of Louis XIV as unified under a dogmatic
            classicism, the socioanthropological approach stresses the tensions
            and oppositions running through this society. Classicism appears
            then as a façade covering up the change that it cannot imagine.
            This "spectacle"7 makes it possible to unite
            contradictory social practices, both those produced by consumption
            and which originate in the medieval economy (based on the gift/
            countergift and service) and those belonging to the early
            accumulation of capital which sketch future bourgeois economic
            practices.
             
            6. See Cornelius Catoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of
            Society,trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
            7. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle,rev. English ed.
            (Detroit, 1977).
             
            Jean-Marie Apostolidès is professor of French literature at
            Stanford University. His publications include Le roi-machine, Les
            metamorphoses de Tintin,andLe prince sacrifié.Alice Musick McLean,a
            Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, is specializing in
            medieval narrative and the literature of the fantastic.
J. Paul Hunter
         "News, and new Things": Contemporarneity and the Early_English
            Novel
         The novel represents a formal attempt to come to terms with
            innovation and originality and to accept the limitations of
            tradition; it reflects the larger cultural embracing of the present
            moment as a legitimate subject not only for passing conversation
            but for serious discourse. For at least a half century before the
            novel emerged, the world of print had experimented in assuming,
            absorbing, and exploiting that new cultural consciousness based on
            human curiosity on the one hand "preparing"
            readers for novels and on the other offering later writers of
            novels some sense of potential subject matter and potential form, a
            sense of how the present could be won over to serious literature.
            The process was a curious and unstructured one; in its early
            manifestations it hardly seemed destined to lead to a significant
            new literary form. Even in retrospect, the print novelties of the
            turn of the century hardly seem part of a teleology of form or
            thought, but the broad ferment that authenticated the new, together
            with the apparent permanence that print seemed to bestow on
            accounts of the temporary and passing, ultimately led to a mind and
            art that transcended occasions and individuals even though it
            engaged them first of all energetically, enthusiastically,
            evangelically. The first fruits of the modern moment-centered
            consciousness were not very promising, but the emergence of that
            consciousness enabled, when other cultural contexts were right, an
            altogether new aesthetic and a wholly different relation between
            life and literature.
             
            J. Paul Hunter,professor of English at the University of Chicago,
            is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim, Occasional Form,and of a
            forthcoming book on literacy, readership, and the contexts of early
            English fiction, Before Novels.
Janice Radway
         The Book-of-the-Month Club and the General Reader: On_the_Uses_of
            "Serious" Fiction
         If one accepts the social hierarchy that this taste structure
            masks, it is easy to accept the validity of the particular criteria
            which serve as the working test of excellence. In fact, the high
            value placed on rationality, complexity, irony, reflexivity,
            linguistic innovation, and the "disinterested"
            contemplation of the well-wrought artifact makes sense within
            cultural institutions devoted to the improvement of the
            individuality, autonomy, and productive competence of the already
            privileged individuals who come to them for instruction and
            advice.8 Appreciation for the technical fine points of aesthetic
            achievement is also understandable among people whose daily work
            centers on the business of discrimination. But it is worth keeping
            in mind that the critical dismissal of literary works and
            institutions that do not embody these values as failures is an
            exercise of power which rules out the possibility of recognizing
            that such works and institutions might be valuable to others
            because they perform functions more in keeping with their own
            somewhat different social position, its material constraints, and
            ideological concerns. The essay critical dismissal of the Club and
            other "popularizers" is an act of exclusion that
            banishes those who might mount even the most minimal of challenges
            to the culture and role of the contemporary intellectual by
            proclaiming their own right to create, use, and value books for
            different purposes.
            My preoccupation with the Book-of-the-Month Club arises, then, out
            of a prior interest in the way books are variously written,
            produced, marketed, read, and evaluated in contemporary American
            culture. My subjects might best be described as ways of writing
            rather than Literature, ways of reading rather than texts.9 I have
            begun to examine the Club's editorial operation with the
            intention of eventually comparing the manner, purpose, and
            substance of the editors' choice of books with the choices of
            actual Book-of-the-Month Club members. Such a comparison seems
            potentially interesting for a variety of reasons.
             
            8. For a discussion of the connections between the social position
            and role of literary academics and the values they promote through
            the process of canonization, see Jane Tompkins, Sensational
            Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New
            York, 1985), esp. pp. 186-201.
            9. See, for instance, my earlier effort to specify how a group of
            women actually read and evaluate individual books in the much-
            maligned romance genre, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and
            Popular Culture (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984). I am indebted to Mary
            Pratt's discussion ("Towards a Critical Cultural
            Practice," paper presented at the Conference on the Agenda of
            Literary Studies, Marquette University, 8-9 Oct. 1982) of the
            concept of "literariness" and the way it disciplines
            ideologically this particular way of describing my own interests.
             
            Janice Radway is an associate professor of American civilization at
            the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Reading the
            Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature(1984) and is a
            former editor of American Quarterly.This article is part of a
            larger study, the working title of which is "The Book-of-the-
            Month Club and the General Reader: The Transformation of Literary
            Production in the Twentieth Century."
Pierre Bourdieu
         Flaubert's Point of View
         The break necessary to establish a rigorous science of cultural
            works is something more and something else than a simple
            methodological reversal.1 It implies a true conversion of the
            ordinary way of thinking and living the intellectual enterprise. It
            is a matter of breaking the narcissistic relationship inscribed in
            the representation of intellectual work as a "creation"
            and which excludes as the expression par excellence of
            "reductionist sociology" the effort to subject the
            artist and the work of art to a way of thinking that is doubly
            objectionable since it is both genetic and generic.
            It would be easy to show what the most different kinds of analysis
            of the work of art owe to the norms that require treating works in
            and for themselves, with no reference to the social conditions of
            their production. Thus in the now-classic Theory of Literature,René
            Wellek and Austin Warren seem to advocate "an explanation in
            terms of the personality and the life of the writer." In
            fact, because they (no doubt along with most of their readers)
            accept the ideology of the "man of genius" they are
            committed, in their own terms, to "one of the oldest and
            best-established methods of literary study" which seeks
            the explanatory principle of a work in the author taken in
            isolation (the uniqueness of a work being considered a
            characteristic of the "creator").2 In fact, this
            explanatory principle resides in the relationship between the
            "space" of works in which each particular work is taken
            and the "space" of authors in which each cultural
            enterprise is constituted. Similarly, when Sartre takes on the
            project of specifying the meditations through which society
            determined Flaubert, the individual, he attributes to those factors
            that can be perceived from that point of view that is, to
            social class as refracted through a family structure what are
            instead the effects of generic factors influencing every writer in
            an artistic field that is itself in a subordinate position in the
            field of power and also the effects specific to all writers who
            occupy the same position as Flaubert within the artistic field.
             
            1. See Pierre Bourdieu, "Intellectual Field and Creative
            Project," trans. Sian France, Social Science Information 8
            (Apr. 1969): 89-119; originally published as "Champ
            intellectual et projet créateur," Les Temps moderns no. 246
            (Nov. 1966): 865-906. See also Bourdieu, "Champ du pouvoir,
            champ intellectual et habitus de classe," Scolies1 (1971): 7-
            26, and Bourdieu, "The Genesis of the Concepts of Habitus and
            Field," trans. Channa Newman, Sociocriticism no. 2 (Dec.
            1985): 11-24.
            2. René Welleck and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York,
            1956) p. 69.
             
            Pierre Bourdieu holds the chair of sociology at the Collège de
            France and is director of the Centre de Sociologie européenne at
            the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Among his most
            recent works are Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1984), and
            Choses Dites (1987).
Alain Viala
         Prismatic Effects
         In recent years the sociology of literature has developed on the
            basis of another formula: literature is part of the larger social
            order. It is not the "expression of society" but an
            integral part of it. The idea is simple, the implications are
            great. Literature as part of the social order goes beyond a study
            of the external social manifestations of literature, beyond the
            sociology of the book, author, and reader practiced, for example,
            by Robert Escarpit a sociology which leads inevitably to a
            positivist outlook.5 Nor can we be satisfied with a wholesale
            borrowing of sociological concepts that does no more than provide
            the tools for arguments in favor of one or another theory of
            literature.6 Whatever the interest of these theories (and sometimes
            it is very great), a sociology of literature becomes possible only
            when it includes the sociology of the theories elaborated on the
            subject itself. (So far my purpose has led me gradually to
            substitute the term "sociology of literature" for
            "literature and society." Philosophical or political
            theories can be propounded on the relations between literature and
            society, but these relations can be studied scientifically only in
            sociological terms.)
             
            5. See Robert Escarpit, Sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1958).
            See also Escarpit et al., Le Littéraire et le social: Éléments pour
            une sociologie de la literature (Paris, 1970).
            6. Pierre V. Zima's presentations of the sociology of
            literature seem to be taking him toward this failing. See Zima,
            Pour une sociologie du texte littéraire (Paris, 1978).
             
            Alain Viala is a professor of the Université de Paris
            II Sorbonne Nouvelle. Author of Naissance de
            l'écrivain: Sociologie de la literature à l'âge
            classique (1985) and Les Institutions de la vie littéraire en
            France au XVIIe siècle (1985), he is currently working on studies
            of the sociology of literature, Racine, and literary strategies.
            Paula Wissing is a free-lance translator and editor.
John Sutherland
         Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of_Literary_Sociology
         For most literary sociologists serious modern work starts with
            Robert Escarpit's Sociologie de la Littérature (1958), a book
            which proposes that sociology (or a sociological perspective) can
            usefully explain how literature operates as a social institution.
            Subsequent Escarpit-inspired work on the literary enterprise covers
            topics such as the profession of authorship; the stratified
            "circuits" (Escarpit's hallmark concept) of
            production, distribution, and consumption; and the commodity aspect
            of literature. Critics have objected that Escarpit's
            increasingly macroquantitative and statistics-bound procedures
            bleach out literary and ideological texture. And his model of
            literature as discrete social system encourages the abstract model
            making which Raymond Williams despises.1 But, whatever its
            shortomcings, Escarpit's definition of literary product and
            practice as social faits (not facts, but things made) forms an
            essential starting point for the sociologist intending to
            investigate the apparatuses of literature.
            In what follows, I shall mainly fix on a problem currently
            disabling constructive research on the literary-sociological lines
            projected by Escarpit: namely, scholarly ignorance about book trade
            and publishing history technicalities. This sets up, I shall
            suggest, a large and troubling hole at the centre of the subject,
            and there is little indication, at this stage, how or when the hole
            is to be filled.
             
            1. See Raymond Williams, "Literature and Sociology,"
            Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London,
            1980), pp. 11-30.
             
            John Sutherlandis professor of literature at the California
            Institute of Technology. His books include Fiction and the Fiction
            Industry (1978), Bestsellers (1980), and Offensive Literature
            (1982). He is currently completing an encyclopedia of Victorian
            fiction.
Jacques Derrida
         Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within_a_Shell:_Paul_de_Man's_War
         Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will
            ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that
            would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several
            questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it
            not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is
            that not already to take a responsibility? One's own as well
            as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon
            others?
            The title names a war. Which war?
            Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago
            around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium
            between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is
            important to situate the beginning of things public,that is the
            publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but
            before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December
            1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir,the
            major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less
            strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United
            States, the phenomena of this war "around" Pula de Man
            have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by
            rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of
            war the private phenomena meetings, discussions,
            correspondences, or telephonic conclaves however intense they
            may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American
            academic milieu.
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the
            University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years,
            he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man (1986).
            Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University.
            She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of
            Heloise (1982) and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of
            Authorship (forthcoming). Her article "Pieces of
            Resistance" is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading.
Londa Schiebinger
         Feminine Icons: The Face of Early Modern Science
         In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and
            masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed
            parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine
            or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of
            nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From
            ancient to modern times, nature the object of scientific
            study has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the
            same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of
            science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly have been men.
            But what about science? What gender was it as an activity and
            set of ideals to have? In one tradition the answer was clear:
            science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to
            Boethius' sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman,
            was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia,the
            Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed
            each of the sciences as a woman.
            "Scientia" knowledge or skill was portrayed
            as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes (fig. 2).
            "Physica" physical science was a goddess
            with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding
            a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in
            blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of
            her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand
            and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and
            symmetry of the skies.
             
            5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and
            the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
            6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a
            dream in his De consolatione philosophiae.See also Cesare Ripa,
            Iconologia (Rome, 1593), first illustrated in 1603.
             
            Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at
            Pennsylvania State University. Her book, "The Mind has no
            Sex": Women in the Origins of Modern Science,will be
            published next spring.
Gérard Genette
         Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature
         Wishing to contribute to the brief history of title science, I
            would argue that the difference in terminology between
            "secondary title" and "subtitle" is too
            weak for the mind to grasp; and since, as Duchet has noted, the
            principal feature of his "subtitle" is to contain a
            more or less explicit generic indication, it would be simpler and
            more vocative to rebaptize it as such, thereby freeing the term
            "subtitle" to resume its usual present meaning. Hence
            these three terms: "title" (Zadig),
            "subtitle" (ou la Destinée), "generic
            indication" (Histoire orientale). This is the most complete
            state of a de facto system in which the only mandatory element, in
            our present culture, is the first one. Nowadays, we find most
            frequently incomplete combinations, such as title plus subtitle
            (Madame Bovary, Moeurs de province) or title plus generic
            indication (La Nausée, roman) without counting the really
            simple titles that are reduced to the single "title"
            element, without subtitle or generic indication, such as Les Mots
            or, a little differently, statements such as the following, clearly
            parodic: Victor Shklovskii, Zoo / Letters not about Love / or The
            Third Heloise.
             
