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E. H. Gombrich and Quentin Bell
         Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A_Correspondence
         [E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:]
             
            . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution
            for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned
            teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right
            whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because
            every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly
            tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which
            has invaded our art schools and resulted in the doctrine (which I
            have read in print) that art could not possibly be taught because
            only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is
            creativity (they used to call it originality) it is not possible to
            teach it. Q.E.D. I recently asked my history finalists what
            "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . .
             
            [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:]
             
            .  . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist?
            Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school
            children. With me there was a much better teacher (better in that
            she could interest and control a class and organize things and was
            in fact a very admirable and sensible person). One day she came
            into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of (to
            my mind) the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are
            these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made
            by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to
            explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael
            but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes
            beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the
            sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror.
             
            "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was
            exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I
            had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in
            fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very
            nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self
            expression" was as precious as virginity.
             
            E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor
            of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of
            London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art
            and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic
            Images, The Heritage of Apelles,and In Search of Cultural History.
            He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of
            the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a
            trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American
            Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical
            Society. His contributions to  include "Notes and
            Exchanges" (Summer 1979),"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image
            and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons
            and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" (Spring 1976).
            Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex
            University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human
            Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other
            contributions to  are "The Art Critic and the Art
            Historian" (Spring 1975), "Notes and Exchanges" (Summer 1979), and
            "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'" (Winter 1979).
Wayne C. Booth
         M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as_Pluralist
         When M. H. Abrams published a defense, in 1972, of "theorizing
            about the arts,"1 some of his critics accused him, of falling into
            subjectivism. He had made his case so forcefully against "the
            confrontation model of aesthetic criticism," and so effectively
            argued against "simplified" and "invariable" models of the art work
            and of "the function of criticism," that some readers thought he
            had thrown overboard the very possibility of a rational criticism
            tested by objective criteria.
             
            In his recent reply to these critics,2 Abrams concentrates almost
            entirely on whether his critical pluralism is finally a skeptical
            relativism. He does not even mention his great historical works,
            The Mirror and the Lampand Natural Supernaturalism, and he has
            nothing to say about how his pluralistic theories would be applied
            to the writing of history. But then, surprising as it seems once we
            think about it, neither of the two histories has much about his
            method either.
             
            What is the true achievement of these aggressive raids into our
            past, and how does Abrams see them in relation to other possible
            histories of the same subjects? Knowing in advance that he has
            agreed to reply to my nudging, I should like both to propose that
            everyone has with Abrams' own encouragement understated
            the importance of what he has done and to ask: What kind of
            pluralist is he?
             
            ·  1. "What's the Use of Theorizing about the Arts," In Search of
            Literary Theory, ed. Morton Bloomfield (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), pp. 3-
            54.
             
            ·  2. "A Note on Wittgenstein and Literary Criticism," ELH 41
            (Winter 1974): 541-54.
             
            Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to  include
            "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974), "Irony and Pity
            Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), >"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 'Theses" (Autumn 1978),
            with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A
            Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T.
            Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).
M. H. Abrams
         Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply_to_Wayne
            Booth
         In retrospect, I think I was right to compose Natural
            Supernaturalism (let us, following Booth, focus our discussion on
            this book) by relying on taste, tact, and intuition rather than on
            a controlling method. A book of this kind, which deals with the
            history of human intellection, feeling, and imagination, employs
            special vocabularies, procedures, and modes of demonstration which,
            over many centuries of development, have shown their profitability
            when applied to matters of this sort. I agree with Booth that these
            procedures, when valid, are in a broad sense rational, and subject
            to analysis and some degree of definition. But the rules underlying
            such a discourse are complex, elusive, unsystematic, and subject to
            innovative modification; they manifest themselves in the intuitive
            expertise of the historian; and the specification of these rules
            should not precede, but follow practice. . . . After the fact,
            nevertheless, a book like Natural Supernaturalism is subject to
            close critical inquiry about its methods and rationale. I am
            grateful to Booth for opening up such an inquiry, and for doing so
            in a way that is not only disarming, but seems to me to be the most
            promising of useful results. That is, instead of adopting a
            prosecutorial stance, demanding: "Justify the rationality and
            probative force of what you have done; it looks dammed suspicious
            to me," he has adopted the friendly tactic of saying: "Your book,
            in my experience of it, has yielded discoveries that I want to call
            knowledge, by methods, however deviant from standard rubrics of
            valid reasoning, that it seems irrational to call non-rational.
            Let's set out to clarify what these methods are, and to see what
            grounds we can find for the claim that they provide warranted
            knowledge."
             
