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James S. Ackerman
         Transactions in Architectural Design
         It may seem reasonable, even inevitable, that architectural
            practice should be based on an understanding that architects, like
            lawyers and doctors, should discover their clients' needs and
            accommodate them to the best of their abilities. But current
            discussion within the legal and medical professions of the conflict
            between service to private individuals who can pay, and to the
            public who cannot, suggest an expanded or altered definition of
            professional responsibility. Actually, the conflict between public
            and private interest may be more acute in architecture than in
            other professions: the kind of buildings architects design are
            costly and are made possible only by the wealth of a small segment
            of the population or the state, yet every one raised affects the
            lives of people other than the one who makes the program and pays
            the architect for his services. Furthermore, the decisions of
            architects are embodied in buildings that last for generations,
            even for millennia, so that the overwhelming majority of people in
            our culture live and work in places designed not only for other
            people but for other times and conditions. For this reason, even
            the "private" practice of architecture involves responsibilities to
            a widespread constituency.
             
            James S. Ackerman is the author of The Architecture of Michelango,
            Art and Archaeology, The Cortille del Belvedere, Palladio and
            Palladio's Villas and is professor of fine arts at Harvard
            University. He has contributed "On Judging Art without Absolutes"
            (Spring 1979) to .
Ralph W. Radar
         Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanations
         We are free to get our theories where we will. As Einstein said,
            the emergence of a theory is like an egg laid by a chicken, "auf
            einmal ist es da.1" In practice theories are usually derived as
            improvements on earlier theories, as better tools are refinements
            of earlier, cruder ones; and they are directed explanatorily not at
            the facts of their own construction but at independently
            specifiable facts which, left unexplained by earlier theories, have
            therefore refuted them. A new theory should cogently and directly
            explain all that its predecessors explain and in addition those
            particular facts which they conspicuously do not explain. The ideal
            is to have the simplest possible premises explaining most precisely
            the widest possible range of problematical facts.
             
            ·  1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York,
            1971), p.173 n.
             
            Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical
            Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in
            Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The
            Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor
            of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His
            contributions to  are "Explaining Our Literary
            Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish"
            (June 1975), "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms"
            (Autumn 1976), and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of
            Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1979).
John M. Wallace
         "Examples Are Best Precepts": Readers and Meanings in_Seventeenth-
            Century Poetry
         My title is taken from the frontispiece to Ogilby's translation of
            Aesop (1665); since every Renaissance poet believed the statement
            to be true, let me start with my own example.
             
            John Denham's only play, The Sophy, published in August 1642, is a
            tale about the perils of jealousy. The good prince Mirza, after a
            miraculous victory over the Turks, returns in glory to his father's
            court, but leaves it shortly thereafter. In his absense, Haly, the
            evil courtier, follows a friend's advice to " work on [the king's]
            fears, till fear hath made him cruel"1 and poisons the king's mind
            with jealousy against his son. Mirza returns only to be brutally
            blinded and killed, and the emperor soon dies stricken with
            remorse. Now it happens that Parliament justified all its actions
            in the months preceding the civil war on the grounds of the "fears
            and jealousies" that the king had inspired. Charles was incensed by
            the slogan and claimed angrily that he, if anyone, had the most
            cause for fears and jealousies.2
             
            Denham obviously decided that here was the all-consuming topic
            around which a predominantly royalist drama could be written. He
            followed what I believe was the standard practice - the method that
            Fulke Greville said Sidney used and that Congreve repeated at the
            end of the century when he declared of The Double Dealerthat "I
            design'd the Moral first, and to that Moral I invented the Fable."3
            He found a plot in Thomas Herbert's Travels into Diverse Parts of
            Asiathat recorded some terrible cruelties and catastrophes caused
            by jealousy, and he added the point that the emperor's mind had
            been wrought upon by his counselor. There is no evidence that the
            play was ever acted, but the most casual reader would have said to
            himself, "Yes, history reminds us that states destroy themselves
            through fears and jealousies, and we should abate our own before it
            is too late."
             