            Gérard Genetteis professor of history and theory of literary forms
            at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His principal
            works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures
            III (1972), Introduction à l'architexte(1979), Nouveau
            discours du récit (1983), and, most recently, Seuils (1987).
            Bernard Crampé is assistant professor of romance languages and
            literatures at the University of Chicago. His principal work is in
            the history of rhetoric.
David Simpson
         Literary Criticism and the Return to "History"
         If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice
            toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be
            constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical
            subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in
            principle impossible that we might choose to set going an
            initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and
            approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must
            be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of the predispositions for or
            against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as
            they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these
            predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether
            or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as
            firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter
            much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular
            authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple
            totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need
            here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul
            de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey (with the later case
            of Fredric Jameson) do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety,
            evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded
            them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not
            in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give
            us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those
            alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical
            party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an
            important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the
            influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed
            to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist
            alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling
            concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe
            the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no
            discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that
            represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to
            demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have
            become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has
            been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form,
            threatens to remain merely gestural and generic.
            "History" promises thus to function as legitimating any
            reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived,
            whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material
            circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of
            discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the
            historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist
            reconstructions.
             
            David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at
            the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various
            books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English,
            1776-1850 (1986) and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The
            Poetry of Displacement (1987).
Hazard Adams
         Canons: Literary Criteria/Power Criteria
         W. B. Yeats' poem "Politics" has as its epigraph
            Thomas Mann's remark, "In our time the destiny of man
            presents its meaning in political terms."1 Yeats chose the
            epigraph in 1938, just before World War II, for a poem proclaiming
            that sexuality holds his interest more than politics. This still
            may be true for poets, but by the looks of things, not for many
            contemporary critics, who, if they do not choose one over the
            other, subsume one under the other. For them everything is
            political (no more so than when it is sexual), which is to hold
            that everything is reduced to questions of power. So it is, in
            their eyes, with canons.
            The first canonization of note for western culture seems to have
            been that of the Hebrew Scriptures; and although there is much
            dispute about the whole matter of how that occurred, it is
            interesting to observe that in a 1971 book entitled The Shaping of
            Jewish History: A Radical New InterpretationEllis Rivkin presents
            the development of that canon in political terms, arguing that
            production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the
            work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected
            traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling
            to gain power."2 In a very interesting article on this
            subject, Gerald L. Bruns observes that the lesson of this is that
            the concept of canon is not literary but a "category of
            power" ("CP," p. 478). Rivkin himself decides, as
            Bruns remarks, to treat "the promulgation of canonical texts
            of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according
            to power criteria" ("CP," p. 475). Presumably it
            is this program that warrants Rivkin's subtitle Radical New
            Interpretation.But what would the literary criteria that are
            opposed to power criteria here be? Are there any longer believers
            in the more than trivial existence of such criteria? Does the
            destiny of literature now present its meaning political terms? If
            there are no longer thought to be such things as literary criteria,
            is there, can there be, literature? We have heard answers in the
            negative to the last question; and the notion of canon has recently
            been addressed almost always in terms of politics and power, most
            notably, of course, but certainly not exclusively, by feminist and
            minority critics. The destiny of women's writing has
            certainly presented its meaning in political terms.
             
            Hazard Adams is professor of English and comparative literature at
            the University of Washington. He has recently completed The Book of
            Yeats' Poems and a collection of critical essays.
Daniel Cottom
         On the Dignity of Tables
         Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the
            "Rochester knockings" of 1848, tables took on a new and
            controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their
            days impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware,
            vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They
            were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States
            and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping,
            knocking, tilting, turning, tapping, dancing, levitating, and even
            "thrilling" though this last was uncommon. So
            Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan said in her discussion of Daniel
            Dunglas Home, probably the most famous nineteenth-century medium:
            It is only in Mr. Home's presence that I have witnessed that
            very curious appearance, or process, the thrilling of the table.
            This takes place for some seconds, perhaps more, before it rises
            from the floor. The last time I witnessed this phenomenon, an acute
            surgeon present said that this thrilling,the genuineness of which
            was unmistakable, was exactly like what takes place in that
            affection of the muscles called subsultus tendinum.2
            And the tables did still more. Their actions were a language; and
            so they came to symbolize "the &lsquo;movement,' as it
            has been called,"3 of modern spiritualism. Spirits had chosen
            the table as an organ of speech.
            Tables were customarily viewed as objects of economics, aesthetics,
            utility, diversion, tradition, even theology (in the case of church
            artifacts). Now, though, as Professor De Morgan jokes,
            "London and Paris were running after tables in a new
            sense."4 Tables had become a different kind of thing.
            Whatever one might think about reports of spiritual communications,
            the conception of tables had changed. They had become moral
            objects.
             
            2. C. D. [Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan], From Matter to Spirit.
            The Result of Ten Years' Experience in Spirit
            Manifestations,with a preface by A. B. [Augustus De Morgan]
            (London, 1863), p. 27.
             
            Daniel Cottom is an associate professor of English at the
            University of Florida. His most recent books are Social Figures:
            George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (1987)
            and Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation(forthcoming).
            This essay is adapted from a work in progress on spiritualism and
            surrealism.
Daniel A. Herwitz
         The Security of the Obvious: On John Cage's_Musical_Radicalism
         That [John] Cage's challenge to our musical beliefs,
            attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of
            a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both
            by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge
            to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct
            voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into
            new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for
            musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about music as we
            know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and
            practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that
            something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those
            beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating
            what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage's
            genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as
            an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage's
            radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider
            both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be
            justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an
            important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp
            in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I
            wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage's
            skepticism about music.
             
            Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at
            California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work
            on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century
            music, art, and architecture.
Charles Altieri
         John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in_the_Visual_Arts
         It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who
            made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually
            ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively
            of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the
            old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength
            but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work
            deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the
            psyche. Such omissions not only distance Ashbery from the urgencies
            of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate
            just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges
            and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers
            like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the
            postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post-
            structural theory's idealization of the nomadic, the
            undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions
            Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art
            the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie
            Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical
            idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical
            problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new
            dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values
            of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the
            increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated
            the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the
            emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in
            post-structuralist mills?
             
            Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature
            at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary
            poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on
            abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some
            groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians,attempt to keep the arts
            central to our discussion of postmodernism.
Lauren Berlant
         Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple
         The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and
            political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro-
            American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous
            culture. But rather than using patriarchal language and logics of
            power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro-American
            national consciousness, Celie's narrative radically
            resituates the subject's national identity within a mode of
            aesthetic, not political, representation. These discursive modes
            are not "naturally" separate, but The Color Purple
            deliberately fashions such a separation in its attempt to represent
            a national culture that operates according to
            "womanist" values rather than patriarchal forms.5 While
            political language is laden with the historical values and
            associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries
            with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit
            of everyday life relations among women.
             
            5. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego,
            1983), p. xi. "Womanist" is a neologism of
            Walker's invention. Much more than an idiosyncratic
            translation of "feminist" into a black/third-world
            female tradition, the term describes the "woman" in a
            range of personal and social identities: "Usually referring
            to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting
            to know more and in greater depth than is considered
            &lsquo;good' for one…. Also: A woman who loves other women,
            sexually and/or nonsexually…. Sometimes loves individual men,
            sexually and/or nonsexually…. Traditionally universalist, as in …
            &lsquo;the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every
            color flower represented.' " In calling the new
            nationalist epistemology imaged and advocated in The Color Purple
            an "aesthetic/symbolic" logic, I mean to honor the
            careful historical and categorical distinctions that operate in the
            novel and in Walker's critical work around it. Central to her
            practice is a delegitimation of traditionally patriarchal-racist
            political practices, institutions, and language.
             
            Lauren Berlant is assistant professor of English at the University
            of Chicago. She is currently working on Nathaniel Hawthorne's
            readings of the cultural/sexual politics of national identity.
Richard Stern
         Some Members of the Congress
         In most groups, there's a sort of commedia del l'arte
            distribution of roles. In families, factories, universities,
            corporations, people are known not only for their work, their
            looks, their social and economic status, but also for the
            characters they assume in the organization. So there are clowns and
            those who laugh at them, there are leaders and there are followers;
            some followers are worshipful, some resentful. Most people put on
            their organization-character as they put on their uniforms. It
            doesn't mean that the character isn't related to their
            temperament they have, after all, chosen it as they have
            chosen what they wear but it never represents all of what
            they are and often represents very little. It is a convenience, a
            way of smoothing the roughness of interaction.
            At a congress of writers, things are somewhat different. At the PEN
            Congress there were the clowns writers, say, like Salman
            Rushdie, the young Anglo-Indian novelist; there were dour, dynical
            observers from the periphery I think of Sven Delblanc, the
            Swedish novelist; there were writers who's pulled themselves
            out of Pleistocene social pockets which they'd barely
            survived and which they record: here I think of Kenji Nakagami, the
            Japanese novelist, screenwriter, and critic.
             
            Richard Stern's Noble Rot, Stories 1949-88,will be published
            in the fall of 1988.
Jerome J. McGann
         The Cantosof Ezra Pound, the Truth in Contradiction
         … [T]he scandals surrounding the work of these men are as nothing
            compared to the scandal of Ezra Pound's Cantos.We are amused
            to think that anyone ever felt Byron might have been mad, bad, and
            dangerous to know. We are not amused by the Cantos. Like
            Pound's letters and so much of his prose, the Cantos is
            difficult to like or enjoy. It is a paradigm of poetic obscurity
            because its often cryptic style is married to materials which are
            abstruse, learned, even pedantic. The poem also makes a mockery of
            poetic form; and then there are those vulgar and bathetic sinking
            which it repeatedly indulges through its macaronic turns of voice.
            All that is scandalous, but the worst has not been said. For the
            Cantosis a fascist epic in a precise historical sense.1 Its racism
            and anti-Semitism are conceived and pursued in social and political
            terms at a particular point in time and with reference to certain
            state policies. Those policies led to a holocaust for which the
            murder of six million Jews would be the ultimate exponent. That is
            truly scandalous
            For anyone convinced that works of imagination are important to
            human life, however, the scandal takes a last, cruel twist.
            Pound's magnum opus is one of the greatest achievements of
            modern poetry in any language. That is more a shocking than a
            controversial idea. It shocks because it is outrageous to think so;
            but it is in fact a commonplace judgment passed on the poem by
            nearly every major writer and poet of this century. The greatness
            of the Cantoswas an apparent to Pound's contemporaries as it
            has been to his inheritors, to his enemies as to his friends, to
            those who have sympathized with Pound's ideas and to those
            who have fought against them.
             
            1. See John Lauber, "Pound's Cantos: A Fascist
            Epic," Journal of American Studies12 (1978): 3-21; Victor C.
            Ferkiss, "Ezra Pound and American Fascism," Journal of
            Politics 17 (May 1955): 173-97.
             
            Jerome J. McGann is Commonwealth Professor of English, University
            of Virginia. This essay was originally one of the Clark Lectures
            delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently one of
            the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago.
Terry Castle
         Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern
            Reverie
         In what follows I would like to uncover part of this history [of
            the phantasmagoria], not just as an exercise in romantic etymology
            (or for the sake of a certain Carlylean local color) but as a way
            of approaching a larger topic, namely, the history of the
            imagination. For since its invention, the term phantasmagoria,like
            one of Freud's ambiguous primary words, has shifted meaning
            in an interesting way. From an initial connection with something
            external and public (an artificially produced
            "spectral" illusion), the word has now come to refer to
            something wholly internal or subjective: the phantasmic imagery of
            the mind. This metaphoric shift bespeaks, I think, a very
            significant transformation in human consciousness over the past two
            centuries what I shall call here the spectralization or
            "ghostifying" of mental space. By spectralization
            (another nonce word!) I mean simply the absorption of ghosts into
            the world of thought. Even as we have come to discount the spirit-
            world of our ancestors and to equate seeing ghosts and apparitions
            with having "too much" imagination, we have also come
            increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological
            recoil, in the spectral nature of our own thoughts to figure
            imaginative activity itself, paradoxically, as a kind of ghost-
            seeing. Thus in everyday conversation we affirm that our brains are
            filled with ghostly shapes and images, that we "see"
            figures and scenes in our minds, that we are "haunted"
            by our thoughts, that our thoughts can, as it were, materialize
            before us, like phantoms, in moments of hallucinations, waking
            dream, or reverie.
             
