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Northrop Frye
         Expanding Eyes
         This article grew out of a profound disinclination to make the kind
            of comment that I was invited to make on Angus Fletcher's article
            in a previous issue [June 1975]. I felt that such a writer as Mr.
            Fletcher, who clearly understands me, and, more important, himself,
            ought to be allowed the last word on both subjects. Besides that, I
            have a rooted dislike of the "position paper" genre. In all arts,
            adhering to a school and issuing group manifestoes and statements
            of common aims is a sign of youthfulness, and to some degree of
            immaturity; as a painter or writer or other creative person grows
            older and acquires more authority, he tends to withdraw from all
            such organizations and become simply himself. Others in the same
            field become friends or colleagues rather than allies. I see no
            reason why that should not be the normal tendency in criticism and
            scholarship also. About twenty years ago I was asked, in a hotel
            lobby during an MLA conference, "What is your position relative to
            Kenneth Burke?" I forgot what I mumbled, but my real answer was,
            first, that I hadn't the least idea and, second, that anyone who
            could really answer such a question would have to be a third
            person, neither Burke nor Frye.
             
            Northrop Frye's contribution to contemporary thought has been
            discussed by prominent critics in Northup Frye in Modern Criticism:
            Selected Papers from the English Institute(1966). The most
            comprehensive bibliography of his publications and of commentaries
            on them has been compiled by Robert D. Denham in Northup Frye: An
            Enumerative Bibliography (1974). Angus Fletcher's interpretation of
            Professor Frye's works, "The Critical Passion," appeared in the
            June 1975 issue of .
Harold Rosenberg
         Metaphysical Feelings in Modern Art
         The aesthetic is present everywhere in the street, in
            department stores, movie houses, mountainsides, as in the art
            gallery, the cathedral, the sacred grove. By universalizing the
            concept of the aesthetic, modern art has destroyed the barrier that
            once marked off Beauty and the Sublime as separate realms of being.
            In the eyes of modern art and modernist aesthetics, anything can
            legitimately appeal to taste. President Eisenhower, complaining
            about modern art, said that he had been brought up to believe that
            art was intended to carry one away from the dangers and
            unpleasantness of everyday life but that the new paintings
            (Abstract Expressionist) reminded him of traffic accidents. A
            recent statement by Francis Bacon, the celebrated British painter,
            also mentions traffic accidents. Bacon agrees with Ike that this
            type of event is not excluded by modern art. But Bacon finds
            traffic accidents to be a source of beauty. "If you see somebody
            lying on the pavement with the blood streaming from him," he
            explains in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Metropolitan
            Museum in spring 1975, "that is in itself the color of the
            blood against the pavement very invigorating . . .
            exhilarating. . . . In all the motor accidents I've seen, people
            strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange
            beauty."
             
            Harold Rosenberg is a professor, poet and art critic for the New
            Yorker. Among his influential works are The Tradition of the New,
            The Anxious Object, Artworks and Packages, Act and Actor, The De-
            Definition of Art, Discovering the Present, and Art on the Edge.
             
Harold Bloom
         Poetry, Revisionism, Repression
         The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will
            that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all
            prior texts as openings for its own totalizing and unique
            interpretations. Strong poets present themselves as looking for
            truth in the world, searching in reality and in tradition, but such
            a stance, as Nietzsche said, remains under the mastery of desire,
            of instinctual drives. So, in effect, the strong poet wants
            pleasure and not truth; he wants what Nietzsche named as "the
            belief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief." No
            strong poet can admit that Nietzsche was accurate in this insight,
            and no critic need fear that any strong poet will accept and so be
            hurt by demystification. The concern of this book, as of my earlier
            studies in poetic misprision, is only with strong poets, which in
            this series of chapters is exemplified by the major sequence of
            High Romantic British and American poets: Blake, Wordsworth,
            Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and
            Stevens, but also throughout by two of the strongest poets in the
            European Romantic tradition: Nietzsche and Freud. By "poet" I
            therefore do not mean only verse-writer, as the instance of Emerson
            also should make clear.
             
            Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University. This article is the first chapter of his new book,
            Poetry and Repression, to be published by the Yale University
            Press. The book completes a tetralogy, of which the earlier volumes
            are The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Kabbalah and
            Criticism.
             
