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Jorge Luis Borges
         Walt Whitman: Man and Myth
         In the year 1855, American Literature made two experiments. The
            first, quite a minor one, the blending of finished music with sing-
            song and Red Indian folklore, was undertaken by a considerable poet
            and a fine scholar, Longfellow. The name of it, Hiawatha. I suppose
            it succeeded, as far as the expectations of the writer and of his
            readers went. Nowadays, I suppose it lingers on in the memory of
            childhood and survives him. Now the other is, of course, Leaves of
            Grass. Leaves of Grass is a major experiment. In fact, I think I
            can safely venture to say that Leaves of Grass is one of the most
            important events in the history of literature. If I speak of it as
            an experiment, perhaps you will think that I am implying a
            profanation, a desecration, and a blasphemy, since, when we speak
            of experiments in literature, we generally think of unsuccessful
            ones. For example, when we speak of experimental literature, well,
            we think of works that we do our best to admire and that somehow
            defeat us (for example, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, may I add the
            ninety-odd Cantos of Ezra Pound?) because, after all, the word
            "experiment" is a polite word. Well, in the case of Leaves of Grass
            the experiment succeeded so splendidly that we think it could never
            have failed. Somehow when something goes right - and that hardly
            ever happens in literature - we think it somehow inevitable. We
            think that Leaves of Grass lay there, lay unsuspected there, ready
            for anybody to discover and write it down.
Jorge Luis Borges
         Post-Lecture Discussion of His Own Writing
         You see, I'm not really a thinker. I am a literary man and I have
            done my best to use the literary possibilities of philosophy,
            although I'm not a philosopher myself, except in the sense of being
            very puzzled with the world and with my own life. But when people
            ask me, for example, if I really believe that the cosmic process
            will go on and will repeat itself, I say I have nothing at all to
            do with that. I merely tried to apply the aesthetic possibilities,
            let's say, of the transmigration of souls or of the fourth
            dimension to literature and see what could result from them. But
            really, I would not think of myself as a thinker or a philosopher.
            And I follow no particular school. 
Richard McKeon
         Arts of Intervention and Arts of Memory:Creation and_Criticism
         The arts of poetry and the arts of criticism are uncovered and
            studied in their products, in poems and in judgments. Poetry and
            criticism, however, the making and judging of poems, are processes.
            The study of literature as a product - existing poems and existing
            interpretations and appreciations of poetry - develops a body of
            knowledge which is sometimes called "poetic sciences." The
            recognition and use of poetic and critical processes - producing
            and judging poems which did not previously exist, and uncovering
            and analyzing aspects of existing poems which were not previously
            discerned or appreciated - develop things and values by use of arts
            which are sometimes called "heuristic arts." Knowledge or science
            is used in the processes of deliberate or artful making; art or
            criticism is used in the production of things or knowledge of
            things, natural or artificial. Knowledge is a product of inquiry;
            criticism is a process of judgment; the two are joined - knowledge
            of things and use of knowledge - in critical inquiries or critiques
            of judgment.
             
            Richard McKeon is Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor
            Emeritus of Philosophy and Greek at the University of Chicago; he
            was a member of the U.S. delegations to the first three General
            Conferences of UNESCO and served as U.S. counselor to UNESCO. His
            numerous publications include The Philosophy of Spinoza, Freedom
            and History,and Thought, Action, and Passion;he also has edited The
            Basic Works of Aristotle and coedited the forthcoming critical
            edition of Abailard'sSic et Non. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiry include "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and
            Heresy in Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976) and Pride and
            Prejudice: Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot" (Spring 1979).
Angus Fletcher
         Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion
         I shall never forget my astonishment and delight on reading the
            1949 essay, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which
            in turn became the Polemic Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism,
            and my even greater astonishment and delight at the appearance of
            "Towards a Theory of Cultural History" (1953), which eventually
            served as Essay 1 of the Anatomy, when revised and expanded. The
            remarkable thing about these articles was not so much their content
            as their assumption, namely, that criticism could at least try to
            become a science. This assumption was couched in the form of most
            general scientific orientations, in that Frye took literature in
            its own terms,1 to begin with, and then did not prejudicially
            segregate and then destroy the claims of particular "minority
            groups" within the whole commonwealth of literary life. I did not
            know it at the time, but Frye was then, as now, fighting for a mode
            of civil rights. He was then, as now, a libertarian. He first made
            his name writing on Blake  freedom enough, perhaps but
            it has always seemed to me that his center is as much Milton as
            Blake. But then, to know Blake truly is to understand Milton.
             
