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Saul Bellow
         A World Too Much with Us
         Wordsworth in 1807 warned that the world was too much with us, that
            getting and spending we laid waste our powers, that we were giving
            our hearts away, and that we saw less and less in the external
            world, in nature, that the heart could respond to.
             
            In our modern jargon we call this "alienation." That was the
            word by which Marx described the condition of the common man under
            Capitalism, alienated in his work. But for Marx, as Harold
            Rosenberg has pointed out,
             
            it is the factory worker, the businessman, the professional who is
            alienated in his work through being hurled into the fetish-world of
            the market. The artist is the only figure in this society who is
            able not to be alienated, because he works directly with the
            materials of his own experience and transforms them. Marx therefore
            conceives the artist as the model man of the future [...]
             
            Thus Rosenberg. And why do I associate him with Wordsworth? Simply
            because we have now a class of people who cannot bear that the
            world should not be more with them. Incidentally, the amusing title
            of Mr. Rosenberg's essay is "The Herd of Independent
            Minds."
             
            Saul Bellow, recipient of three National Book Awards and of the
            Croix de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, was the first American to
            receive the International Literary Prize. His most recent novel,
            Humboldt's Gift, appeared this fall.
Ricardo Gullón
         On Space in the Novel
         Literary space is that of the text; it is there that it exists, and
            it is there that it has an operative force. What is not in the text
            though is reality itself, irreducible to a written form. One of the
            functions of the narrative "I" is to produce this
            verbal space, to give a context for the motion which constitutes
            the novel; a space that is not a reflection of anything, but,
            rather, an invention of the invention which is the narrator, whose
            perceptions (transferred to images) engender it. Manuscript
            corrections as well as page proofs modified by the author show that
            these perceptions are progressively refined so as to be more
            convincing.
             
            Ricardo Gullón is the author of numerous books and articles on
            Latin American, English, French, Spanish, and American literature,
            art, and critical theory and has lectured extensively in the
            Americas and in Europe. Direcciones del Modernismo; Galdós,
            novelista moderno; and García Marquez,el arte de contarare among
            his more influential books. A critical study of his works, La obra
            crítica de Ricardo Gullón, by Barbara Bockus Aponte was recently
            published in Spain.
             
            See also: "Spatial Form in Literature: Toward a General Theory" by
            W. J. T. Mitchell in Vol. 6, No. 3
Bertrand H. Bronson
         Traditional Ballads Musically Considered
         A folk tune is brief enough to be readily grasped and remembered as
            a whole; it has an inner unity that makes it shapely to the ear and
            mind. As a temporal event, or succession of notes, it consists of a
            little tour through a sonic landscape; so that as we follow the
            course we recognize its topography; the setting forth, the approach
            to a turning point, a moment of heightened interest, a pause of
            retrospection or anticipation, a homecoming. It falls naturally
            into related, self-defining stages of its whole extent, revealing
            balance, contrast, and decision. The balance normally relies on
            approximately the same number of stresses in corresponding phrases;
            the contrast (also an aspect of balance) usually on tonal sequence
            and management; the decision appears in cadential statement, and
            held, or repeating, notes, like signposts at an intersection or
            junction. Because the tune is seized as a whole, and because
            several parts have these mutual references, we gain already the
            suggestion of stanzas of a certain pattern and identical length.
            Since the phrasal cadences get their weight and meaning from their
            relative emphasis and relation to the tonic, they inherently prompt
            corresponding verbal emphases of rhyme or pause. By their
            perceptible division or separation they exert, moreover, a pressure
            on the verbal partner, so that the total syntactical and rhetorical
            structure is palpably affected, and restricted, by their influence.
             