            Terry Castle,associate professor of English at Stanford University,
            is the author of two books: Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and
            Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa"(1982) and
            Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in 18th-Century
            English Culture and Fiction (1986). She is currently working on a
            study of the literature and psychology of apparitions in the
            eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entitled "Spectropia:
            Ghost-Seeing and the Modern Imagination."
Naomi Scheman
         Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women
         Connecting the issues of the female gaze and of the female
            narrative is the issue of desire. As [Stanley] Cavell repeatedly
            stresses, a central theme of these films is the heroine's
            acknowledgment of her desire of its true object frequently
            the man from whom she mistakenly thought she needed to be divorced.
            The heroine's acknowledgment of her desire, and of herself as
            a subject of desire, is for Cavell what principally makes a
            marriage of equality achievable. It is in this achievement (or the
            creation of the grounds for the hope of it) that Cavell wants to
            locate the feminism of the genre: it is the "comedy of
            equality" (PH,p. 82). There is, therefore, an obvious
            explanation in Cavell's terms for the anomalous nature of
            these films: if their vision is explicitly feminist in embracing an
            ideal of equality, in approvingly foregrounding female desire, and
            in characterizing that desire as active and as actively gazing,
            then they would not be expected to fit an analysis based on films
            whose view of female desire and the female gaze is passive, absent,
            or treacherous. If we accept Cavell's readings, these films
            provide genuine counterexamples to feminist claims of the normative
            masculinity of film (in general or in Hollywood).
            My affection for these films, and the ways in which Cavell accounts
            for that affection, leads me to want to believe that his account,
            or something like it, is true: that there did briefly emerge a
            distinctively feminist sensibility in some popular Hollywood
            movies, one which unsurprisingly succumbed to the repressive
            redomestication of women in the postwar years. But, for a number of
            reasons, I can't quite believe it. Some version of the
            feminist critical theory of popular cinema does, in an odd way,
            apply to these movies: they are, to use a frequent phrase of
            Cavell's, the exceptions that prove the rule. Though they do
            have some claim to being considered feminist, their feminism is
            seriously qualified by the terms in which it is presented, by the
            ways in which female desire and the female gaze are framed.
             
            Naomi Scheman is associate professor of philosophy and
            women's studies at the University of Minnesota. She is
            currently working on the roles played by bodies and by differences
            in modern and feminist postmodern accounts of knowledge.
Henri Meschonnic
         Rhyme and Life
         Poetry turns everything into life. It is that form of life that
            turns everything into language. It does not come to us unless
            language itself has become a form of life. That is why it is so
            unquiet. For it does not cease to work on us. To be the dream of
            which we are the sleep. A listening, awakening that passes through
            us, the rhythm that knows us and that we do not know. It is the
            organization in language of what has always been said to escape
            language: life, the movement no word is supposed to be able to say.
            And in effect words do not say it. That is why poetry is a meaning
            of time more than the meaning of words. Even when its course is
            ample, it is contained in what passes from us through words. It
            does not have the time of glaciers and ferns. It tells about a time
            of life. Through everything that it names. Even its haste
            transforms. Since it is a listening that compels a listening.
            But traditionally poetry suffers from the effect of the separation
            between the order of language and the order or disorder of life. It
            is that the order in which the thought of language is found is an
            order against chaos. The fabulous is not found in chaos. It is
            found in order. A mythic thought about language is charged with the
            maintaining of order. Thus there is an impassable barrier between
            poetry in terms of life and language in terms of the forms of
            poetry. Its meters and its rhymes. That is what we have to think
            about. Through and for poetry, language, life. Against sentimental
            poetizations of poetry and of life. As much as against
            formalizations.
             
            Henri Meschonnic is professor of linguistics at the University of
            Paris VIII at Vincennes. His penultimate book of poems,
            Voyageurs de la voix (1985), was awarded the Prix Mallarmé. His
            other books include Critique du rythme, anthropologie historique du
            langage (1982) and Modernité, modernité(1988). Gabriella
            Bedetti,associate professor of English at Eastern Kentucy
            University, is completing A Meschonnic Reader.
Zhang Longxi
         The Myth of the Other: China in the_Eyes_of_the_West
         For the West … China as a land in the Far East becomes
            traditionally the image of the ultimate Other. What Foucault does
            in his writing is, of course, not so much to endorse this image as
            to show, in the light of the Other, how knowledge is always
            conditioned in a certain system, and how difficult it is to get out
            of the confinement of the historical a priori, the epistemes or the
            fundamental codes of Western culture. And yet he takes the Borges
            passage seriously and remarks on its apparent incongruity with what
            is usually conceived about China in the Western tradition. If we
            are to find any modification of the traditional image of China in
            Foucault's thought, it is then the association of China not
            with an ordered space but with a space without any conceivable
            arrangement or coherence, a space that makes any logical ordering
            utterly unthinkable. Significantly, Foucault does not give so much
            as a hint to suggest that the hilarious passage from that
            "Chinese encyclopaedia" may have been made up to
            represent a Western fantasy of the Other, and that the illogical
            way of sorting out animals in that passage an be as alien to the
            Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind.
            In fact, the monstrous unreason and its alarming subversion of
            Western thinking, the unfamiliar and alien space of China as the
            image of the Other threatening to break up ordered surfaces and
            logical categories, all turn out to be, in the most literal sense,
            a Western fiction. Nevertheless, that fiction serves a purpose in
            Foucault's thought, namely, the necessity of setting up a
            framework for his archaeology of knowledge, enabling him to
            differentiate the self from what is alien and pertaining to the
            Other and to map out the contours of Western culture recognizable
            as a self-contained system. Indeed, what can be a better sign of
            the Other than a fictionalized space of China? What can furnish the
            West with a better reservoir for its dreams, fantasies, and
            utopias?
             
            Zhang Longxi,author of A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century
            Theories of Literature (1986), is currently writing a dissertation
            in comparative literature at Harvard University. His previous
            contribution to  is "The Tao and the Logos:
            Notes on Derrida's Critique of Logocentrism" (March
            1985).
David Stern
         Midrash and Indeterminacy
         Literary theory, newly conscious of its own historicism, has
            recently turned its attention to the history of interpretation. For
            midrash, this attention has arrived none too soon. The activity of
            Biblical interpretation as practiced by the sages of early Rabbinic
            Judaism in late antiquity, midrash has long been known to Western
            scholars, but mainly as either an exegetical curiosity or a source
            to be mined for facts about the Jewish background of early
            Christianity. The perspective of literary theory has placed midrash
            in a decidedly new light. The very nature of midrash (as recorded
            in the Talmud as well as in the more typical midrashic collections)
            has now come to epitomize precisely that order of literary
            discourse to which much critical writing has recently aspired, a
            discourse that avoids the dichotomized opposition of literature
            versus commentary and instead resides in the dense shuttle space
            between text and interpreter. In the hermeneutical techniques of
            midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of
            interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of
            commentary as a means of extending a text's meanings rather
            than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial
            intention. Some theoreticians have gone so far as to invoke midrash
            as a precursor, in a spiritual if not a historical sense, to more
            recent post-structuralist literary theory, in particular to
            deconstruction with its critique of logocentrism and the
            metaphysics of presence
             
            David Stern is assistant professor of medieval Hebrew literature in
            the department of Oriental Studies at the University of
            Pennsylvania. He is the author of Parables in Midrash: The
            Intersection of Narrative and Exegesis in Rabbinic Literature
            (forthcoming) and coauthor, with Mark Jay Mirsky, of Rabbinic
            Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical and Medieval
            Hebrew Literature (forthcoming).
Susan Stewart
         The Marquis de Meese
         The pornography debate occupies a prominent site of apparent
            contradiction in contemporary culture: a site where the interests
            of cultural feminism merge with those of the far Right, where an
            underground enterprise becomes a major growth industry, and where
            forms of speculation turn alarmingly practical. Another more
            problematic confluence occurs as a result of this debate. That is,
            by juxtaposing the 1986 Final Report of the Attorney
            General's Commission on Pornography (known informally as the
            Meese Commission's Report) and the Marquis de Sade's
            120 Days of Sodom,we will see how pornography and the public
            discourse on pornography share the same comparative logic. An
            examination of such a logic shows how the pleasures of
            comparison its gestures toward control, limit, and
            transcendence are always balanced by its failures, even
            tragedies: the realization of the situated nature of all
            measurement, juxtaposition, subordination, and hierarchization.
            Thus this essay is designed to both discuss and illustrate a series
            of issues implicit in pornography's predicament: the
            impossibility of describing desire without generating desire; the
            impossibility of separating form and content within the process of
            sublimation; and, most important, the impossibility of constructing
            a metadiscourse on pornography once we recognize the interested
            nature of all discursive practices. We cannot transcend the
            pornography debate, for we are in it. But by writing through it, by
            examining its assumptions, we can learn a great deal about the
            problems of representing desire and the concomitant problems of a
            cultural desire for unmediated forms of representation.
             
            Susan Stewart,whose most recent contribution to 
            was "Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-
            linguistics" (December 1983), is the author of two books of
            literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore
            and Literature(1979) and On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature,
            the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984), and two books of
            poetry, Yellow Stars and Ice (1981) and The Hive (1987). She is
            finishing a book on "crimes of writing," of which this
            essay is a part, and a study of the five senses.
Edward W. Said
         Representing the Colozined: Anthropology's Interlocutors
         At this point I should say something about one of the frequent
            criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to
            respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of
            Europe's inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic
            which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method,
            and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing
            seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the
            matters I've been discussing so far, and while I have no
            desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do
            want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the
            topic at hand.
            What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an
            adversarial critique not only of the field's perspective and
            political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that
            makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable.
            Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are
            scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as
            objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced
            with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity,
            institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism
            should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits
            function as a worldview with considerable political force not
            easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my
            view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest
            whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as
            scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the
            contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things
            are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is
            no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or
            epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various
            sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give
            epochs their peculiar individuality.
             
            Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to
             is "An Ideology of Difference" (Autumn
            1985).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Editor's Introduction: Essays toward a New Art History
         The following articles are best described as essays
            "in," not "on," the New Art History. They
            exemplify what we regard as some of the most interesting new
            directions in the practical understanding of art: the discourse of
            art historical description (David Summers); the materiality of the
            pictorial surface (Charles Harrison); the role of genre (Norman
            Bryson); the relation of visual representation and language (Robert
            Morris, Jan Baetens, and W. J. T. Mitchell); and the mediation of
            social and economic history through painting (Elizabeth Helsinger).
            These essays constitute a kind of first installment of work
            resulting from out call for papers on "The Disciplines of the
            Eye." This call continues to go out, and we shall welcome
            contributions that attempt to take stock of current thinking in the
            visual arts in a more general way essays "on" as
            well as "in" the patterns of thought emerging in the
            study of visual representation.
Norman Bryson
         Chardin and the Text of Still Life
         It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular
            genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for
            the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the
            genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end,
            that genre is for.I want to suggest that this is so in the case of
            Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and in the case of still life.
            Chardin's still life painting can reveal, as almost no other
            classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still
            life, and what is that made still life one of the enduring
            categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin
            can force us right back to the fundamentals of the genre, to still
            life's origins in antiquity, and to the extraordinary
            development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be
            trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what
            Chardin's work reveals about it. In a sense I will be
            treating hardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though
            everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not
            as argument. If we can see Chardin's work with eyes fresh
            enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life's inner
            logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his
            solutions, but the solutions other still life painters look
            towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to
            understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been
            the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical
            genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life
            at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history
            painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from
            language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no
            obvious tradition of theoretical work on still life, and in these
            circumstances it is appropriate to turn to a painter's
            practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary
            observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre:
            its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the
            value and prestige of the human subject.
             
            Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the
            University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art
            History and Criticism.He is the author of Tradition and Desire:
            From David to Delacroix (1984) and the editor of Calligram: Essays
            in New Art History from France (1988). He is currently completing a
            study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked (1989).
Elizabeth Helsinger
         Constable: The Making of a National Painter
         John Constable is one of England's best-known landscape
            painters and greatest artists. While few will object to this
            statement, what it means will depend on when it was made. In the
            150 years since his death in 1837, the terms of Constable's
            greatness have shifted several times. In the nineteenth century his
            scenes of the Stour Valley in Suffolk were valued as images of a
            particularly English countryside: the placid river with its locks
            and barges, great overhanging trees, and distant green water-
            meadows beneath massive cloudy skies. In this century, though the
            popular conviction of his Englishness persists, Constable is better
            known as "The Natural Painter."1 As modernism rewrote
            the history of art, Constable was rediscovered as the man who
            excited Eugène Delacroix and other French artists in the 1820s: the
            natural painter whose freedom of technique, color, and chiaroscuro
            suggested a new way of representing the truth of landscape. The
            happy accident of his reception in France in the 1820s anchors
            English claims to participate in the development of an
            international style that moves through impressionism toward the
            more purely painterly and formal values of modernism. This
            Constable probably still dominates contemporary critical
            discussions of his work: the truthful student of nature who is also
            a painter's painter.2 There is more than a little chauvinism
            in this view of Constable, but it is the national feeling of a less
            confident age, always looking over its shoulder to other countries
            like France.
             