            ·  1. This assumption is to be distinguished from that of "early"
            Richards, which held that a science for literary studies had to
            come at literature from the outside, with chiefly psychological
            instruments. Richards' career has been the most complex critical
            "life" in our century, I believe, and it should be observed that he
            has held, and abandoned, more than one assumptive high ground
            during the course of his long and magnificent involvement with
            poetry.
             
            Angus Fletcher's numerous writings include Allegory: The Thought of
            a Symbolic Mode, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser, The
            Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's Comus, The Stranger
            God: A Theoretical Study of the Myth of Dionysus,and Thresholds: A
            Critical Approach to the English Renaissance. Northrop Frye's
            response, "Expanding Eyes" appears in the Winter 1975 issue.
George Kubler
         History or Anthropology of Art?
         In anthropology, works of art are used as sources of information
            rather than as expressive realities in their own right. In
            anthropology the work of art is treated more as a window than as a
            symbol; it is treated as a transparency rather than as a membrane
            having its own properties and qualities.
             
            For instance, it is usually in social science that art "reflects"
            life with more or less distortion. Yet no art can record anything
            it is not actually programmed to register. This programming usually
            concerns very small sectors of all actuality, and it is limited by
            the figural traditions and by the technical resources of the
            artisans....Given my assumptions that art does not "reflect"
            life; nor does it necessarily imitate nature; nor can it be
            explained away by texts or informants given these
            assumptions, we are required to limit our notions about how much
            "information" the arts can convey.
             
            George Kubler is Robert Lehman Professor of the History of Art at
            Yale University. His publications include The Shape of Time:
            Remarks on the History of Things, Studies in Classic Maya
            Iconography, Portuguese Plain Architecture, 1526-1706 and The Art
            and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya, and Andean
            Peoples.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
         On the Margins of Discourse
         Asked (or challenged) to define poetry, one is likely to reply with
            a sigh, a shrug, a look of exasperation or even one of contempt,
            indicating not only that the question is oppressive but that anyone
            who asks it must be something of a fool, a pest, or a vulgarian.
            Though these uncongenial reactions may be interpreted as the signs
            of intellectual embarrassment, they are, I think, quite justified.
            For the nature of definition and the particular historical fortunes
            of the term poetry conjoin to this effect: that a definition of the
            term will either be a total chronicle of those fortunes or will
            constitute merely one more episode in them. In other words, a
            definition of poetry is bound to be either inadequate to the job
            or, if adequate, then both unmanageable and uninteresting for any
            other purpose.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smith, professor of English and communications
            at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Poetic Closure:
            A Study of How Poems End, for which she received the Christian
            Gauss and Explicator awards, and the editor of Shakespeare's
            Sonnets.This article will be part of a book, Fictive Discourse. She
            has also contributed "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories"
            (Autumn 1980) to .
Nelson Goodman
         The Status of Style
         Obviously, subject is what is said, style is how. A little less
            obviously, that formula is full of faults. Architecture and
            nonobjective painting and most of music have no subject. Their
            style cannot be a matter of how they say something, for they do not
            literally say anything; they do other things, they mean in other
            ways. Although most literary works say something, they usually do
            other things, too; and some of the ways they do some of these
            things are aspects of style. Moreover, the what of one sort of
            doing may be part of the how of another. Indeed, even where the
            only function in question is saying, we shall have to recognize
            that some notable features of style are features of the matter
            rather than the manner of the saying. In more ways than one,
            subject is involved in style. For this and other reasons, I cannot
            subscribe to the received opinion that style depends upon an
            artist's conscious choice among alternatives. And I think we shall
            also have to recognize that not all differences in ways of writing
            or painting or composing or performing are differences in style.
             
            Nelson Goodman, professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has
            written The Structure of Appearance; Fact, Fiction and Forecast;
            Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols; Problems and
            Projects;and numerous articles. Logic and Art: Essays in Honor of
            Nelson Goodman was published in 1972. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiryinclude "Metaphor as Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted
            Tales; or, Story, Study, and Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The
            Telling and the Told" (Summer 1981).
David Daiches
         What Was the Modern Novel?
         In The Novel and the Modern World I tried to explain the three
            factors that account for the special characteristics of the modern
            novel the breakdown in community of belief about what was
            significant in experience, new notions of time, new notions of
            consciousness with reference with changes to the social and
            economic fabric of society, for I was writing in the heyday of
            "social" thinking about literature that affected so
            many of us in the late 1930s. But I soon came to feel that this
            explanation was too slapdash and that a much subtler kind of
            relationship existed between literature and society than the one I
            tried to present in 1938. That is why in the new addition of the
            book I substituted for some of the larger generalisations about
            society a closer reading of aspects of individual novels. But I
            have never given up my belief that there is a profound relationship
            between literature and society and that what might be called the
            heroic period of experiment and innovation of the novel on both
            sides of the Atlantic reveals something of that relationship. And
            in the years that followed the original publication of the book I
            have found no reason to abandon my general theory, but have applied
            it, with more subtlety (I hope), to a wider range of writers.
             