            M.H. Abrams' contributions to  are "The
            Deconstructive Angel" (Spring 1977) and "Behaviorism and
            Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of
            Pluralism'" (Autumn 1977).
Stanley E. Fish
         Interpreting the Variorum
         The willows and the hazel copses green
            Shall now no more be seen
            Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.
            [Milton, Lycidas, Ll. 42-44]
             
            It is my thesis that the reader is always making sense (I intend
            "making" to have its literal force), and in the case of these lines
            the sense he makes will involve the assumption (and therefore the
            creation) of a completed assertion after the word "seen," to wit,
            the death of Lycidas has so affected the willows and the hazel
            copses green that, in sympathy, they will wither and die (will no
            more be seen by anyone). In other words at the end of line 43 the
            reader will have hazarded an interpretation, or performed an act of
            perpetual closure, or made a decision as to what is being asserted.
            I do not mean that he has done four things, but that he has done
            one thing the description of which might take any one of four
            forms making sense, interpreting, performing perpetual
            closure, deciding about what is intended. (The importance of this
            point will become clear later.) Whatever he has done (that is,
            however we characterize it) he will undo it in the act of reading
            the next line; for here he discovers that his closure, or making of
            sense, was premature and that he must make a new one in which the
            relationship between man and nature is exactly the reverse of what
            was first assumed. The willows and the hazel copses green will in
            fact be seen, but they will not be seen by Lycidas. It is he who
            will be no more, while they go on as before, fanning their joyous
            leaves to someone else's soft lays (the whole of line 44 is now
            perceived as modifying and removing the absoluteness of "seen").
            Nature is not sympathetic, but indifferent, and the notion of her
            sympathy is one of those "false surmises" that the poem is
            continually encouraging and then disallowing.
             
            Stanley E. Fish, professor of English at Johns Hopkins University,
            is the author of John Skelton's Poetry, Surprised by Sin: The
            Reader inParadise Lost, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The
            Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. His other
            contributions to  include "Facts and Fictions: A
            Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Normal Circumstances, Literal
            Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the
            Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases" (Summer
            1978), "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to Stop Worrying and
            Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and "One More Time"
            (Autumn 1980).
             
            See also: "Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum" by Douglas Bush
            in Vol. 3, No. 1; "Stanley Fish's 'Interpreting the Variorum':
            Advance or Retreat?" by Steven Mailloux in Vol. 3, No. 1;
            "Interpreting 'Interpreting the Variorum'" by Stanley E. Fish in
            Vol. 3, No. 1
Earl Miner
         That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge
         We are much given to supposing that "knowledge" designates a few
            prize classes of of what I am not sure, but matters quite
            distinct from, superior to, others. It seems we are beginning to
            understand that: "Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery,
            recall, problem-solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to
            hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition."1 The imagery of
            Macbeth refers to a hypothetical stage or aspect of cognition, as
            does problem solving using algebra. For that matter, it might be
            argued that "cognition" itself is hypothetical, only a part of
            knowing, only an abstraction of a human activity. But we must have
            terms to make sense, and we can take "cognition" to designate the
            activity that we otherwise designate in specific result as
            knowledge. In such a view, what we know is all "a human being might
            possibly do." That "all" is inexplicable apart from doer-knower,
            from a postulated "real world," and from activities by organs or
            tissue collectively referred to as the brain.
             
            · 1. Ulrich Neisser, Cognitive Psychology (New York, 1967), p. 3.
             
            Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English
            and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His works
            include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the
            Present (of which he is editor and a contributor) and Japanese
            Linked Poetry. He has contributed "On the Genesis and Development
            of Literary Systems, Part 1" (Winter 1978) and "On the Genesis and
            Development of Literary Systems, Part 2" (Spring 1979) to Critical
            Inquiry.
             
Maurice Friedberg
         The U.S. in the U.S.S.R.: American Literature throughout_the_Filter
            of Recent Soviet Publishing and Criticism
         The advent of the post-Stalin "thaw," particularly the period after
            1956, was marked by a spectacular expansion in the publishing of
            translated Western writing and also, on occasion, of editions in
            the original languages: the virtual ban on import of Western books
            was, as of 1975, never relaxed. The more permissive political
            atmosphere favored the publication of a vastly larger variety of
            Western authors and titles and provision for the Soviet public of
            much larger quantities of such books in the country's bookstores
            and libraries. While the improvement was very impressive in itself,
            abundant data attest that it was far from adequate to satisfy
            reader demand.1 Among the beneficiaries, books by American authors
            stood out the more prominently since it was these that were most
            discriminated against during the years immediately preceding.2
            Decades of neglect, to say nothing of politically inspired
            selectivity, resulted in such incongruities as the first Russian
            translation of Melville's Moby Dick in 1961 more than a
            century after the novel's appearance and the first Soviet
            publication of any work by Henry James (who was a friend of
            Turgenev a century earlier!) in 1973. It was not until the 1960's
            that Russians had an opportunity to read Faulkner but then,
            the same was true of Kafka. However unevenly, the range of American
            literature, both old and new, now made available to Soviet readers
            is gradually expanding.
             