            1. This is the title of Graham Reynolds' seminal book,
            Constable, the Natural Painter (London, 1965).
            2. See, for example, Malcolm Cormack's recent book, Constable
            (New York and Oxford, 1986); hereafter abbreviated C.
             
            Elizabeth Helsinger is professor of English at the University of
            Chicago and coeditor of .Her Ruskin and the Art of
            the Beholder was published in 1982. This essay is part of a book in
            progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian
            England.
Jan Baetens
         The Intermediate Domain, or the Photographic Novel and_the_Problem
            of Value
         In recent years, the problem of value has been drastically pushed
            away towards the periphery of the discipline of literary studies.
            More and more, this fact has come to be experienced as a source of
            frustration and misunderstandings.1 In this article, I would like
            to show the great extent to which a value-oriented approach is in
            fact inevitable. By the same token, however, I will also indicate
            the disturbing ambiguities that the consideration of the value-
            dimension may reveal. The example I will use for my demonstration,
            the case of the French photographic novel (figs. 1-3), is fairly
            straightforward (as all examples ought to be), but at the same time
            it betrays my slightly polemical intentions, since this genre is
            undoubtedly held in low esteem both within and without the domain
            of literary scholarship.
            It seems reasonable to assume that our twentieth century, with its
            turbulent successions of competing fashions and trends, has
            radically affected the concept of value, that is, the dialectical
            game of valorization and devalorization. The notion of value has of
            course become subject to "devaluations" on the content-
            level, as the mixtures and the instabilities of the criteria called
            on clearly lattest.2 In addition and more
            important value has been disobjectified,that is, snatched
            from the object of the judgment and located on the side of the
            judging subject.
             
            Jan Baetens teaches French at the Vlaamse Economische Hogeschool
            (Flemish High School for Economic Studies). He is the author of
            three books: Aux frontiers du récit: "Fable" de Robert
            Pinget comme "nouveau nouveau roman"(1987); Hergé
            écrivain: microlectures de Tintin(forthcoming); and Les Mesures de
            l'excès: notes pour un traverse de "Eglogues" de
            Renaud Camus et al. (forthcoming). He is currently at work on the
            various aspects of grammatextuality in literature and the comics.
Charles Harrison
         On the Surface of Painting
         Lucas van Valckenborch's Winter Landscape (fig. 1) hangs in
            the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred
            years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of
            reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the
            museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of
            the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the
            long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to
            horizon, fallen snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of
            the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top,
            touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small
            painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable
            dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist
            painting or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by
            Modernist accounts of painting it is by virtue of this
            surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere
            anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture
            that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-
            creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the
            over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable
            pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about
            appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative
            depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5
             
            5. Wollheim (Painting as an Art,p. 21) uses the term
            &lsquo;twofoldness' for &lsquo;this strange duality of
            seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the
            surface.' In his account this experience leads to a
            thematizing of the image, which &lsquo;ushers in
            representation.' Translated into his terminology, my
            suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as
            catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of
            &lsquo;twofoldness' itself.
             
            Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at
            the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism
            1900-1939 (1981), and he is now completing a second volume, English
            Art and Modernism 1940-1985.He is co-author (with Fred Orton) of A
            Provisional History of Art &amp; Language (1982), and his most
            recent book Essays on Art and Language is due out in
            1989. He has been associated with the Art &amp; Language group
            since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language.
Robert Morris
         Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism
         To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic
            second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of
            language. To inquire into the relations between image and language
            is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I
            would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in
            the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past
            art. Certainly the term "image" has had a long and
            embattled history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be
            in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones?
            What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions
            and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the
            perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the
            mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical
            discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in
            the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to
            linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images
            that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such
            relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics.
            Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues
            and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from
            object.
            Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an
            entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a
            clarity of distinctions between the imagistic (whatever it is) and
            the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are
            inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art
            in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement.
             
            Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A
            collection of his writings is forthcoming.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Ut Pictura Theoria:Abstract Painting and the Repression of_Language
         This may be an especially favorable moment in intellectual history
            to come to some understanding of notions like
            "abstraction" and "the abstract," if only
            because these terms seem so clearly obsolete, even antiquated, at
            the present time. The obsolescence of abstraction is exemplified
            most vividly by its centrality in a period of cultural history that
            is widely perceived as being just behind us, the period of
            modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth
            century to the aftermath of the Second World War.1 Abstract art is
            now a familiar feature of our cultural landscape; it has become a
            monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history.
            The experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer
            "experimental" or shocking: abstraction has not been
            associated with the artistic avant-garde for at least a quarter of
            a century, and its central masterpieces are now firmly entrenched
            in the tradition of Western painting and safely canonized in our
            greatest museums. That does not mean that there will be no more
            abstract paintings, or that the tradition is dead; on the contrary,
            the obsolescence we are contemplating is in a very precise sense
            the precondition for abstraction's survival as a tradition
            that resists any possible assault from an avant-garde. Indeed, the
            abstract probably has more institutional and cultural power as a
            rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning
            of tradition. For that very reason its self-representations need to
            be questioned more closely than ever, especially its account of its
            own nature and history. This seems important, not just to set the
            record straight about what abstract art was, but to enable critical
            and artistic experimentation in the present, and a more nuanced
            account of both pre-and postmodern at, both of which are in danger
            of being swallowed up by the formulas (and reactions against the
            formulas) of abstract formalism. If art and criticism are to
            continue to play an oppositional and interventionist role in our
            time, passive acceptance and reproduction of a powerful cultural
            tradition like abstract art will simply not do.
             
            1. I define modernism and "the age of abstraction" here
            in familiar art historical terms, as a period extending from
            Kandinsky and Malevich to (say) Jasper Johns and Morris Louis.
            There are other views of this matter which would trace modernism
            back to the emergence of an avant-garde in the 1840s (T. J. Clark),
            or to romanticism (Stanley Cavell), or to the eighteenth century
            (Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried). My claim would be that
            "the abstract" as such only becomes a definitive slogan
            for modernism with the emergence of abstract painting around 1900.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is professor of
            English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology.
David Summers
         "Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art
            Historical Description
         It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding
            "form" work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed
            to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but
            they did not, I believe, stray from the foundations I have tried to
            indicate for them. Let us consider the example of Wilhelm
            Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss
            ornament rather than images because ornament is a purer expression
            of form and therefore provides a less encumbered view into
            form's spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of
            the first millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is
            "impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this
            tangle of lines"; it is "the decisive formula for the
            whole medieval North." The "need for empathy of this
            inharmonious people" requires the "uncanny pathos which
            attaches to the animation of the inorganic"; the "inner
            disharmony and unclarity of these peoples … could have borne no
            clearer fruit."4 Here forms mostly lines and edges and
            their relations are compared to a natural outgrowth, a fruit,
            and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the characterization
            of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms were made and
            used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive with the range
            of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations, and
            epochs.
            It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to
            quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many
            authors have done so and many more have done so less
            systematically. The important thing for my purposes is the pattern
            of inference from form to historical statements and conclusion.
             
            4. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to
            the Psychology of Style,trans. Michael Bullock (Cleveland and New
            York, 1967), p. 77.
             
            David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of
            Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo and
            the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance
            Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987), he is currently
            writing a book to be titled The Defect of Distance: Toward a
            University History of Art.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Questions Concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate
         Through the thickets of recent debates, I take two facts as clear
            enough starting points. The first is that Heidegger's
            participation in National Socialism, and especially his remarks and
            pronouncements after the war, were, and remain, horrifying. The
            second is that Heidegger remains of the essential philosophers of
            our century; Maurice Blanchot testifies for several generations
            when he refers to the "veritable intellectual shock"
            that the reading of Being and Time produced in him.5 And Emmanuel
            Levinas, not hesitating to express his reservations about
            Heidegger, can nevertheless bring himself to say that a person
            "who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century
            cannot not have gone through Hiedegger's philosophy, even to
            escape it."6 In this century, perhaps only Ludwig
            Wittgenstein has had a comparable impact and influence on
            philosophy. I do not mean to deny that one can reject the over
            seventy volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe as worthless,
            that one can, as with Wittgenstein, find that his work is obscure,
            indulgent, impossible to read, that nothing in it contributes to
            philosophy. But both Heidegger and Wittgenstein write in
            anticipation of this reaction, recognizing that their desires,
            differently articulated, to overcome philosophy will help to
            determine how their writing is received. Stanley Cavell's
            characterization of Wittgenstein's Philosophical
            Investigations describes (not by chance) Heidegger as well:
            Philosophical Investigations,like the major modernist works of the
            past century at least, is, logically speaking, esoteric. That is,
            such works seek to split their audience into insiders and outsiders
            (and split each member of it); hence they create the particular
            unpleasantness of cults (at best as a specific against the
            particular unpleasantness of indifference or intellectual
            promiscuousness, combating partialness by partiality); hence demand
            for their sincere reception the shock of conversion.7
            When combined with Heidegger's political engagement, the
            particular unpleasantness of cults and indifference are more than
            joined. Thus it can seem as though one must either exculpate
            Heidegger, explain away his relation to Nazism as an aberration
            from the outside, or reject his thought entirely, declare that his
            books should no longer be read. In an attempt to begin to confront
            these issues,  is publishing this symposium.
             
            5. Maurice Blanchot, "Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from
            Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David," trans. Paula Wissing,
            p. 479 of this issue.
            6. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with
            Philippe Nemo,trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 42.
            See also the last line of Gadamer, " &lsquo;Back from
            Syracuse?' " p. 430.
            7. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
            Morality, and Tragedy (New York and Oxford, 1979), p. xvi;
            hereafter abbreviated CR.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is associate
            professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General
            Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of
            Science at the University of Chicago. His most recent contribution
            to  is "Sex and the Emergence of
            Sexuality" (Autumn 1987).
Hans-Georg Gadamer
         "Back from Syracuse?"
         It has been claimed, out of admiration for the great thinker, that
            his political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy. If
            only we could be content with that! Wholly unnoticed was how
            damaging such a "defense" of so important a thinker
            really is. And how could it be made consistent with the fact that
            the same man, in the fifties, saw and said things about the
            industrial revolution and technology that today are still truly
            astonishing for their foresight?
            In any case: no surprise should be expected from those of us who,
            for fifty years, have reflected on what dismayed us in those days
            and separated us from Heidegger for many years: no surprise when we
            hear that in 1933 and for years previous, and for how long
            after? he "believed" in Hitler. But Heidegger was
            also no mere opportunist. If we wish to dignify his political
            engagement by calling it a "standpoint," it would be
            far better to call it a political "illusion," which had
            notably little to do with political reality. If Heidegger later, in
            the face of all realities, would again dream his dream from those
            days, the dream of a "people's religion"
            [Volksreligion], the later version would embrace his deep
            disappointment over the actual course of affairs. But he continued
            guarding that dream and kept silent about it. Earlier, in
            1933 and 1934, he thought he was following his dream, and
            fulfilling his deepest philosophical mission, when he tried to
            revolutionize the university from the ground up. It was for that
            that he did everything that horrified us at that time. For him the
            sole issue was to break the political influence of the church and
            the tenacity of academic bossdom. Even Ernst Jünger's vision
            of "the worker" [der Arbeiter] was given a place beside
            his own ideas about overcoming the metaphysical tradition via the
            reawakening of Being. Later, as is known, Heidegger wandered all
            the way to his radical talk of the end of philosophy. That was his
            "revolution."
             
            Hans-Georg Gadamer is professor emeritus of philosophy at the
            University of Heidelberg. His books include Truth and Method,
            Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
            Aristotelian Philosophy,and The Relevance of the Beautiful and
            Other Essays. John McCumber,associate professor of philosophy at
            Northwestern University, is the author of Poetic Interaction:
            Language, Freedom, Reason (forthcoming).
Jürgen Habermas
         Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a_German
            Perspective
         From the perspective of a contemporary German reader, one
            consideration is particularly important from the start.
            Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot
            and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his
            thought. As a personality of recent history, Heidegger comes, like
            every other such personality, under the judgment of the historian.
            In Farias' book as well, actions and courses of conduct are
            presented that suggest a detached evaluation of Heidegger's
            character. But in general, as members of a later generation who
            cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of a political
            dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions
            and omissions from the Nazi era. Karl Jaspers, a friend and
            contemporary of Heidegger, was in a different position. In a report
            that the denazification committee of the University of Freiburg at
            the end of 1945, he passed judgment on Heidegger's
            "mode of thinking": it seemed to him "in its
            essence unfree, dictatorial, uncommunicative."7 This judgment
            is itself no less informative about Jaspers than about Heidegger.
            In making evaluations of this sort Jaspers, as can be seen from his
            book on Friedrich Schelling, was guided by the strict maxim that
            whatever truth a philosophical doctrine contains must be mirrored
            in the mentality and lifestyle of the philosopher. This rigorous
            conception of the unity of work and person seems to me inadequate
            to the autonomy of thought and, indeed, to the general history of
            the reception and influence of philosophical thought. I do not mean
            by this to deny all internal connection between philosophical works
            and the biographical contexts from which they come or to
            limit the responsibility attached to an author, who during his
            lifetime can always react to unintended consequences of his
            utterances.
             