            David Daiches, professor of English at the University of Sussex, is
            the author of numerous books and articles. Among them, New Literary
            Values, The Novel and the Modern World, Virginia Woolf, and
            Literary Essays were pioneering studies in modern literature. He is
            currently working on Was, a book on the nature of memory and the
            relation of imagination and language.
Karl J. Weintraub
         Autobiography  and Historical Consciousness
         An autobiographic instinct may be as old as Man Writing; but only
            since 1800 has Western Man placed a premium on autobiography. A
            bibliography of all autobiographic writing prior to that time would
            be a small fascicule; a bibliography since 1800 a thick tome. The
            ground behind this simpleminded assertion of a quantitative measure
            cannot be explained away by easy reference to the mass literacy of
            the modern world or the greater ease of publishing. It is as much a
            fact of cultural conditions as is the significant relation of
            rhetoric to the intense public mindedness of classical men, the
            relative insignificance of tragedy in a thoroughly Christianized
            world view, the disappearance of epic from a nonaristocratic world,
            or the powerful assertion of the novel in an age of burghers. The
            usage of the term "autobiography" itself is suggestive, although
            this mode of historical explanation is always defective in the
            sense that such older terms as "hypomnemata," "commentarii,"
            "vita," "confessions," or "memoirs" may well have covered the
            functions subsequently encapsulated in a newly fashionable term. In
            German the term makes its appearance shortly before 1800; the
            Oxford English Dictionary attributes first English usage to Southey
            in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809.
             
            Karl J. Weintraub, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and
            dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of
            Chicago, is the author of Visions of Culture and numerous articles.
            His introduction to a new edition of Goethe's Autobiography
            (Chicago, 1974) will prove of special interest to our readers.
Paul K. Alkon
         Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B._Toklas
         Past, present, and future are reversed in the reader's encounter
            with the illustrations selected by Gertrude Stein for her
            Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.1 After the table of contents
            there is a table of illustrations that encourages everyone to look
            at the pictures before they begin reading. During that initial
            examination, the illustrations forecast what is to be discovered in
            the text. Expectations are aroused by photographs showing Gertrude
            Stein in front of the atelier door, rooms hung with paintings,
            Gertrude and Alice in front of Saint Mark's Cathedral, and both
            with a car in front of Joffre's birthplace. It is
            natural although, as it turns out, not altogether
            correct to assume that the accumulation of paintings will be
            explained, that the life lived within the rooms will be fully
            depicted, and that conventional narrative explanation will be
            provided to account for the presence of Gertrude and Alice together
            in such disparate settings as Venice and the French marshal's home.
             
            ·  1. For useful comments on several pictures as well as evidence
            that "even the book's sixteen photographs were carefully placed in
            the first edition," see Richard Bridgman, Gertrude Stein in Pieces
            (New York, 1970), p. 219.
             
            Paul K. Alkon, professor of English at the University of Minnesota,
            is author of Samuel Johnson and Moral Discipline. Among his recent
            articles are "Boswellian Time" and "The Historical Development of
            the Concept of Time." He is writing a book about time in Defoe's
            fiction.
             
            See also: "The Mind, The Body, and Gertrude Stein" by Catharine R.
            Stimpson in Vol. 3, No. 3; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and
            the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3
Stanley E. Fish
         Facts and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader
         Ralph Rader's model of literary activity is built up (or rather
            down) from a theory of intention. A literary work, he believes,
            embodies a "cognitive act,"1 an act variously characterized as a
            "positive constructive intention" (Fact, p. 253), "an overall
            creative intention" (Conception, p.88). To read a literary work is
            to perform an answering "act of cognition" (Fact, p. 250), which is
            in effect the comprehension of this comprehensive intention, the
            assigning to the work of a "single coherent meaning" (Concept, p.
            86). Both acts the embodying and the assigning  are
            one-time, single-shot performances. They are "ends" in two senses;
            the overall intention is the end to which everything in the work
            must be contributory, and its comprehension is something the reader
            does at the end (of a sentence, paragraph, poem, etc.).
             