            See also: "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of
            Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3; "The
            Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm"
            by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1
Bruce Morrissette
         Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film
         This essay does not aim to investigate film-novel relationships per
            se, although the fact that the two genres now share certain
            generative procedures may be further evidence that fiction in print
            and on film lie to a great extent in a unified field not only of
            diegesis but also of structure.
             
            A diachronic or historical approach to the theory of fictional
            generators would show that, with the shifts which have occurred on
            present-day aesthetic thought, much of what once was considered to
            be a static analysis of retrospective rules or established forms
            could now be regarded as the disguised beginning of generative
            theory. Aristotle's seemingly static doctrines of dramatic
            structure, involving such notions as peripeteia, discovery, or
            unity of action, to the extent that dramatists had consciously or
            unconsciously followed such doctrines, obviously served the
            production of their works, as well as their later analysis. In
            fact, any sort of artistic intentionality constitutes a kind of
            "generator," as does the deliberate adherence to outward forms as
            rhyme schemes, stanzas, cantos, or chapters. As we shall see, it is
            not always easy to distinguish between generative formulas and
            self-imposed forms or limits, such as the sonnet with its fourteen
            lines, its quatrains, and its tercets. Although the most advanced
            practitioners of generative theory, like Jean Ricardou, seem to
            view their work as a radical break with the past and the discovery
            of an entirely new domain of fiction, literary history would
            provide innumerable examples of precedents, from antiquity through
            the Grands Rhétoriqueurs, the Gongorists and Baroque poets, and
            many subsequent groups of writers down to and including the pre-
            modern and modern periods.
             
            Bruce Morrissette has published widely on French fiction of the
            classical period, Rimbaud and the Symbolist movement, the Nouveau
            Roman and Robbe-Grillet, and on contemporary film. He is the Sunny
            Distinguished Service Professor and Chairman of Romance Languages
            and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He translated Alain
            Robbe-Grillet's "ARTISTS ON ART: Order and Disorder in Film and
            Fiction" for the Autumn 1977 issue of .
             
Berel Lang
         Space, Time, and Philosophical Style
         It is a continuing irony that in an age of philosophical self-
            consciousness philosophers have been largely indifferent to
            questions about their own means of expression. It is as though they
            have tacitly established a distinction between form and matter, and
            had also asserted an order of priority between them: the "matter"
            was what they would deal with the form of its expression
            being an accidental feature of the acts of conception and
            communication. To be sure, there is a method, or at least a dogma,
            behind this inclination. If one assumed that philosophical
            discourse cloaks the outline of a natural propositional logic, then
            the mode of discourse would indeed be arbitrarily related to its
            substance; at most, the medium of discourse would reflect an
            aesthetic decision where "aesthetic" is meant to suggest a
            matter of taste, and "taste" in turn, a noncognitive ground.
            However one first put the utterance, it could be translated into a
            proposition of standard form which was either true or false.
             
            Berel Lang, professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado,
            has written Art and Inquiry and numerous scholarly articles, edited
            the forthcoming Philosophical Style: An Anthology about the Writing
            and Reading of Philosophy, and coedited Marxism and Art: Writings
            in Aesthetics and Criticism. He has contributed "Style as
            Instrument, Style as Person" (Summer 1978) to . The
            present article stems from his current work on philosophical and
            literary style.
             
Arthur Heiserman
         Aphrodisian Chastity
         It seems that a Greek romance named Chaereas and Callirhoe if
            it was in fact written about A.D. 50 might be the oldest
            extant romantic novel.1 Chaucer's Troilus, Chretien's Erec,
            Apuleius' Metamorphoses, and for all l know Homer's Odyssey have
            already blushed under this dubious accolade; and I do not mean to
            celebrate an old Greek book by thrusting an English genre-label
            upon it. But nothing quite like Callirhoe survives from an earlier
            period of western literature; and following our inclination to
            comprehend such a phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories
            we would call it a Greek romance because it is written in Greek, a
            novel because it is an extensive prose fiction of ordinary moral
            life that conforms to a recognizable canon of realism, and a
            romance because its admirable protagonists suffer the most serious
            threats to their lives and values but survive them all. Its author,
            a certain Chariton of Aphrodisia, a small city in the province of
            Caria in Asia Minor, places his book about Callirhoe in the
            Hellenistic genre of the erotikon pathematon a story of
            erotic suffering. This is an accurate label and perhaps a bold one,
            as erotic pathemata were thought to be more suitable for epic or
            elegiac verse than for prose. In any case, I am not here concerned
            to argue that Callirhoe is the precursor of such entities as the
            novel, nor to speculate about its cultural origins, nor to point
            out its obvious likenesses to later narratives. I do want to
            discuss the habits of narrative art Chariton exploits in his book,
            and to explore a few of the ways he makes erotic suffering
            pleasurable for his readers us, and the leisured, literate
            members (perhaps mostly ladies) of the bourgeois households that
            had for centuries flourished in the great Hellenic cities of the
            eastern Mediterranean basin.
             