            7. Ott, "Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus,"
            p. 65.
             
            Jürgen Habermas is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Frankfurt. His most recent books include the two-volume work Theory
            of Communicative Action (1984) and The Philosophical Discourse of
            Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1987). John McCumber is an associate
            professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the
            author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason
            (forthcoming).
Jacques Derrida
         Of Spirit
         I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame and of ashes.
            And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.
            What is avoiding? Heidegger on several occasions uses the common
            word Vermeiden:to avoid, to flee, to dodge. What might he have
            meant when it comes to "spirit" or the
            "spiritual"? I specify immediately: not spirit or the
            spiritual but Geist, geistig, geistlich,for this question will be,
            through and through, that of language. Do these German words allow
            themselves to be translated? In another sense: are they avoidable?
            Sein und Zeit (1927): what does Heidegger say at that time? He
            announces and he prescribes. He warns [avertit]: a certain number
            of terms will have to be avoided (vermeiden). Among them, spirit
            (Geist). In 1953, more than twenty-five years later and this
            was not just any quarter-century in the great text devoted to
            Georg Trakl, Heidegger notes that Trakl always took care to avoid
            (vermeidenagain) the word geistig.And, visibly, Heidegger approves
            him in this; he thinks the same. But this time, it is not Geist nor
            even geistlich that is to be avoided, but geistig.
            How are we to delimit the difference, and what has happened? What
            of this meantime? How are we to explain that in twenty-five years,
            between these two warning signals ("avoid,"
            "avoid using"), Heidegger made a frequent, regular,
            marked (if not remarked) use of all this vocabulary, including the
            adjective geistig?And that he often spoke not only of the word
            "spirit" but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode,
            in the name of spirit?
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the
            University of California, Irvine. His most recent contribution to
             is "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a
            Shell: Paul de Man's War" (Spring 1988). An English
            translation of De l'espirit: Heidegger et la question is
            forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Geoff
            Bennington,author of Lyotard: Writing the Event,is a lecturer in
            French at the University of Sussex. Rachel Bowlby,author of
            Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations,is a lecturer in English at
            the University of Sussex.
Maurice Blanchot
         Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot_to
            Catherine David
         I prefer to put this in a letter to you instead of writing an
            article that would lead one to believe that I have any authority to
            speak on the subject of what has, in a roundabout way, become the
            H. and H. affair (just as there was Luchaire affair, a Chaumet
            affair, and so on). In other words, a cause of extreme seriousness,
            already discussed many times although certainly endless in nature,
            has been taken up by a storm of media attention, which has brought
            us to the lowest of passions, intense emotions, and even violence.
            I understand why people are talking about Victor Farias, who has
            contributed some unpublished information with a polemical
            intent, it is true, that does not help one to appreciate its true
            value. But how has it happened that Philippe Lacoue-
            Labarthe's book, published in 1987, was greeted by a silence
            that I am perhaps the first to break?1 It is because he avoids
            anecdotal accounts, all the while citing and situating most of the
            facts mentioned by Farias. He is severe and rigorous. He lays
            essential questions before us.
             
            1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger,
            l'art et la politique(Paris, 1987). I also cite Lacoue-
            Labarthe's book, La Poésie comme experience (Paris, 1986),
            devoted to Paul Celan.
             
            Maurice Blanchot,one of France's preeminent writers, has
            written, among many other books, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The
            Madness of the Day,and The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary
            Essays.Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has
            recently translated Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in
            Their Myths?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
         Neither an Accident nor a Mistake
         Something … happened … in the first half of this century, and the
            second half, hovering between nightmare and parody, is only its
            shadow. Even so we must take its measure. Not on a small scale,
            based on the last three or four centuries…. But since philosophy,
            even in its possibility, is at stake, the true assessment,
            incalculable as it is, of the entire history of the West is needed.
            And that is another matter altogether.
            We know that this other matter was, at the time, the Heidegger
            affair…. Since Nietzsche no thinker has delved so deeply and so far
            into the question of the essence of philosophy (and consequently,
            the essence of thought), nor has there been anyone who has opened a
            dialogue of such breadth and rigor with the tradition of the West.
            Nonetheless, a detail concerning this subject requires our
            attention: to subscribe, as I do, to Heidegger's theses (and
            particularly to his theses about philosophy), or even to grant a
            primary place to his thought, does not amount to any kind of
            declaration or profession of "Heideggerianism," as it
            is called…. Strictly speaking, the idea of a
            "Heideggerianism" is meaningless. It is not out of
            coyness or inconsistency that Heidegger constantly reminded us that
            "there is no philosophy of Heidegger." This clearly was
            an expression of his own question in condensed form: the question
            of Being could not in any way produce a new thesis on Being or,
            even less, give rise to any sort of "concept of the
            world." …
             
            Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe teaches philosophy at the University of
            Strasbourg. His books include The Literary Absolute (with Jean-Luc
            Nancy), Le Sujet de la philosophie, L'imitation des
            moderns,and, most recently, La Fiction du politique,forthcoming in
            an English translation from Basil Blackwell Press. Paula Wissing is
            a free-lance translator and editor. She has recently translated
            Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
Emmanuel Levinas
         As If Consenting to Horror
         I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after
            Hitler's huge success at the time of his election to the
            Reichstag, of Heidegger's sympathy toward National Socialism.
            It was the late Alexandre Koyré who mentioned it to me for the
            first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt
            the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with
            the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a
            great speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow
            over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever
            separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the
            pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme
            analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit,which had opened
            the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry.
            Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this
            book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was
            the interlocutor and equal of the greatest those very
            few founders of European philosophy? that here was someone,
            this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer?
             
            Emmanuel Levinas has been professor of philosophy at the École
            Normale Supérieure Israélite de Paris and at the University of
            Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into
            English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity,and
            Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Paula Wissing,a free-lance
            translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne's
            Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
Garry Wills
         Message in the Deoderant Bottle: Inventing Time
         I have on my desk an artifact of wonderful contrivance. Though its
            outer skin is of flimsy cardboard standing over half a foot high,
            it is squarely based, making it nearly untippable on shelves. It is
            a deodorant product called ban a box containing a bottle
            containing a liquid. But this simple division of the artifact into
            three components gives no idea of the complex relationships
            sustained between part and part, or within each part taken
            separately.
            Study, first, the bottle. It emerges from the box a tall and
            shapely miracle of ballast. It emerges from the box a tall and
            shapely miracle of ballast. Its most prominent feature, the
            revolving-ball applicator on top, is airy enough not to destabilize
            the three-and-one-half ounces of liquid in the bottle's
            pyramidal base. It looks like one of those skirted Egyptian statues
            with no waist to speak of bulbous of headdress or hairstyle
            above, firm-footed below, pinched in the middle.
            The box, despite artfully cutout windows, gives little suggestion
            of the Nefertiti-like interior. On the contrary: the box suggests
            that the bottle is bulkier than, unclothed, it turns out to be.
            Still, one could argue that the box is almost suicidally candid. It
            not only confesses but proclaims how much of the interior is taken
            up by the applicator (leaving, obviously, less space for the stuff
            that is to be applied). The upper window space on the bottle is
            intruded on by a semicircle of cardboard the lower half of a
            full yellow circle boldly marked off from the green and white
            product colors that reign everywhere else. Inside the circle, wide
            letters boast: WIDE BALL. The circle is, in fact, exactly the size
            of the wide ball as seen in section, giving us what seems an almost
            geometrical regard for truth in advertising. The circle is
            repeated, at full size, on both ends of the box; but there it is
            white, with WIDE BALL printed in green. Why this emphasis on an
            empty ball, on the fact that one is being sold a great content of
            air? The ball is shrouded by a huge plastic cover, a screw-on cowl
            that gives the Egyptian figure its impressive headdress.
             
            Garry Wills,adjunct professor of history at Northwestern
            University, is the author of Reagan's America (1987). His
            previous contribution to was
            "Washington's Citizen Virtue: Greenough and
            Houdon" (March 1984).
Michael Rogin
         The Great Mother Domesticated: Sexual Difference and Sexual
            Indifference in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance
         A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over
            Intolerance (1916), the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph
            with The Birth of a Nation(1915). Ishtar sits above Babylon's
            royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so
            gigantic a scale that is diminishes the size of the goddess.
            Perhaps to establish Ishtar's larger-than-life proportions,
            Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the
            movie (fig. 1). The director is the same size as the sculptured
            grown man who sucks at Ishtar's breast; both males are
            dwarfed by the goddess' dimensions.
            Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power
            current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the
            New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture
            were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could
            support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will
            show us how.
             
            Michael Rogin is professor of political science at the University
            of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Subversive
            Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville(1985), and
            "Ronald Reagan," the Movie and Other Episodes in
            Political Demonology (1987).
Stanley Fish
         Spectacle and Evidence in Samsom Agonistes
         When the chorus at the end of Samson Agonistesdeclares that
            "all is best," what it means is that the best of all
            possible things, the thing everyone in the play most desires, has
            finally happened: Samson is dead. This is, of course, not quite
            fair. What the chorus most wants is that things once more be as
            they were, and its moment of highest joy in the play involves the
            speculation that a revived Hebrew hero may "now be dealing
            dole among his foes / And over heaps of slaughtered walk his
            way" (ll. 1529-30).1 "That were a joy presumptuous to
            be through" (l. 1531), responds Manoa, indicating that he too
            wishes for nothing more than the return of the days when his son
            "walked about … / On hostile ground" "like a
            petty god" (ll. 530-31, 529). This is also what Harapha wants
            for different reasons when he says of Samson's change of
            fortune, I "wish it had not been, / Though for no friendly
            intent" (ll. 1077-78); and it is what Dalila wants for more
            reasons than Samson can shake a stick at when she laments an event
            more "perverse … than I foresaw" (l. 737) and attempts
            to mitigate if she cannot cancel the effects of her "rash but
            more unfortunate misdeed" (l. 747). Everyone, in short, wants
            to turn back the clock, and this, of course, includes Samson, who
            is obsessed with the disparity between his present and his past
            states: "Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed / … / …
            if I must die / Betrayed, captive[?]" (ll. 30-33);
            "Promise was that I / Should Israel from Philistian yoke
            deliver; / Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him / Eyeless
            in Gaza" (ll. 38-41); "The base degree to which I now
            am fall'n" (l. 414); "I was his nursling once and
            choice delight" (l. 633).
             
            1. John Milton, Samson Agonistes, The Poems of John Milton,ed. John
            Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York, 1968); hereafter
            cited by line number.
             
            Stanley Fishis Arts and Sciences Professor of English and Professor
            of Law and chairman of the English department at Duke University.
            His most recent book is Doing What Comes Naturally: Change,
            Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Legal and Literary Studies.
David Van Leer
         The Beast of the Closet: Homosociality and the_Pathology_of_Manhood
         [Eve] Sedgwick examines from an explicitly feminist, implicitly
            Marxist perspective the relation of homosexuality to more general
            social bonds between members of the same sex ("male
            homosocial desires"). She argues that the similarity between
            (socially acceptable) homosocial desire and (socially condemned)
            homosexuality lies at the root of much homophobia. Moreover, she
            sees this tension as misogynist to the extent that battles fought
            over patriarchy within the homosocial world automatically exclude
            women from that patriarchal power. Thus she places homosexuality
            and its attendant homophobia within a wider dynamic of social
            relationships.1
            Yet even as Sedgwick invents a more sophisticated definition of
            "homophobia," she may permit misreading of a more
            elementary sort. Her use of vocabulary is troubling. In a slangy
            prose that regularly juxtaposes James Hogg and Louis Lepke,
            Tennyson and Howard Keel, references to the "campiness"
            of Thackeray's "bitchy" bachelors or the
            "feminized" cuckolds of Wycherley's The Country
            Wife seem tame enough. Yet there is a political difference between
            the jokes. One can burlesque fifties musicals or organized crime
            with impunity; to refer to sexually embattled men with feminine
            adjectives, however, is to reinforce a sexual stereotype that sees
            in the supposed effeminacy of homosexuals a sign of their deviance.
            Nor are women empowered when terms of female degradation like
            "bitch" are turned back against men: the ironic
            reversal does not challenge the terms' validity but reaffirms
            it, showing they have an even wider range of applicability than had
            been thought.
             
            1. Throughout my analysis, I use "homosexual" and
            "gay" exclusively in reference to male sexuality. I do
            so in part to echo Sedgwick's emphasis and in part because
            the logic of my own argument does not empower me to speak on female
            homosexuality.
             