            ·  1. Sir John Denham, The Poetical Works, ed. Theodore Howard
            Banks, 2d ed. (Hamden, Conn., 1969), p.245. The references to fear
            and jealousy are so ubiquitous in the play that they need not be
            listed here.
            ·  2. On March 1, 1642, in the angriest of his replies to
            Parliament so far, Charles exclaimed, "You speake of Jealousies and
            Feares: Lay your hands to your hearts, and aske your selves whether
            I may not likewise be disturbed with Feares and Jealousies: And if
            so, I assure you this Message hath nothing lessened them" (An Exact
            Collection of All Remonstrances...[London, 1643], p. 94). Although
            phrases like "distempers and jealousies" had been used earlier,
            Clarendon on two occasions is quite specific that "fears and
            jealousies" were "the new words which served to justify all
            indispositions and to excuse all disorders" in January 1642 (The
            History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn
            Macray [Oxford, 1888]1:493; see also p. 535). Taken with other
            evidence, Clarendon's remarks strongly suggest that The Sophy was
            written after Coopers Hill, and during seven months preceding its
            publication in August 1642.
            ·  3. William Congreve, The Complete Plays, ed. Herbert Davis
            (Chicago, 1967), p. 119. And compare John Donne in Sermons, ed.
            Evelyn M. Simpson are George R. Potter (Berkeley and Los Angeles
            1953-62), 9:274: "All wayes of teaching are Rule and Example: and
            though ordinarily the Rule be first placed, yet the Rule it selfe
            is made of Examples...for, Example in matter of Doctrine, is as
            Assimiliation in matter of Nourishment; The Example makes that that
            is proposed for our learning and farther instruction, like
            something which we knew before, as Assimilation makes that meat,
            which we have received and digested, like those parts which are in
            our bodies before."
            John M. Wallace, author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of
            Andrew Marvell and articles on Milton, Dryden Denham, Traherne, and
            Arnold, is professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Philip Gossett
         Verdi, Ghislanzoni, and Aida: The Uses of Convention
         The existence of extensive written communications between Verdi and
            his librettists should have prompted scholars to prepare editions
            of the correspondence and to analyze its meaning and implications.
            Only rarely can we participate directly in the formative stages of
            an opera, and available material such as the correspondence between
            Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal is invaluable.1
            Obeisance, at least, has been done to Verdi's correspondence.
            Alessandro Luzio calls the letters of Verdi to Antonio Ghislanzoni,
            "versifier" of Aida(we shall return to this formulation in a
            moment), "the most marvelous course in musical aesthetics in
            action." Yet, for no opera do we have available a complete editions
            of the surviving letters between Verdi and a librettist.
             
            ·  1. Willi Schuh, ed., Richard Strauss - Hugo von Hofmannsthal:
            Briedwechsel, 4th ed. (Zurich, 1970). An English edition, made from
            an earlier German edition with many omissions, was published as A
            Working Friendship: The Correspondence between Richard Strauss and
            Hugo von Hofmannsthal, trans. Hans Hammelmann and Ewald Osers (New
            York, 1961).
             
            Philip Gossett is the general editor of the critical edition of the
            works of Rossini and author of numerous articles on Renaissance
            music, Italian opera, Beethoven, and musical theory.
Murray Krieger
         Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality
         I begin by asking an engagingly naive question that a layman would
            have every right to put to us - and often has. Why should we
            interest ourselves seriously in the once-upon-a-time worlds of
            fiction - these unreal stories about unreal individuals? It has
            been a persistent question in the history of criticism - ever since
            Plato called the poet a liar - and it is a question at once obvious
            and embarrassing. It is obvious because, for the apologist for
            imaginative literature, it becomes a prolegomenon to all further
            questions; and it is embarrassing because merely to ask it
            threatens to put literature out of business and, with it, all those
            who treat it as a serious and world-affecting art. Why, then,
            should we interest ourselves seriously in fictions? However
            elementary, it is a question that is more easily asked than
            answered.
             