            Bertrand H. Bronson is the author of such influential works as
            Joseph Ritson: Scholar-at-Arms, Johnson Agonistes and Other Essays,
            In Search of Chaucer, and Facets of the Enlightenment and is the
            editor of the four-volume The Traditional Tunes of the Child
            Ballads. Among other honors, he has received the American Council
            of Learned Sciences Award. "Traditional Ballads Musically
            Considered" will appear in a slightly different version as the
            introduction to Singing Tradition, to be published by Princeton
            University Press.
Thomas Flanagan
         Yeats, Joyce, and the Matter of Ireland
         We are concerned here with two towers. One is a Norman keep in the
            Galway barony of Kiltartan, some twenty miles from the western
            seacoast. The second, one of a chain constructed by the British to
            withstand a Napoleonic invasion, stands facing eastwards towards
            the Irish sea at the village of Sandycove, a few miles south of
            Dublin. Yeats's tower at Ballylee Ballylee Castle as it was
            grandly termed and the Martello tower in which Joyce lived in
            for a few weeks in 1904, the setting upon which Ulysses opens, take
            on central and symbolic roles in the art of each man and enter also
            those shorthands of symbols by which we, in our turn, hold the two
            writers in our imagination.
             
            I propose to consider the very different manner in which each man
            came to accept his identity as an Irish writer. And this in its
            turn involves some consideration of what for convenience we may
            term the "matter of Ireland," the body of oral and written Irish
            literature, and the accumulated symbolic powers of the word
            "Ireland" itself. If I place their two towers, Ballylee and
            Martello, as twin emblems at our entrance way, it will at last
            appear, I trust, that I do so for substantial rather than
            decorative purposes.
             
            Thomas Flanagan, chairman of the Department of English at the
            University of California at Berkeley, is the author of The Irish
            Novelists, 1800-1850 and many studies of contemporary literature.
Elder Olson
         The Poetic Process
         In general, discussions of the poetic process have tended to fall
            into one of three classes. The first of these, generalizing the
            process, analyzes the faculties or the activities supposedly
            involved and arranges these in their logical order, to produce
            distinct stages or periods of the process. The second kind
            describes the working habits of an individual poet in terms of
            characteristic external or internal circumstances or conditions.
            The third kind gives us, in the same terms, the history of the
            composition of a particular poem. To illustrate these in reverse
            order: W. D. Snodgrass' essay The Finding of a Poem tells us how he
            discovered the meaning for him of the elements entering
            into a particular poem; Paul Valéry's essays on his own
            poetry Poésie et pensée abstraite, for
            example generally describe his working habits and his
            experiences while at work; and the following passage gives a
            typical account of the poetic process as a series of logically
            ordered stages: "There is, first, a period of hard thinking, during
            which the mind explores the problems; then a period of relaxation,
            during which the rational processes of the mind are withdrawn from
            this particular problem; then the flash of insight which reveals
            the solution, organizes the symbols, or directs the thinking,
            during which the formula is tested, the work of art shaped and
            developed...Graham Wallas calls the four stages Preparation,
            Incubation, Illumination, and Verification..." [Wilbur L. Schramm,
            "Imaginative Writing," 1941]
             
            Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his
            work. He is the author of, among other works, Penny Arcade, a
            collection of poetry, and of criticism, On Value Judgment in the
            Arts and Other Essays. His contributions to  are
            "On Value Judgments in the Arts" (September 1974), Part 1 of a
            "Conspectus of Poetry" (Autumn 1977), and Part 2 of a "Conspectus
            of Poetry" (Winter 1977).
Annette Kolodny
         Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism"
         A good feminist criticism . . . must first acknowledge that men's
            and women's writing in our culture will inevitably share some
            common ground. Acknowledging that, the feminist critic may then go
            on to explore the ways in which this common ground is differently
            imaged in women's writing and also note the turf which they do not
            share. And, after appreciating the variety and variance of women's
            experience as we have always done with men's we must
            then begin exploring and analyzing the variety of literary devices
            through which different women are finding effective voices. As a
            consequence of this activity, we may even find ourselves better
            able to understand and to encourage women writers' continued
            experiments in language in stylistic devices, genre forms,
            and image making experiments which inevitably expand
            everyone's abilities to know and express themselves.
             