            ·  1. I accept the date accepted by Ben E. Perry, The Ancient
            Romances (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), p. 350. The standard edition is
            W.E. Blake's (Oxford Classical Texts [Oxford, 1938]), whose
            translation (Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe [Ann Arbor, Mich.,
            1939]) I use throughout. Chariton's work did not see print until
            1750, so it did not enjoy the vogue enjoyed by other Greek romances
            (Heliodorus' Aethiopika, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, etc.) in the
            Renaissance.
             
            Arthur Heiserman is the author of several articles, short stories,
            and Skelton and Satire. 'Aphrodisian Chastity" will appear as a
            chapter in his forthcoming book, Romance in Antiquity: Essays and
            Discussions about the Beginnings of Prose Fiction in the West.
             
Giulio Carlo Argan
         Ideology and Iconology
         Is it possible to compose a history of images? It is obvious that
            history can be composed only from that which is intrinsically
            historical; history has an order of its own because it interprets
            and clarifies an order which already exists in the facts. But is
            there an order in the birth, multiplication, combination,
            dissolution and re-synthesis of images? Mannerism had discredited
            or demystified form with its pretense of reproducing an order which
            does not exist in reality. But is the world of existence, like the
            world of images, chaos or cosmos?
             
            Erwin Panofsky's1 great merit consists in having understood that,
            in spite of its confused appearance, the world of images is an
            ordered world and that it is possible to do the history of art as
            the history of images. In order to do this, he had to begin, as
            indeed he did, with the demonstration that classical art, in spite
            of the deep-rooted theoretical certitude, is also an art of the
            image; its forms are nothing if not images to which one tries to
            attribute the consistency of concepts, with the sole result of the
            demonstrating that even concepts are images and that the intellect
            is still another sector or segment of the image.
             
            ·  1. See, e.g., Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Art: Papers
            in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1957; Harmondsworth,
            1970); Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
            Renaissance (New York, 1939, 1962, 1967); Problems in Titian,
            Mostly Iconographic (New York, 1969); Idea: Ein Beitrag zur
            Begriffsgeshicte der ålteren Kunsttheorie (Leipzig and Berlin,
            1924) [Idea: a concept in art theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake
            (Columbia, S.C., 1968)].
             
            Giulio Carlo Argan, who has seriously influenced the course of art
            history and criticism in postwar Italy, is professor of modern
            (post-medieval) art at the University of Rome. He has written on
            Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Borromini, Brunelleschi, and Gropius and
            three volumes of critical essays on modern art. His Skira volume on
            Baroque art, Europe of the Capitals, is his only major work
            published in English. "Ideology and Iconology" originally appeared
            in Italian in the journal Storia dell'arte, which he edits, and in
            Psicon. Rebecca West, translator of this article and assistant
            professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of
            Chicago, presently is collaborating on a translation of Dario Fo's
            theater. She has translated "Narrative Structures and Literary
            History" by Cesare Segre, for the Winter 1976 issue of Critical
            Inquiry.
Robert L. Carringer
         Citizen Kane, The Great Gatsby, and Some Conventions_of_American
            Narrative
         It is widely thought that what finally characterizes American
            literary narratives is a preoccupation with Americanness. If the
            "great theme" of European fiction has been "man's life in society,"
            Walter Allen writes in The Modern Novel, "the great theme of
            American fiction has been the exploration of what it means to be an
            American." The best American film narratives also seem to bear out
            this proposition, especially those of the great American naturals
            like Griffith and Ford and Hawks, and most especially Orson Welles'
            Citizen Kane (1941), regarded by many as the greatest American
            film. Welles' film belongs to that category of narratives which
            take a prominent figure from contemporary American life (here
            William Randolph Hearst) and use him to stand for what are
            conceived to be representative traits of the collective American
            character. Understandably, then, there are many general
            resemblances in the film to other well-known stories of American
            entrepreneurs, magnates, and tycoons. Long before the flourishing
            of tycoon biographies in the American sound film, well before F.
            Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis or Theodore Dreiser, before even
            Henry James, certain conventions and associations had become well
            established in stories of this type. The up-and-coming young
            American was shrewd and practical, an image of compulsive energy, a
            man with his eye always on the future. His Americanness also
            consisted of such traits as enterprise, indomitable idealism, a
            certain naturalness and openness to experience, and a relentless
            will to succeed. His geographical origin could be made to carry
            moral force, and he or another character who equated American
            commercial noblesse oblige with universal morality could be a
            useful thematic touchstone.
             