            Murray Krieger is the author of The Tragic Vision and The Classic
            Vision, which have recently been reprinted in the two-volume
            paperback Visions of Extremity in Modern Literature. He is
            University Professor of English and director of the Program of
            Critical Theory at the University of California at Irvine. "Poetic
            Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of
            Metaphor," another contribution to , appeared in
            the Winter 1974 issue.
             
            See also: "The Dismantling of a Marionette Theater; or, Psychology
            and the Misinterpretation of Literature" by Erich Heller in Vol. 4,
            No. 3
Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann
         Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface
         As a critic, Virginia Woolf has been called a number of disparaging
            names: "impressionist," "belletrist," "raconteur," "amateur." Here
            is one academic talking on the subject: "She will survive, not as a
            critic, but as a literary essayist recording the adventures of a
            soul among congenial masterpieces. . . . The writers who are most
            downright, and masculine, and central in their approach to life -
            Fielding or Balzac - she for the most part left untouched....Her
            own approach was at once more subterranean and aerial, and
            invincibly, almost defiantly, feminine." In other words, Virginia
            Woolf is not a critic; how could she be? She is a woman. From its
            beginning, criticism has been a man's world. This is to say not
            only that males have earned their living as critics but, more
            importantly, that the conventionally accepted ideals of critical
            method are linked with qualities stereotypically allotted to males:
            analysis, judgment, objectivity. Virginia Woolf has had a poor
            reputation as a critic not merely because her sex is female but
            because her method is "feminine." She writes in a way that is said
            to be creative, appreciative, and subjective. We will accept this
            descriptive for the moment but will later enlarge on it, and even
            our provisional acceptance we mean to turn to a compliment.
             
            Barbara Currier Bell has written articles on critical theory and
            modern poetry and has served as a consultant on women's education
            at both Vassar and Hampshire Colleges. She is assistant professor
            of English at Wesleyan University. Carol Ohmann is the author of
            Ford Madox Ford: From Apprentice to Craftsman and several articles
            on English and American fiction. She coedited Female Studies IV:
            Teaching about Women with Elaine Showalter and is chairman of the
            Department of English at Wesleyan University. She has contributed,
            with Richard Ohmann, "Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the
            Rye (Autumn 1976), and "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Universals and the
            Historically Particular" (Summer 1977).
            See also: "The Masculine Mode" by Peter Schwenger in Vol. 5, No. 4;
            "The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief of Love: A Woolfian
            Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs" by Mark Spilka in Vol. 5,
            No. 4
Gerald Mast
         What Isn't Cinema?
         When Andre Bazin's most important essays on film were collected
            together in a single volume and titled What is Cinema?they raised a
            question that Bazin did not answer. Nor did he intend to. Nor has
            it been answered by any of the other theorists who have written
            what now seem to be the major works on film theory and who now seem
            the most influential (and intellectually ambitious) spokesmen for
            the art. Rudolf Arnheim, Andre Bazin, Stanley Cavell, S. M.
            Einstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, Hugo Munsterberg,
            Erwin Panofsky, and Gene Youngblood have failed to define what
            cinema essentially is.1 Unlike Ionesco's comically methodical
            Logician, they have been less than careful about posing the problem
            correctly. As a result they have been less than successful and less
            than precise with a deceptively difficult and complicated issue.
            They have defined some kinds of cinema, they have defined some of
            the qualities unique to those kinds of cinema, they have defined
            the characteristics and devices they find most valuable in some of
            those kinds of cinema, they simply have not defined cinema.
             
            ·  1. Relevant sections of all these theorists can be found in
            Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism:
            Introductory Readings (London and New York, 1974).
             