            Annette Kolodny, assistant professor of English at the University
            of New Hampshire, has been awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship for
            the study of women in society. She has written articles on American
            literature and culture and a feminist analysis of American
            pastoral, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History
            in American Life and Letters.
Edward T. Cone
         In Defense of Song: The Contribution of Roger_Sessions
         In a single richly suggestive word, "song," Sessions sums up all
            the factors melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, dynamic,
            articulative that contribute to what I have called musical
            line: "Each one of these various aspects derives its functions from
            the total and indivisible musical flow - the song. . . . [M]usic
            can be genuinely organized only on this integral basis, and . . .
            an attempt to organize its so-called elements as separate factors
            is, at the very best, to pursue abstraction, and, at the worst, to
            confuse genuine order with something which is essentially
            chaotic."1 Analysis, whose functions as a valuable tool for the
            training of composer and performer Sessions has so well explicated
            and demonstrated, is now all too often called on to justify and to
            further this essentially unmusical, or at best nonmusical, pursuit
            of abstraction. Herein lies the explanation for the increasing
            doubt of the general usefulness of the discipline that Sessions has
            lately evidenced.2 For the creation and analysis of art are two
            distinct activities, confused at the artist's peril. ". . .
            [A]nalysis cannot reveal anything whatever except the structural
            aspects of a completed work . . . Discoveries after the fact are
            necessarily verbalized in terms of preexistent contexts; it hears
            forward, as it were, in terms of the contexts.3
             
            ·  1. "Song and Pattern in Music Today," The Score 17 (September
            1956): 77-78.
            ·  2. See, e.g., "Song and Pattern," p. 78, and "To the Editor,"
            Perspectives of New Music 5 (1967): 92-93.
            ·  3. Questions about Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 109-110.
             
            Edward T. Cone, composer and professor of music at Princeton
            University, has written Musical Form and Musical PerformanceandThe
            Composer's Voice, edited Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony, and coedited
            Perspectives on American Composers and Perspectives on Schoenberg
            and Stravinsky. In a slightly different form, this essay was
            delivered as an address at Amherst College on the occasion of a
            music festival honoring Roger Sessions.
Roger Sessions
         Heinrich Schenker's Contribution
         At the basis of Schenker's teaching lies the most important
            possible goal - that of effecting some kind of rapprochementbetween
            musical theory and the actual musical thought of the composer. It
            should be hardly necessary to point out, at this late date, the
            vital necessity of some such rapprochement. The older theory of
            harmony, virtually a compilation and standardization of the purely
            practical teachings of earlier days, consisted in little more than
            a systematic catalog of "chords" and what was a chord but the
            simultaneous sounding of any two or more notes, regardless of their
            syntactical significance? That the harmony books catalogued only
            the simplest of such phenomena does not in the slightest alter the
            fact that fundamentally the conception went no further. While
            distinctions were made between "harmonic" and "non-harmonic" tones,
            and the number of possible chords limited by professional fiat,
            such distinctions and limitations were patently arbitrary and often
            contrary to the true order beneath what was assumed to be merely
            conventional, and therefore sanctified by tradition. There even
            exist harmony books which dogmatically assert the inferiority of
            certain cadence formulas, on the ground that the masters used them
            less frequentlythan others of different structure!
             
            Roger Sessions was an American composer who taught at Smith
            College, Princeton University and the University of California,
            Berkeley. Sessions received two Pulitzer prizes.
Christopher Ricks
         Lies
         . . . I should like to ask some questions about a particular
            obviousness: that lie in English means both to say something false
            while knowing it to be so, and to rest or (expressive of bodily
            posture) to be in a prostrate or recumbent position. A pun, after
            all, is likely to be a compacting or constellating of language and
            literature, of social and cultural circumstance.
             
            There is potency in the pun or the suggestive homophone.
            "Miscegenation" must be a bad thing. Does it not confess that it is
            a mis-something? (All it really confesses, of course, is that it is
            a miscere-something, but the word still carries its infection.)
            Similarly, "What's good for General Motors is good for America"
            presses us to concede the claim made by general (not invidiously
            particular or sectional, and with a touch of "captains of industry"
            authority); a quite other route would have to be taken if the
            language were to press us to concede that "What's good for A.B.
            Dick is good for America." Again, the political energy of a strike
            (and perhaps the credulity as to its effectiveness) profits from
            the crisp energy of the word, a word strike which
            accords to an enterprise which is one of withdrawal, passivity, and
            attrition the associations of something which is on the offensive,
            active, and speedy.
             