            Robert L. Carringer is an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He teaches and writes
            on film, American literature, and interdisciplinary approaches to
            literature. This study is the first in a series of essays in
            progress on American films and American narrative tradition. He has
            also contributed "The Scripts of Citizen Kane" (Winter 1978) to
            .
             
Wayne C. Booth
         Irony and Pity Once Again: Thaïs Revisited
         Mad about it they still were, in 1926, when Hemingway's splendid
            spoofing appeared in The Sun Also Rises. But it was not everybody
            who had been responsible. It was mainly Anatole France, abetted by
            his almost unanimously enthusiastic critics. And of all his works,
            the one that must have seemed to fit the formula best was Thaïs,
            already a quarter of a century old when Jake Barnes learned of
            irony and pity.
             
            It is not a bad formula for the effect of Thaïs, as formulas go. It
            is at least as useful and at least as misleading as
            "pity and fear" for tragedy. There is, however, a surprising
            difference. If I tell you the story of any classical tragedy, even
            in very brief form, you will know at once why someone might talk
            about that story using the terms "pity" and "fear." But if I tell
            you of the priest who lost his soul converting the prostitute, you
            will not be able to predict any determinate reaction except
            perhaps that the story will have for everyone a slight bit of
            ironic wonder at the grand reversal. In other words, a teller will
            be able to turn such material almost any direction he chooses,
            making it into a tragedy, a comedy, a farce, a celebration of God's
            wonder and mystery or a tale playing with pity and irony.
             
            Wayne C. Booth's most recent books are A Rhetoric of Irony and
            Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. He is now completing a
            book on critical warfare and critical pluralism (a revision of his
            Christian Gauss seminars at Princeton University, 1974). A version
            of one chapter from that book, "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic,
            Critic as Pluralist," will appear in the Spring issue of Critical
            Inquiry. Other contributions to  include "Kenneth
            Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "'Preserving the
            Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "Notes
            and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of
            Evaluation" (Autumn 1978), "Ten Literal &lsquo;Theses'"
            (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction:
            A Conversation" (Winter 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T.
            Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).
             