            ·  1. The overall problem is discussed in detail in this writer's
            forthcoming book, A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in Post-
            Stalin Russia, 1954-64 (Bloomington, Ind., 1976).
             
            ·  2. For a thorough and illuminating discussion of the fate of
            American literature in the U.S.S.R. from the Revolution until the
            early post-Stalin years, see Deming Brown, Soviet Attitudes toward
            American Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1962). Interesting statistical
            data on the first post-Stalin years may also be found in Melville
            J. Ruggles, "American Books in Soviet Publishing," Slavic Review
            20, n.3 (October 1961): 419-35. A useful, very brief list of
            selected works of American writing published by 1968, though not
            entirely as complete as it purports to be, may be found in M.O.
            Mendel'son, A.N. Nikolyukin, R.M. Samarin, eds., Problemy
            literature S. Sh. A. XX. veka (Moscow: "Nauka," 1970), pp. 391-517.
            Unfortunately, the Soviet bibliography contains no information on
            press runs of the books listed.
             
            Maurice Friedberg, head of the Department of Slavic Languages and
            Literatures at the University of Illinois, is the author of
            numerous essays and articles on Soviet literature. Professor
            Friedberg's most recent book,A Decade of Euphoria: Western
            Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954-1964, will be published this
            year.
James E. Miller, Jr.
         Henry James in Reality
         In working his way through his complex conception of the relation
            of fiction and reality, [Henry] James thus found the unconscious
            moral dimension inextricably embedded within "realism" itself. In
            following the threads of realism (or reality) back to consciousness
            itself, James invariably found there intertwined with its roots
            those aspects and elements that other theorists kept carefully
            separate. By exploring experience to its source, he found
            imagination. By following objective life from "out there" to
            conception, he found individual vision. By following the seeming
            oneness of the passing show back to perception, he found infinite
            variation and multiplicity. By following the uncolored flux and
            flow of events to their embodiment in the fictional medium, he
            found coloration of personality. And by following the "felt life"
            back to the artist's "prime sensibility" (consciousness), James
            found there the "moral sense" and the "enveloping air of the
            artist's humanity" that which gives "the last touch to the
            worth of a work."
             
            James E. Miller, Jr., professor of English at the University of
            Chicago, is the author of A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; Walt
            Whitman; F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique; J.D.
            Salinger; Theory of Fiction: Henry James; and numerous articles on
            American literature and education. He contributed "Catcher In and
            Out of History" to , Spring 1977.
             
Jerome J. McGann
         Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of_Criticism_Once
            Again
         Teachers and critics have much to learn from [Harold] Bloom's work,
            and in this paper I want to try to show what it is we can learn
            from him and how we might go about it. In doing so, I also mean to
            analyze his attack upon formal criticism and to consider the merits
            of that attack. In the end, I propose an assessment of what in my
            view is the crucial weakness of both formal and dialectical
            criticism alike. This will involve an explication of the meaning of
            critical care and an enlargement of our customary understanding of
            critical method and procedure. . . . In The Anxiety of Influence
            Bloom presents theory based frankly upon Freudian models, or what
            Bloom calls Family Romance. Every new poet is caught up in a
            struggle with his forebears, or precursors. Being Freudian
            forebears, they naturally both teach the poet and threaten him as
            teachers. The problem for the poet is to learn from his forebearing
            (or perhaps overbearing) family without losing his integral self.
            If he succeeds he becomes what Bloom calls a "strong poet," and,
            hence, again quite naturally, he lives to present much trouble to
            coming generations, who have their own paths to go.
             
            Jerome McGann, professor of English at John Hopkins University, has
            written books on Byron and Swinburne and is presently working on
            the Oxford English Text edition of Byron's Complete Poetical Works,
            Don Juan in Context, and a collection of poetry, Air Heart Sermons.
             
            See also: "Poetry, Revisionism, Repression" by Harold Boom in Vol.
            2, No. 2; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a
            Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1