            David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American
            literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author
            of Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays(1986)
            and articles on American literature and popular culture.
Stanley Cavell
         Who Disappoints Whom?
         Can one conceive something to say about Allan Bloom's view of
            America and the American university that he hasn't already
            heard? Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences in what
            we each saw in our students of the 1960s, I find two regions in
            which Bloom's experience and mine differ systematically that
            are specific and clear enough to be stated briefly, perhaps
            usefully: first, our experience of the position of philosophy in
            the intellectual economy we were presented with in the two decades
            prior to the 1960s; second, our experience of the modern and the
            popular in the arts. My citing of these differences can only prove
            worthwhile, however, against a background of agreement I find with
            his work over the centrality of a cluster of issues, of which I
            specify five: a first agreement concerns the illustriousness (in
            Emerson's sense, which includes illustrativeness) of the
            university in the life of a democracy; a second concerns the
            irreplaceability of Great Books what Thoreau calls
            scriptures in (let's call it) a humanistic education; a
            third concerns the unaware imbibing of European thought by a
            chronically unprepared American constitution a condition that
            is as live for us, or should be, as when Emerson was founding
            American thinking by demonstrating his knack of inheriting, by
            transfiguring, European philosophy; a fourth moment of agreement
            concerns the goal of a democratic university education as keeping
            open the idea of philosophy as a way of life, call it the life of
            the mind, a name for which might be Moral Perfectionism (Bloom
            speaks of the longing for completeness, Emerson speaks instead of a
            capacity for partiality, and of the courage to become both
            see in the goal a desire for the world's human possibilities,
            and both are aware that the aspiration is always threatening to
            turn into debased narcissism or foolish imitation); a fifth sense
            of my agreement with Bloom concerns the threat that a discourse
            about such issues, such as the prose fashioned in Bloom's
            book (manifestly the product of a lifetime of reading and of a
            devotion to teaching), is becoming unintelligible to the culture
            that has produced it, and not alone to the young (in my experience,
            less to them than to others).
             
            Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and
            the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent
            works include In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and
            Romanticism and This New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays after
            Emerson after Wittgenstein
Robert J. Griffin
         Ideology and Misrepresentation: A Response to Edward Said
         The gist of Edward Said's attack on Israel ("An
            Ideology of Difference,"  12 [Autumn 1985]:
            38-58) is that Zionism is racism. The very appearance of his essay
            in a special issue devoted to racism is an interesting fact in
            itself. But the fact that the editors up until now received no
            responses to Said carries special significance. It signals, or can
            be read as signaling, that the literary-critical establishment has
            reached a consensus and that liberal supporters of Israel in our
            discipline have retreated from the field.
            I may be wrong about this, of course, for other explanations are
            possible, but Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s observations a year
            later on that special issue would seem to reinforce my view. Baker
            describes Said's (and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's)
            method as aiming "to prove that &lsquo;A' is as good
            as&lsquo;B' and to induce shame in defenders of
            &lsquo;B' who have made other axiological choices."
            Baker protests against this method, however, since it gives too
            much play to "B," so that "it is difficult to
            hear a Palestinian voice separate from the world of Jewish
            discourse." Then he adds in parentheses: "(Of course,
            Jews are not likely to feel this way, and will probably call for
            Said's head on a platter. But that is the necessary reaction
            of well-financed client states.)"2 In Baker's language,
            only Jews are likely to disagree, and these "Jews,"
            conceived as a unitary group, are a client state (no doubt of some
            evil empire) and are compared by means of allusion to the corrupt,
            libidinous king who executed the true prophet (in this case, Said),
            the herald of Jesus. These comments are remarkable in any context,
            but especially so in a forum on racism.
             
            Robert J. Griffin is a lecturer in English at Tel Aviv University.
            He is currently working on two books, one on Samuel Johnson and one
            on literary historiography.
Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin
         Toward a Dialogue with Edward Said
         As critics, a vital part of our task is to examine the ways in
            which language mystifies and reveals, serves and disserves human
            desires and aspirations. In that spirit we feel that engaging the
            leading Palestinian intellectual in the United States in a critical
            dialogue is a vital task. Although this reply takes issue with
            several points in Edward Said's paper, "An Ideology of
            Difference" ( 12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), our
            critique is intended as part of the struggle for increased mutual
            empathy. We in no way wish to deny Said's claims regarding
            the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations, nor the validity of Said
            and other Palestinian intellectuals' efforts to counter the
            destructive military, political, and ideological forces that stand
            in the way of the Palestinians' achievement and self-
            determination. Said's critiques of the idea that Israel is
            somehow above criticism, and of the elimination of the Palestinians
            from "Western" discourse, are both valid.2
            We wish to make our own perspective clear at the start. We are both
            Jewish nationalists. We believe that it's a good thing to be
            Jewish. We believe that those of Jewish heritage who fail to
            explore and re-create that heritage lose something of themselves.
            We think that Judaism still has a role to play in the healing of
            the world. By making this statement, we are not claiming that our
            views are identical,3 nor that they are the same from day to day,
            nor, a fortiori, that they are identical or even similar to those
            of many or most other people who would define themselves in that
            way. This, we note, touches on one of the aspects of Said's
            paper of which we are most critical: The statements that he makes
            at several points, which seem to reify Zionists and Zionism into
            one model of theory and social practice, as well as his occlusion
            of the fact that other options for Jewish self-renewal were
            obviated by genocide or Soviet repression.
             
            2. We are hardly alone among Jewish intellectuals in concurring
            with this point. Compare the recent comments by the American Jewish
            leader Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:
            In memory of the Holocaust we have been reminded by you that
            silence is a sin. You have spoken out against indifference and
            injustice. Why are you making a special exception of Israel? Do you
            think that our silence will help Israel? The texts that we study
            and restudy teach the contrary.
            (Arthur Hertzberg, "Open Letter to Elie Wiesel," New
            York Review of Books,18 Aug. 1988, 14.)
             
            Daniel Boyarin is associate professor of midrash at Bar-Ilan
            University. His articles on midrash and theory have appeared in
            Poetics Today and Representations,and a monograph on the subject is
            forthcoming this year. Jonathan Boyarin is a fellow of the Max
            Weinreich Center at the VIVO Institute for Jewish Research. He
            edited and translated, with Jack Kugelmass, From a Ruined Garden:
            The Memorial Books of Polish Jewry,and is currently completing an
            ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris. He is active in the
            International Jewish Peace Union.
Edward W. Said
         Response
         Since neither of these two inordinately long responses deals
            seriously with what I said in "An Ideology of
            Difference" (written in 1984, published in 
            12 [Autumn 1985]: 38-58), both the Boyarins and Griffin are made
            even more absurd by actual events occurring as they wrote. The
            Israeli army has by now been in direct and brutal military
            occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for twenty-one years; the
            intifadah,surely the most impressive and disciplined anticolonial
            insurrection in this century, is now in its eleventh month. The
            daily killings of unarmed Palestinians by armed Israelis, soldiers
            and settlers, numbers several hundred; yesterday two more
            Palestinians were killed, the day before (7 October 1988) four were
            killed. The beatings, expulsions, wholesale collective punishments,
            the closure of schools and universities, as well as the
            imprisonment of dozens of thousands in places like Ansar III, a
            concentration camp, continue. A V sign flashed by a young
            Palestinian carries with six months in jail; a Palestinian flag can
            get you up to ten years; you risk burial alive by zealous Israel
            Defense Forces soldiers; if you are a member of a popular committee
            you are liable to arrest, and all professional, syndical, or
            community associations are now illegal. Any Palestinian can be put
            in jail without charge or trial for up to six months, renewable,
            for any offense, which needn't be revealed to him or her. For
            non-Jews, approximately 1.5 million people on the West Bank and
            Gaza, there are thus no rights whatever. On the other hand, Jews
            are protected by Israeli law on the Occupied Territories. In such a
            state of apartheid so named by most honest Israelis the
            intifadah continues, as does the ideology of difference vainly
            attempting to repress and willfully misinterpret its significance.
             
            Edward W. Saidis Parr Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to
             is "Representing the Colonized:
            Anthropology's Interlocutors" (Winter 1989).
Robert Markley
         What Isn't History: The Snares of Demystifying Ideological
            Criticism
         Oscar Kenshur's "Demystifying the Demystifiers:
            Metaphysical Snares of Ideological Criticism" (Critical
            Inquiry14 [Winter 1988]: 335-53) should go a long way toward
            convincing most readers that the cure for "ideological"
            (or Marxist) criticism is worse than the disease. His attempt to
            uncouple ideology and epistemology in Thomas Hobbes'
            Leviathan and Michael Ryan's Marxism and Deconstruction
            belongs to an increasingly popular subgenre of metacriticism, the
            "more-historical-than-thou" offensive against Marxists
            and new historicists for their alleged essentialist procedures.1
            There is no question that Kenshur raises significant issues about
            the nature of ideological analysis that should be debated. However,
            he has neither interrogated the basis of his own assumptions about
            seventeenth-century views of language theory and epistemology nor
            convincingly demonstrated, to my mind, that Ryan is somehow wrong
            in his reading of Hobbes. The weakness of Kenshur's argument
            is that he seems intent on erecting the windmills at which he wants
            to tile most damagingly for his argument a simplistic notion
            of ideology that he assumes both Hobbes and Ryan share. By
            accepting a deterministic notion of ideology, Kenshur offers a
            "corrective" to overzealous claims for the significance
            of ideological criticism that has the effect not of "sav[ing
            history] from its friends" (p. 353) but of returning it to
            the status of "background" or "context"
            that it had been for a previous generation of New Critics. The
            terms in which he casts his argument epistemology and/or (but
            not as) ideology redefine "ideological criticism"
            in a polemical manner designed, it seems, to discourage anyone from
            wanting to practice it. His ultimate purpose is not simply to save
            "history" from the Ryans of the world but to inoculate
            his versions of literature and philosophy against the ideological
            virus. To respond fully to the various issues that Kenshur raises
            would require detailed analyses of seventeenth-century literary and
            political culture and of the institutionalization of twentieth-
            century criticism; simply to discuss the differences between Hobbes
            and Ryan on epistemology or ideology would require a full-length
            study of the various discourses in which and against which their
            works are situated. Given the limitations of a critical response, I
            shall confine my remarks to two suspect areas of Kenshur's
            argument: his characterization of seventeenth-century notions of
            the relationships among language, epistemology, and ideology and
            his assumptions about the nature of claims currently made for
            ideological analysis.
             
            1. See, for example, Edward Pechter, "The New Historicism and
            Its Discontents: Politicizing Renaissance Drama," PMLA 102
            (May 1987): 292-303.
             
            Robert Markley teaches in the English department of the University
            of Washington and is editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and
            Interpretation.He is the author of Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style
            and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve
            (1988) and coauthor, with Kenneth J. Koespel, of Newton and the
            Failure of Messianic Science: A Postmodern Inquiry into the
            Discourses of Natural Philosophy (forthcoming).
Oscar Kenshur
         (Avoidable) Snares and Avoidable Muddles
         The subtitle of the essay that Robert Markley attacks had, in its
            penultimate version, a parenthetical word that was ultimately
            dropped. It read, "(Avoidable) Metaphysical Snares of
            Ideological Criticism." The editor of ,W. J.
            T. Mitchell, politely suggested that my subtitle was redundant:
            snares, he observed, are by nature avoidable. Indeed they are. In
            fact, my parentheses were intended to indicate that the word
            didn't really need to be there. The self-conscious redundancy
            was intended to underlines the fact that the essay was not
            attacking ideological criticism in general, but only certain
            tendencies that seemed especially prevalent in ideological
            critiques of abstract ideas. Seeking support for my redundancy, I
            appealed to a sagacious friend, who promptly urged me to follow
            Mitchell's suggestion and drop the "avoidable,"
            parentheses or no parentheses. I was asking my title to do too
            much, he observed; the essay itself would make it quite clear that
            I was undertaking to refine and strengthen the techniques of
            ideological criticism by urging that its pitfalls be avoided.
            If I had declined to follow this eminently reasonable advice and
            had retained the word "avoidable," would that have kept
            Markley from so radically misconstruing my project? After all, near
            the end of his rebuttal, he acknowledges that "Kenshur is
            right … in one respect," that there is a "lot of not
            particularly interesting pseudo-Marxist criticism being
            written" (p. 656). If I had underscored my own sympathy
            toward and links with the new historicism something that I
            could have done in all good conscience would that have
            disarmed him? Or if I now undertook, after the fact, to offer
            assurances that I, like Markley, was working from within the
            capacious and self-critical Marxist tradition and trying to
            distinguish its strengths from its weaknesses, would that impel
            him, like Gilda Radner's Emily Litella (another launcher of
            overheated attacks based on misapprehensions), meekly to say,
            "Never mind"? Perhaps, but somehow I doubt it.
             
            Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at
            Indiana University. He is author of Open Form and the Shape of
            Ideas (1986) and is completing Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a study
            that traces shifts in the ideological significance of early modern
            ideas about intellectual method, religious toleration, and female
            chastity.
Simon During
         After Death: Raymond Williams in the Modern Era
         Like all deaths, Raymond Williams' must touch most profoundly
            those who were closest to him; it belongs first to his private
            circle. But it also belongs to his fame: to those who have read his
            books, heard him speak in public, were taught by him, and, then, to
            those who have been taught by those he taught, and so on. Because
            Williams was so committed and important politically writing
            not just as an academic but as a leftist his death also
            enters public history. One can ask: does it mark the end of an era?
            Or, on the contrary, is it the sign of a beginning set in motion by
            the programs, the shifts of emphasis, he urged? Such questions are
            all the most insistent because the left, as a political force and
            as an idea, is so fragile today. Indeed, no other theme seems as
            urgent in thinking about Williams' life and work now; for, to
            put it rather glibly, it is no longer easy to tell left from right.
            If we regard "being on the left" as requiring the
            belief that state control of the economy and the ideological
            apparatus and the empowerment of the proletariat are steps demanded
            by the journey towards real, rather than illusory or formal,
            freedom, then who is still on the left? And if "being on the
            left" does not require such beliefs, if there is a left that
            is not statist, how does it differ from liberalism, from a
            Deleuzian or Foucauldian micro-politics or a mere insistence on
            "social justice"?2
             
            2. This is not to approach the question of what it means to be a
            "Marxist" (as against just "one the left")
            in cultural/literary studies. Historically, one of the clearest
            demarcations of Marxism within and from the left in general was its
            willingness to theorize and imagine revolution. The difficulties
            faced by Williams' work and career are very much those posed
            by a nonrevolutionary Marxism. (And, to anticipate, this
            problematic, strangely enough, also connects him to Maurice
            Blanchot.)
             
            Simon During is a lecturer in English at the University of
            Melbourne. His Foucault and Literature will appear in 1990, and he
            is currently working on a book entitled Literature without Culture
Shoshana Felman
         Paul de Man's Silence
         The responses to this discovery, in the press and elsewhere, seem
            to focus on the act of passing judgment, a judgment that reopens
            with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of de
            Man's work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical
            approach known as "deconstruction."
            The discourse of moral judgment takes as its target three distinct
            domains of apparent ethical misconduct:
            1. the collaborationist political activities themselves;
            2. de Man's apparent erasure of their memory his
            radical "forgetting" of his early past;
            3. the silence that de Man chose to keep about his past: the
            absence of public confession and public declaration of remorse.
            The question of ethics thus seems to be linked to the separate
            questions of the nature of political activities, of the nature of
            memory, and of the nature of silence. It is judged unethical, of
            course, to engage in acts that lent support to Germany's
            wartime position; but it is also judged unethical to forget; and
            unethical, furthermore, to keep silent in relation to the war and
            to the Holocaust. The silence is interpreted as a deliberate
            concealment, a suppression of accountability that can only mean a
            denial of responsibility on de Man's part.
             
            Shoshana Felman,the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and
            Comparative Literature at Yale University, is the author of The
            Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two
            Languages (1984), Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/
            Psychoanalysis(1985), and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture:
            Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight(1987). She is also the
            editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of
            Reading Otherwise (1982). She is currently working on a book
            entitled Testimony in History, Literature and Psychoanalysis.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Tide and Trust
         Many things are frightening in the process by which people identify
            against and resist oppressions. One of the worst is how easy it is
            for people to be made to feel, by some intervention from another,
            that their own identity and their standing from which to resist
            that oppression have been foreclosed or annihilated: their voices
            delegitimated, the authority of their grounding in an indispensable
            identity threatened with erasure. Anyone who has worked in feminist
            groups, for instance, knows the moment when a woman or group of
            women announce that they have sat silent through a discussion, not
            because they had nothing to say, but because they felt
            silenced,felt radically denegated by some act or speech or some
            perceived dynamic of the group. These announcements make shifty
            moments in the power relations of a group. They bring to the
            surface, by rupturing it, how far from impartial or inclusive is
            the normal, "neutral" decorum of conversational
            exchange, and how far from detached are the needs and dreads that
            people have invested in it. The fabric of trust that gives a
            nominally egalitarian texture to activist interactions is it
            is always shocking to have once more to learn a fragile one
            that a multitude of unacknowledged presumptions can suddenly leave
            gaping.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is professor of English at Duke University.
            She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male
            Homosocial Desire and the forthcoming Epistemology of the
            Closet.Her most recent contribution to is
            "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley, Sterne,
            and Male Homosocial Desire" (December 1984).
David Van Leer
         Trust and Trade
         As presidential campaigns and "Saturday Night Live"
            have repeatedly demonstrated, debate is an uninteresting mode of
            communication, imitating dialogue without engaging in it. Formally
            it encourages infinite regress: my misreading of your misreading of
            my misreading of your misreading. Intellectually its conclusions
            are in some ways predetermined. In the short run, the winner is
            whoever speaks last; in the long run, whoever has the greater
            power. Rather than occasion or remark on further "shifty
            moments" (p. 745), then, I will try to review some general
            areas of contention suggested in my exchange with Eve Kosofsky
            Sedgwick.
            Although Sedgwick and I value the personal and the theoretical
            both, we disagree on the lines of intersection. I am struck by her
            initial situation of "Van Leer" in the ranks of those
            who feel silenced. The complaint might just as easily have been
            that he has entirely too much to say. Nor, if autobiography is
            really the issue, do I in any way regret the notoriety of
            Sedgwick's work? From what I take to be my point of view,
            Sedgwick's book has opened up for me a far more visible space
            in the academy than has my own. And I attribute to myself at least
            enough self-consciousness to recognize the disingenuousness of
            "feeling silenced" in .
             
            David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American
            literature at the University of California, Davis. The author of
            Emerson's Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays (1986), he
            is currently examining the issue of contextualism in a book to be
            called The Queening of America
Jean-Marie Apostolidès
         On Paul de Man's War
         In 1982-83, I was preparing my volume on the Belgian cartoonist
            Hergé. During the Second World War, Hergé's comic strips
            appeared daily in the newspaper Le Soir.Since I wanted to analyze
            the influence of the rightist thought on Hergé and Tintin, I
            borrowed most of the copies of Le Soir available in this country
            through interlibrary loan. Examining the newspaper, I came across
            Paul de Man's articles, which were sometimes on the same page
            as the comic strips. I showed these articles to some colleagues
            related to or teaching at Harvard University. I specifically recall
            an afternoon with a colleague from Boston University whose
            specialty is the hunting of presumed French fascist intellectuals;
            we discussed together the possible bridges between de Man's
            contemporary thought (he was still alive at that time) and his
            former intellectual engagement during the Second World War.
            That is to say that, as far as I know, several people at Harvard
            and in the Boston area (where deconstruction and feminism were and
            continue to be a recurrent theme) were aware of de Man's
            former affiliation with rightist circles. One can ask why it took
            five more years for the "scandal" to appear: why this
            "sudden" revelation after several years of silence and
            dissimulation? Compared to the fact that Hergé had constantly been
            confronted with his political past, one can wonder how strongly
            Paul de Man's "secret" was kept.
             
            Jean-Marie Apostolidèsis professor of French at Stanford
            University. He is currently writing an essay on the anthropological
            reading of literature. His article "Molière and the Sociology
            of Exchange" appeared in the Spring 1988 issue of Critical
            Inquiry.
Marjorie Perloff
         Response to Jacques Derrida
         Derrida's quite uncharacteristic literalism is surprising: he
            takes de Man and Dosogne at their word,6 thus boxing himself into a
            peculiar corner. If indeed there was no censorship of de
            Man's articles written prior to August 1942, why is his
            "discourse … constantly split, disjointed, engaged in
            incessant conflicts"? If the young de Man could speak freely,
            why do "all the propositions [in his texts] carry within
            themselves a counterproposition" (p. 607)? If, on the other
            hand, as Denuit and others have made amply clear, there was in fact
            censorship all along, the Führerprinzipoperating from the day de
            Becker took over Le Soir,then we have to conclude that de Man is
            not telling the truth in his letter to Poggioli. Either way, the
            statement is compromised. As for the word Nazi,it is not at all
            surprising that de Man didn't use it in his texts for Le
            Soir.Hitler's strategy, at the time, was to try to convince
            the Belgians that annexation to Germany was no more than an
            inevitable return to the glorious German fatherland, the home of
            Culture, the Arts, Philosophy. Indeed, if the Nazis could be seen
            as simply equivalent to the Germans of tradition, the Belgians had
            nothing to fear!
             
            6. See Culler, "Letter to the Editor," p. 4: "De
            Man ceased writing for Le Soir in the fall of 1942, when the Nazis
            extended censorship to the cultural section of the paper."
             
            Marjorie Perloff,professor of English and comparative literature at
            Stanford University, is the author of Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
            Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986). A collection of
            her recent essays, Of Canons and Contemporaries,is forthcoming.
Jonathan Culler
         "Paul de Man's War" and the Aesthetic Ideology
         While debates about the relations to fascism exhibited in de
            Man's newspaper articles will no doubt continue (although
            whatever interpretation one gives them, de Man is guilty of having
            written an anti-Semitic article and of working in the
            collaborationist press), the important question is what value his
            critical and theoretical writings have for us, the productivity of
            his critical and theoretical work for our thinking. The wartime
            writings give a new dimension to much of de Man's work in
            America, helping one to understand more plainly what is implied by
            his critique of the aesthetic ideology, as in late essays on Kleist
            and on Kant and Schiller. Walter Benjamin called fascism the
            introduction of aesthetics into politics. De Man's critique
            of the aesthetic ideology now resonates also as a critique of the
            fascist tendencies he had known.
             
            Jonathan Culler,Class of 1916 Professor of English and comparative
            literature at Cornell University, is the author of Framing the
            Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1989).
W. Wolfgang Holdheim
         Jacques Derrida's Apologia
         The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility,
            as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first
            seven pages swamp the reader with the word
            "responsibility" to the point where they could be
            described as "variations on the theme." Inundation,
            alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion
            remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art
            of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these
            "variation" are more musical than analytic:
            "responsibility" comes close to being a Wagnerian
            leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the
            text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary
            disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although
            there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a
            general direction of development. The question of de Man's
            responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is
            touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about
            responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida's:
            "responsibility" is associated with
            "responding," which is increasingly read as
            Derrida's obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset,
            this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the
            conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath.
            There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later (p.
            639) briefly returns to this subject and this style.
            "Responding for the other" is here connected with
            transference, allegory (standing for narrative), and
            prosopopeia that is, connected with two rhetorical categories
            and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so
            little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de
            force.
             
            W. Wolfgang Holdheim,professor of comparative literature and
            romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies
            at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on
            literature and literary theory as well as a number of books,
            including The Hermeneutic Mode (1984).
Jon Wiener
         The Responsibilities of Friendship: Jacques Derrida on Paul_de
            Man's Collaboration
         But of course Derrida's appeal to context and to authorial
            intention constitutes an abandonment of the deconstructive method.
            As Christopher Norris has written of de Man, "we read in
            defiance of his own repeated counsel" if we read his work
            "by asking what might have been the motives, political or
            otherwise, that led to his adopting the stance they
            exhibit."2
            Derrida emphasizes repeatedly that de Man's objectionable
            acts were committed almost half a century ago, when he was twenty-
            one and twenty-two years old. That's an important argument.
            But the moral problems de man poses do not end in 1942 when he
            stopped writing for Le Soir;a second and in some ways more serious
            moral problem recurs throughout his adult-life, during which de Man
            kept his youthful pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic writings a secret.
             
            John Wiener is professor of history at the University of
            California, Irvine. His articles "Deconstructing de
            Man" and "Debating de Man" appeared in The
            Nation.
John Brenkman and Jules David Law
         Resetting the Agenda
         Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary ("Like the Sound
            of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War,"
             14 [Spring 1988]: 590-652) on the early career of
            Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is
            going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent
            revelations is that they have played into the hands of de
            Man's antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of
            his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such
            indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian.
            He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the discussion and to
            reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across
            historical, theoretical, and political questions.
            He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates
            the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the
            young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and
            however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the
            same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even
            undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the
            challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual
            movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to
            grips with the political and intellectual history of its own
            leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process
            make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and
            intellectuals' participation in it?
             