            Rader offers this model as if it were descriptive, as if it made
            explicit rules of behavior we unerringly follow, rules which
            underlie our "tacit or intuitive capacity" (Fact, p. 249) of
            intention producing and intention retrieving; but the model is, in
            fact, prescriptive since it quite arbitrarily limits this same
            capacity: authors are limited to no more than one positive
            constructive intention per unit, while readers or interpreters are
            limited to its discovery; whatever cannot be related to that
            discovery or interferes with it will either be declared not to
            exist (Rader will later say that such interferences "are not
            actively registered") or, if its existence cannot be denied, it
            will be labeled a defect, an "unintended and unavoidable negative
            consequence of the artist's positive constructive intention" (Fact,
            p. 253).
             
            ·  1. My argument will engage two of Rader's articles. They are
            "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation,"  1, no.2
            (December 1974): 245-72, and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-
            Century Studies," in New Approaches to Eighteenth-Century
            Literature: Selected Papers from the English Institute (New York,
            1974), pp. 79-115. In what follows they will be referred to as Fact
            and Concept along with the appropriate page number.
             
            Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at John Hopkins University,
            responds in this essay to Ralph W. Rader's "Fact, Theory, and
            Literary Explanation" (, December 1974). Professor
            Fish is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The
            Reader in Paradise Lost,and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The
            Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other
            contributions to  include "Interpreting the
            Variorum" (Spring 1976), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Interpreting
            'Interpreting the Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "Normal Circumstances,
            Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday,
            the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases"
            (Summer 1978), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: A Reply to John Reichert; or,
            How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn
            1979), and "One More Time" (Autumn 1980).
Jay Schleusener
         Literary Criticism and the Philosophy of Science: Rader's_"Fact,
            Theory, and Literary Explanation"
         I do not believe that Ralph Rader succeeds in his attempt to borrow
            from the philosophy of science, and I am interested in his essay as
            an example of the difficulties we face when applying theoretical
            studies in another discipline to the theoretical problems of our
            own. My argument is largely negative I mean to show that
            Rader's account of critical explanation is inadequate and in some
            respects inconsistent but even negative arguments have their
            place, and I hope to make a few useful suggestions as a result.
             
            Rader's argument depends on the possibility of recognizing
            unintended consequences when we meet them in a text. It is not
            enough that they exist; we must also be able to say which
            consequences are intended and which are merely the by-products of
            art. If we cannot, then the distinction has no use for practical
            criticism. But the logical structure of Rader's unintended
            consequences is shared by some artistic defects and by some
            critical misapprehensions as well. What should we think when we
            encounter a fact of the text this notion wants
            defining which is inconsistent with our sense of the author's
            purpose but which is a consequence of his means? We might take it
            as an "unintended and unavoidable negative consequence of the
            artist's positive constructive intention,"1 but we might take it
            instead as evidence of a failure in his judgment or as evidence of
            our own failure to understand his purpose in the first place.
             
            ·  1. Ralph Rader, "Fact, Theory, and Literary explanation,"
             1, no.2 (December 1974):253.
             
            Jay Schleusener, assistant professor of English at University of
            Chicago, is author of a book on the rhetoric of Piers Plowman. He
            has contributed "Convention and the Context of Reading" (Summer
            1980) to .
Ralph W. Rader
         Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay
            Schleusener and Stanley Fish
         In replying to Jay Schleusener, I have also answered many of the
            objections put less abstractly, though often more sharply, by
            Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish's assertion that my category of
            unintended negative consequences "will be filled by whatever does
            not accord with what Rader has decreed to be the positive
            constructive intention" (p. 884) is essentially the same charge
            brought by Schleusener and requires no further substantive answer
            than I have already offered here and, for that matter, in my
            original essay. I would point out, however, that in this remark as
            elsewhere Fish loads his statements with inaccurate pejoratives: I
            do not decree but postulate the positive constructive intention and
            test it for explanatory adequacy by deduction open at every point
            to the counterdemonstration of fallacy. (We may constrast this with
            Fish's truly arbitrary procedure of assigning interpretations ad
            hoc to local features as he encounters or wishes to construe them,
            with no interpretation constraining any other.) I would point out
            also that, in making this charge, he operates under different
            explanatory standards from those he adopts elsewhere. The statement
            quoted imputes to my theory as a special defect the fact of its
            supposedly self-fulfilling and nonfalsifiable character, whereas
            later Fish clearly asserts that all interpretations including his
            own are necessarily self-confirming.
             
            Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical
            Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in
            Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The
            Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor
            of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His
            contributions to  include "Fact, Theory, and
            Literary Explanation" (Winter 1974), "The Dramatic Monologue and
            Related Lyric Forms"(Autumn 1976), and "The Literary Theoretical
            Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1980).