T. H. Adamowski
         "Being Perfect: Lawrence, Sartre, and Women in Love"
         To compare a novel to a work of philosophy is, admittedly, a risky
            exercise in analogy. When the novelist is Lawrence and the
            philosophical text is the ponderous and dialectical Being and
            Nothingness, such a comparison may seem willfully perverse and
            peculiarly open, insofar as it deals with Lawrence's great theme of
            sexuality, to his anathema of "sex in the head." Furthermore,
            modern criticism, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has tended
            to be wary of critical approaches that lean on notions that are not
            derived from literature itself - a tendency that is being
            reinforced these days by the structuralist insistence on the
            "literariness" of the Text. Now, despite its metaphorical statement
            as a form of dramatic "gesture," Sartre's book is very definitely
            not a work of literature.
            T.H. Adamowski, associate professor of English at Erindale College,
            the University of Toronto, has written articles on English,
            American, and French literature. This essay is part of a larger
            study on progress on Lawrence's "sexual poetics."
Martin Price
         Critical Response: "The Logic of Intensity: More on_Character"
         Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" raised a great many questions, and I
            should like to deal with lesser matters before going on to those of
            more consequence. He has found in my work the Fallacy of Novelistic
            Presumption. To commit this unnatural act is to assume "that the
            novel (whatever it is) possesses a history that is independent of
            other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently
            of the history of literature." Let me say at the outset that I am
            not trying to frame a restrictive definition of the novel. Novels
            are whatever most critics agree to call novels, and if I speak of
            "the novel" I can only hope that the phrase will be taken as
            convenient shorthand rather than an attempt to define an essence.
            And of course the novel has a history of its own, just as the state
            of Connecticut has a history even as it remains one of the fifty
            states, just as literature has a history although it is only one of
            the arts or institutions of our culture. Mr. Wilson wants a theory
            of characters that "will necessarily account for - go to the heart
            of - all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical,
            naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama,
            or in lyric." To that I can only reply with E.M. Forster's
            sentence: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall
            be left with nothing."
            In this essay Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of
            English at Yale University, responds to Rawdon Wilson's "On
            Character" (Autumn 1975) which raised objections to Price's "People
            of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India" (March
            1975).
 Lawrence W. Hyman
         Critical Response: "The "New Contextualism" Has Arrived: A_Reply_to
            Edward Wasiolek"
         I agree with much of what is said in this article; and I also will
            quote Roland Barthes, but for a different purpose. But I believe
            that it is a mistake to judge contextualism by its theory rather
            than its practice. If we look carefully at what is actually done in
            contextualist criticism, we will find that the "contradictions in
            its basic premises" which trouble Wasiolek have also allowed it to
            overcome the limitations that a strict construction of "autonomy"
            would impose. We will also find that what really distinguished
            contextualism, what the concept of autonomy leads to in practice,
            is not an impoverishment but a deepening and enrichment of the
            literary experience and, third, that the theoretical developments
            in other critical schools have vindicated at least one cardinal
            principle of contextualism, namely, that the meaning of a literary
            work is inherently ambivalent or indeterminate. By following the
            lead (and I will explain how this indeterminacy differs from
            "plurisignification"), we can, I believe, provide a better
            theoretical base for contextualism, although I am not sure that it
            would be or should be one that "includes the world rather than
            excludes it," as Wasiolek demands it (p.627).
            Lawrence W. Hyman professor of English at Brooklyn College of the
            City University of New York, is the author of a book on Milton's
            poetry,The Quarrel Within, and articles on critical theory. He
            responds in this essay to Edward Wasiolek's "Wanted: A New
            Contextualism" (, March 1975). Hyman has also
            contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Harpsichord Exercises and My Lai
            Massacre" (Summer 1980) to .
Edward Wasiolek
         Critical Response: "Texts are Made and Not Given:_A_Response_in_a
            Critique"
         The issue is not whether we should or should not reduce the facts
            of literature to those of some other order or to make it causally
            dependent on such things as history, religion, or philosophy. These
            are the phantoms of forty years. Nor is the issue whether a
            contextualist can be flexible enough to do other kinds of
            criticism. Empson was a poor contextualist and an atrocious
            Freudian; and if the man was the same, the activites were not. One
            can do both in turns and doing both tells us nothing about the
            flexibility of contextualism. Empson was indefatiable in
            multiplying ambiguities and notoriously indifferent to contexts, a
            fact that is drawing some attention and admiration today from some
            structuralists. Nor is the issue whether or not contextualism has
            been vindicated by other schools of criticism because it held that
            poetic language was ambivalent. The  evidence that is brought forth
            from psychoanalysis to support this point undermines it. If
            Freudianism holds that poetic language is ambivalent - and it does
            - then it does not vindicate the contribution of contextualism,
            since it antedates contextualism by many years. And as a matter of
            fact, poetic ambivalence has been held by many critics and
            aestheticians - Croce is an example - long before New Criticism and
            contextualism. Nor is the issue, finally, wheher or not literature
            defamiliarizes usual or habituated language. I suppose it does, but
            this does not tell us very much. The term was used by the Russian
            Formalists to describe the process by which new literary forms come
            into being as they separate themselves from "conventionalized" or
            "canonized" forms. The Russian ostranenie could be translated as
            "deconventionalizing," just as well as the more usual "making
            strange," and the less usual "defamiliarization" that Mr. Hyman has
            taken from Lemon and Reis. The Formalists quickly abandoned the
            term because it was too vague and general to account for the
            increasingly complex process that was involved in the interchange
            of literary forms. The term was not used to describe the
            relationship of literary language to nonliterary language, as Mr.
            Hyman uses it. This is a New Critical reflex, which tends always to
            see the literary context as something opposed to something outside
            itself. But Mr. Hyman's misuse is also the right use because his
            misunderstanding and misapplication of the term takes us to the
            real issue, one that he has been unwilling or unable to face
            despite all the grace and complaisance of his argument.