            John Brenkmanis associate professor of English at Northwestern
            University. He is the author of Culture and Domination (1987).
            Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern
            University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the
            metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and
            nineteenth-century British prose.
Jacques Derrida
         Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments
         Those who have read me, in particular those who have read
            "Paul de Man's War," know very well that I would
            have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an
            argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation
            (theoretical, moral, political) of these articles from 1940-42, and
            so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated
            enough, divided,tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open
            enough to discussion, itselfdiscussing itself enough in advance (on
            every page, indeed within every sentence, and from the very first
            sentence) for me to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and
            objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to
            intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not
            to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce
            massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the
            six "responses" that I reread last night are written,
            as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de
            Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me (I who said things that
            were nevertheless judged by Culler "exceedingly severe"
            against de Man and who have nothing whatever to dowith everything
            that happened; I who, at the time, was rather on the side of the
            victims shall I dare to recall this once again and will they
            forgive me for doing so? struck by a numerous clauses that it
            will be necessary to talk about again). Less against me, in truth,
            than against "Deconstruction" (which at the time was at
            year minus twenty-five of its calendar! This suffices to shed light
            on this whole scene and its actual workings). How can the reader
            tell that these five "critical responses" are not
            "responses," critical texts or discussions, but rather
            the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that
            they are all monolithic.They take into account none of the
            complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say,
            is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility,
            the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion,
            of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is
            rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred.
            Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my
            sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the
            better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship,
            which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me.
            Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship.
            How foreign this experience must be to them!
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) as well as professor at the
            University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the
            Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent
            publication in English is the collection Limited Inc (1988), which
            includes a new afterword, "Toward an Ethic of
            Discussion." Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the
            University of Southern California. Her most recent book is
            Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship (1988). She has
            also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading(1989) and
            Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (1989), and is
            currently editing A Derrida Reader.
Peter Brooks
         Storied Bodies, or Nana at Last Unveil'd
         A major preoccupation of that novel [Zola's Nana] is the
            undressing of the courtesan Nana. One could even say that a major
            dynamic of the novel is stripping Nana, and stripping away at her,
            making per progressively expose the secrets of this golden body
            that has Paris in thrall. The first chapter of the novel provides,
            quite literally, a mise-en-scène for Nana's body, in the
            operetta La Blonde Vénus.When she comes on stage in the third act,
            a shiver passes over the audience, for, we are told, she is nude.
            Yet, we quickly discover, not quite nude: she is covered by a filmy
            shift under which her splendid body lets itself be glimpsed: se
            devinait."It was Venus born from the waves, having only her
            hair as a veil."2 The denuding of nana progresses in chapter
            5 when Comte Muffat and the Prince make their way backstage to her
            dressing room (her undressing room). They surprise her naked to the
            waist, and she then covers herself with a bodice, which only half
            hides her breasts. Despite the repeated references to nana as nude,
            it is only in chapter 7, at the very midpoint of the novel, that
            Nana is finally completely naked. In this scene, she undresses
            before her mirror while Comte Muffat watches, especially looking at
            her looking at herself. Thus she is fully unveiled, frontally in
            the mirror, and from the backside in Muffat's direct view.
            And yet, as we shall see in a moment, even the completely naked
            woman's body bears a troubling veil.
             
            2. Émile Zola, Nana (Paris, 1977), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated N.I
            wish to thank Helen Chillman, Librarian of the Slides and
            Photography Collection, Art and Architecture Library, Yale
            University, for her help in assembling the illustrations
            accompanying this essay.
             
            Peter Brooks is Tripp Professor of Humanities and Director of the
            Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. The author of The
            Melodramatic Imagination (1976) and Reading for the Plot (1984), he
            is currently working on a study of narrative and the body,
            tentatively called "Storied Bodies."
Jay Clayton
         Narrative and Theories of Desire
         The hope of moving beyond formalism is one of two things that
            unites an otherwise diverse group of literary theorists who have
            begun to explore the role of desire in narrative. Peter Brooks, for
            example, in Reading for the Plot,says in more than one place that
            his interest in desire "derives from my dissatisfaction with
            the various formalisms that have dominated critical thinking about
            narrative."3 Leo Bersani sees desire as establishing a
            crucial link between social and literary structures. Teresa de
            Lauretis faults structuralist models for their inability to
            disclose the ways in which narrative operates, through the desire
            it excites and fulfills, to construct the social world as a system
            of sexual differences. Other names could be added, both within and
            outside the field of narrative theory Nancy Armstrong, Roland
            Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jessica Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and
            Félix Guattari, René Girard, Luce Irigaray, Fredric Jameson, Peggy
            Kamuf, Linda Kauffman, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Jean
            Laplance, Catharine A. McKinnon, and Eve Kosofsky
            Sedgwick for desire has become one of the master tropes of
            contemporary criticism.
             
            3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
            Narrative (New York, 1984), p. 47; hereafter abbreviated RP.
            4. Leo, Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in
            Literature (Boston, 1976), p. 13; hereafter abbreviated FA.
            5. Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in
            Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York, 1985), p. v; hereafter
            abbreviated FV.Although Bersani coauthored this book with Dutoit,
            for convenience I refer to it by Bersani's name alone. This
            practice is justified by two considerations: first, most of the
            arguments about narrative, violence, and desire are elaborations of
            positions that Bersani has taken in earlier works; second, passages
            and examples in the sections with which I shall be dealing (chiefly
            those on narrative and psychoanalysis) are reprinted with only
            minor changes from an article that Bersani published under his own
            name.
             
            Jay Clayton,associate professor of English at Vanderbilt
            University, is the author of Romantic Vision and the Novel (1987)
            and coeditor of Contemporary Literature and Contemporary Theory
            (forthcoming). He is currently completing a study of contemporary
            American literature and theory, Narrative Power.
Linda Seidel
         "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait": Business as Usual?
         This essay had its beginnings in my desire to reexamine the
            Arnolfini portrait from the perspective of Giovanna Cenami, the
            demure young woman who stands beside the cloaked and hated man on
            the fifteenth-century panel in London. Even though she shares the
            formal prominence with the man in Jan van Eyck's
            unprecedented composition, she has been paid scant attention in the
            literature on the painting. I anticipated, as I began my work that
            inspection of the female subject of the panel would, of necessity,
            amend the authoritative count of the Arnolfini portrait that
            Panofsky first published in 1934. That narrative, which focused on
            the event portrayed, had been recited to me by my teachers as an
            example of interpretive truth; I had committed it to memory as a
            model of our discipline's search for meaning. I never dreamed
            back then that it might be "wrong." Yet, the material I
            encountered as I pursued my inquiry into Giovanna's life
            contradicted Panofsky's assumptions on several key points;
            amendment alone would not do. It seemed necessary for me to
            challenge the venerable interpretation others were starting to
            question,4 even though two generations of students, including my
            own, had learned from it all they thought there was to know about
            "Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait."
             
            4. See, for example, Peter H. Schabacker, "De Matrimonio ad
            Morganaticam Conracto:Jan van Eyck's &lsquo;Arnolfini'
            Portrait Reconsidered," Art Quarterly35 (Winter 1972): 375-
            98, hereafter abbreviated "DM"; Lucy Freeman Sandler,
            "The Handclasp in the Arnolfini Wedding:A Manuscript
            Precedent," Art Bulletin 66 (Sept. 1984): 488-91, hereafter
            abbreviated "H"; and Jan Baptist Bedaux, "The
            Reality of Symbols: The Question of Disguised Symbolism in Jan van
            Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait," Simiolus16 (1986): 5-28,
            hereafter abbreviated "RS."
             
            Linda Seidel,associate professor in the department of art at the
            University of Chicago, is the author of Songs of Glory (1981), a
            study of twelfth-century French architectural sculpture. She is
            currently completing a work on medieval doorway design as an art of
            entry and pursuing a collaborative project with Michael Camille and
            Robert Nelson, Medieval Art and Its Audiences.
Richard Moran
         Seeing and Believing: Metaphor, Image, and Force
         One way in which the characteristic gestures of philosophy and
            criticism differ from each other lies in their involvements with
            disillusionment, with the undoing of our naivete, especially
            regarding what we take ourselves to know about the meaning of what
            we say. Philosophy will often find less than we thought was there,
            perhaps nothing at all, in what we say about the
            "external" world, or in our judgments of value, or in
            our ordinary psychological talk. The work of criticism, on the
            other hand, frequently disillusions by finding disturbingly more in
            what is said than we precritically thought was there. In our
            relation to the meaningfulness of what we say, there is a
            disillusionment of plentitude as well as of emptiness. And no doubt
            what is "less" for one discipline may be
            "more" of what someone else is looking for.
            In recent years, metaphor has attracted more than its share of both
            philosophical and critical attention, including philosophical
            denials of the obvious, as well as critical challenges to the
            obviousness of the ways we talk about metaphor. In this paper I
            discuss a problem of each sort and suggest a complex of relations
            between them. The particular denial of the obvious that I'm
            interested in is the claim recently made by Donald Davidson that
            "a metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal
            meaning (nor does its maker say anything, in using the metaphor,
            beyond the literal)," nor is it even correct to speak of
            metaphor as a form of communication.1 There's disillusionment
            with a vengeance; and even if not strictly believable, it is still
            not without its therapeutic value, as we shall see.
             
            1. Donald Davidson, "What Metaphors Mean," in On
            Metaphor,ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), p. 30; hereafter
            abbreviated "WMM." Davidson's view has found
            supporters among both philosophers and literary theorists. It is,
            for example, important to the early argument of Richard
            Rorty's recent book. See his Contingency, Irony, and
            Solidarity(Cambridge, 1989), p. 18.
             
            Richard Moran is an assistant professor of philosophy at Princeton
            University. He is currently working on a book on subjectivity and
            contemporary concepts of personhood.
Michael Ragussis
         Representation, Conversion, and Literary Form: "Harrington" and the
            Novel of Jewish Identity
         It was [Maria] Edgeworth's deeply personal motive in writing
            Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality
            that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a
            reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to
            recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and
            perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able
            both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future
            writers the way to move beyond it. In short, she boldly turned her
            personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a
            disorder in "the imaginations of the good people of
            England,"4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded
            a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials
            that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the
            powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up
            in subsequent novels (including Ivanhoe, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel
            Deronda, and Ulysses): the tradition I am designating "the
            novel of Jewish Identity" attempts to articulate,
            investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice'sfunction as
            the English master text for representing "the Jew."
             
            Maria Edgeworth, Harrington,vol. 9 of Tales and Novels (New York,
            1967), p. 148; hereafter cited by page number.
             
            Michael Ragussis,professor of English at Georgetown University, is
            the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic
            Tradition (1978) and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction
            (1986). He is currently working on a book-length study entitled
            "Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British
            Fiction."
Margaret Olin
         Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art
         Some recent artists and critics have taken it upon themselves to
            demystify the notion of stylistic unity. Their task has included
            the historical reconception of a few "modernist"
            artists along "postmodern" lines, usually as precursors
            of current semiotic strategies.11 These artists may have used a set
            of incompatible styles to expose the artificiality of competing
            stylistic conventions, or even to challenge the myth that
            celebrates the authenticity of artistic expressiveness. Pablo
            Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, otherwise very different artists, have
            both been seen as having "deconstructed" the concept of
            authenticity by problematizing basic means of artistic reference.12
            But the desire to challenge conventions must not be misconstrued as
            an enduring element of an iconoclastic artist's personality.
            Otherwise, the characterization is merely an updated version of the
            traditional argument for authorial unity.
             
            11. The terms "modern" and "postmodern" are
            used in a variety of ways in contemporary criticism. Here,
            "modern" refers to nineteenth- and twentieth-century
            artists who embrace the notion of originality, and
            "postmodern" to those who would attack the notion by
            exposing the conventionality at its center. Although some critics
            who profess "modernism" do not mention
            "originality" by name, most subscribe to it in some
            form, often with the originality and self-sufficiency of the artist
            transposed to that of the work. This is especially true of the
            criticism of Clement Greenburg and Michael Fried.
            12. Rosalind Krauss rightly uses the semiotic complications of
            Picasso's art to object to autobiographical interpretations
            of his work. In the course of the argument, she refers to
            Picasso's semiotics as part of the "proto-
            history" of postmodernist art. See Krauss, "In the Name
            of Picasso," The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
            Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 38-39. Arguments for
            Duchamp's protopostmodernism are much more common. For one
            example, see Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," The
            Originality of the Avant-Garde,pp. 196-209.
             
            Margaret Olin is an assistant professor in the department of art
            history and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of
            Chicago. She is presently writing a book on the theories of Alois
            Riegl.
Daniel Cottom
         Purity
         Once an artist imagined how he would look if he plucked out an
            offending eye. He painted a self-portrait in which the orbit on the
            right side of his face was gaping, dolorous. Seven years passed,
            and then there came a day when the artist tried to break up a fight
            among his friends. In the ensuing melee he lost his left
            eye the one he must have painted out all those years before,
            when working on the self-portrait, if he based his image on the
            sight of himself in a mirror. Mirrors, of course, reverse the
            images before them.
            If we could forget niggling qualifications, epistemological hedges,
            all the huffing and puffing of the sense of responsibility that
            distinguishes intellectuals from assassins, then this story might
            be frightening, uncanny. As it is, I suspect most of my readers
            would find it terrible only in the derogatory sense. Although it
            has a certain primitive simplicity, it seems facile, as if it might
            have served for one of the weaker episodes in Walter Scott's
            Waverley novels or Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone."
            Even if it were presented by a master of simple plots, I can
            imagine it succeeding only as an occasion for metaphysical
            conjectures, glistening thorns and blossoms of irony, and the like.
            (Play around with the comparison to Picture of Dorian Gray,sure,
            and throw in a reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann, do a turn on Lewis
            Carroll, or tell us one more time about the sly ruses of
            representation, if you must none of this will make the story
            moving.) And even if I were to say that this is a true story, that
            Victor Brauner painted this Autoportraitin 1931 and suffered this
            injury in 1938, it seems unlikely that it would be more affecting.
            How could such a corny plot raise a shiver from anyone past the age
            of reason? If this story is true, so much the worse for truth. It
            ought to know better than to seek us out with such shopworn
            devices.
             
            Daniel Cottom is a professor in the English department at the
            University of Florida. His most recent book is Text and Culture:
            The Politics of Interpretation (1989). He is currently completing a
            book on spiritualism and surrealism.