            Gerald Mast, associate professor of humanities at Richmond College
            of the City University of New York, has written A Short History of
            the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, Filmguide to the
            Rules of the Game, and Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory
            Readings (coedited with Marshall Cohen). This article is part of a
            forthcoming book, What Isn't Cinema? He has also contributed
            "Kracauer's Two Tendencies and the Early History of Film Narrative"
            (Spring 1980) to .
Francisco Ayala
         Ortega y Gasset, Literary Critic
         In the history of literary criticism the name of Ortega y Gasset is
            indispensable, since in this, as well as in all other sectors of
            cultural activity, the influence of his thought has been most
            decisive. He opened paths and established guidelines that remain in
            effect; his vision of the Quijote not only counterbalanced that of
            Unamuno, against which it purposely rebelled, but also, by
            underscoring the resources called into play by Cervantes in
            composing his master work, he has shaped the attitudes of
            subsequent professional and academic criticism; and his analysis of
            the personalities of such important writers as Baroja is as yet
            unsurpassed.
             
            Among his many influential works, Francisco Ayala has written
            Reflexiones sobre la estructura narrativa (criticism) and España, a
            la fecha. (essays). His collected fiction appeared in 1969 under
            the title Obras narrativas completas. At Professor Ayala's request,
            this essay, and Ideas sobre Pío Baroja, by José Ortega y Gasset,
            were translated by Richard Ford.
José Ortega y Gasset
         Thoughts on Pío Baroja
         There are surely some dozens of young Spaniards who, submerged in
            the obscure depths of provincial existence, live in a perpetual and
            tacit irritation with the atmosphere around them. I can almost see
            them, in the corner of some social hall, silent, with embittered
            gaze and hostile mien, withdrawn into themselves like little tigers
            awaiting the moment for their vengeful, predatory leap. That corner
            and that frayed plush divan are like the solitary crag where the
            shipwrecked of monotony, of utter banality, of the abjection and
            emptiness of Spanish life, hope for better times. Not far away,
            playing their card games, making their petty politics, plotting
            their minimal business ventures, are the "life forces" of the
            community, these men who contrive this ominous moment in our
            national life.
             
            To these ungovernable and independent youths, determined not to
            evaporate into the impurity of their ambience, I dedicate this
            essay, whose subject is a free and pure man, a man who wishes to
            serve no one and who would ask nothing from anyone.
             
            José Ortega y Gasset wrote numerous influential works on
            aesthetics, culture, and philosophy, including La deshumanización
            del arte[The dehumanization of art],España invertebrada
            [Invertebrate Spain],and Ideas y creencias [Ideas and beliefs].
            This essay, which appeared in 1916 in El espectador, is the
            author's most extensive treatment of the novelist Pío Baroja. This
            translation, the first in English, is by Richard Ford.
Denis Donoghue
         A Reply to Frank Kermode
         It is common knowledge that Frank Kermode is engaged in a major
            study of fiction and the theory of fiction. I assume that "Novels:
            Recognition and Deception" in the first number of 
            is part of that adventure, and that it should be read in
            association with other essays on cognate themes which he has
            published in the last two or three years. This may account for my
            impression that the  essay is not independently
            convincing. There are splendid things in the essay, perceptions so
            definitively phrased that I cannot promise not to steal them. My
            copy of the journal is heavily marked on Kermode's pages,
            invariably on passages I dearly wish I had had the wit to write,
            notably his remark of certain fictions by Henry James that "they
            create gaps that cannot be closed, only gloried in; they solicit
            mutually contradictory types of attention and close only on a
            problem of closure." But these perceptions are like indelible
            events in the diction of a poem which, as a whole, does not seem to
            cohere.
             
            Denis Donoghue is professor of Modern English and American
            literature at University College, Dublin. His recent books include
            The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature, Emily
            Dickinson, Jonathan Swift: A Critical Introduction, William Butler
            Yeats, and Thieves of Fire.
David H. Richter
         Pandora's Box Revisited: A Review Article
         The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was
            that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics
            against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s,
            like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop
            Frye's Anatomy of Criticism also ostensibly based upon
            Aristotle's example won the concept of genre broader support.
            And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by,
            genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth
            historical studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional
            genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic,"
            ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize
            the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the
            philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond
            genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled
            Genreentirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism
            employing the concept.
             
            David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End:
            Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on
            Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens
            College of the City University of New York.