            Christopher Ricks, professor of English literature at the
            University of Cambridge, is the author of Milton's Grand Style,
            Tennyson, Poems and Critics, and Keats and Embarrassment. He is
            also editor of the journal Essays in Criticism.
Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen
         Photography, Vision, and Representation
         Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about
            photography something which sets it apart from all other ways
            of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our
            understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts
            of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and
            standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made
            up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact
            been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but
            by laymen. Furthermore, for most of this century the majority of
            critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in
            the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important
            way and require different methods in interpretation precisely
            because photographs and paintings come into being in different
            ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather
            restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they
            are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise
            disagree strongly with each other by people who think that
            photographs are inferior to paintings and people who believe they
            are (in some ways, at least) superior; by people who think that
            photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they
            should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible
            for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe
            that they should at least try.
             
            Joel Snyder teaches criticism and history of photography at the
            University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own
            photographs. His contributions to include
            "Picturing Vision" (Spring 1980) and "Reflexions on Las Meninas:
            Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue.Neil
            Walsh Allen produces educational audio-visual materials and has
            designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and applications
            of photography for the Smithsonian Institution.
Richard Strier
         The Poetics of Surrender: An Exposition and Critique_of_New
            Critical Poetics
         Like the determinist, the New Critic must proceed by assuming what
            he hopes to prove; he assumes the existence of "objective"
            relations between the words of the poem he is studying and then
            attempts to perceive such relations.1 The distinction between
            "objective" that is, in some sense verifiable and
            purely subjective or personal meaning must necessarily be a central
            one for this type of poetics. New Critics are constantly protesting
            that they are not "reading into" works, that the meanings they
            ascribe to the words or images of a literary text are objectively
            there rather than subjectively imposed. Empson declares, speaking
            of a recurrent image in Donne's poetry, "the point is not so much
            what 'connotations' this 'image-term' might have to a self-
            indulgent reader as to what connotation it actually does have in
            its repeated uses by Donne" there is clearly a semantic
            distinction to be made here, for Empson is using the same term,
            "connotation," to describe both what he does and what he does not
            mean.2
             
            ·  1. On this procedure in general, see Nelson Goodman's remark on
            "virtuous circles" in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge,
            Mass., 1953), pp. 67 ff.
            ·  2. "Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition," Kenyon Review 11
            (Autumn 1949): 580; reprinted in Paul Alpers, ed., Elizabethan
            Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism (New York, 1967), pp. 63-77.
            Empson's quotation marks indicate that for the purposes of
            discussion he is adopting the terminology of Rosemond Tuve.
             
            Richard Strier, assistant professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, has written articles on religious poetry and is currently
            completing a book on Herbert and Vaughan.
Rawdon Wilson
         On Character:A Reply to Martin Price
         Price commits the Fallacy (so to call it) of Novelistic
            Presumption. This is clearly evident to his earlier essay ["The
            Other Self"], but it is certainly implicit in "People of the Book."
            He assumes that the novel (whatever that is) possesses a history
            that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be
            discussed independently of the history of literature. In this
            perspective, a specific element of the novel (say, character) will
            seem validly detachable from literary history in general. I think
            that this is an error and that if a theory of character should
            emerge, it will necessarily account for go to the heart
            of all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical,
            naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama,
            or in lyric. "By any inclusive definition of the term, Gerontion
            can be a character; yet he is at once less and more."1 Such a
            statement can be correct only if it masks "less and more than a
            character in a novel."
             
            ·  1. Martin Price, "The Other Self: Thoughts about Character in
            the Novel," in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and
            Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor
            (London, 1968): p. 291.
             
            Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of
            Alberta, has contributed articles and short works of fiction to
            literary journals in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He
            contributed "The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term" to
             in the Summer 1979 issue. Rawdon Wilson responds
            in the present essay to Martin Price's "People of the Book:
            Character in Forster's A Passage to India" (, March
            1974). Martin Price's rejoinder, "The Logic of Intensity: More on
            Character" appears in the Winter 1975 issue of .
