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Josephine Miles
         Values in Language; or, Where Have Goodness,Truth, and_Beauty_Gone?
         As you might guess, the words goodness, truth, and beauty are not
            of heavy poetic value today. Terms of concept may be stressed again
            someday, and maybe soon, but at the moment have gone out of poetry
            in favor of more concreteness, more imagery, more connotative
            suggestion, less effect of the naming and labeling virtues, which
            Ezra Pound and other twentieth-century leaders have told us not to
            use. But actually these terms of abstract concept were lessened in
            major usage in poetry long before the twentieth century. They had
            flourished in a setting of kings and courts. The love poetry, the
            political poetry, the philosophic poetry not only dealt directly
            with truth and goodness but used them constantly for evaluative
            commentary of other subjects. People, as well as moral issues, were
            good; lovers, as well as propositions, were true . . . Love and
            honor, good and true, these were terms of value in which poetry
            worked so strongly that a large proportion of its reference was
            limited to these alone, and so thoroughly that there was not a poet
            in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who did not share in
            this emphasis.
             
            Josephine Miles is a poet, critic, and University Professor of
            English at Berkeley. Her works of criticism include The Vocabulary
            of Poetry,The Continuity of Poetic Language,Eras and Modes in
            English Poetry,Style and Proportion, and Poetry and Change. She is
            also the author of a number of books of poems, from Lines at
            Intersection (1939) to Poems 1930-60, Kinds of Affection (1967),
            and To All Appearances (1975).
Carol and Richard Ohmann
         Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye
         The front page of the [New York] Times on July 16, 1951, serves to
            outline, quickly enough, the situation of the world into which The
            Catcher in the Rye made such a successful and relatively well-
            publicized entrance. The main action of the world, the chief events
            of its days were occurring within a framework of struggle between
            two systems of life, two different ways of organizing human being
            socially, politically, economically. The opposition between East
            and West, between socialist and capitalist, was determining what
            happened in Kaesong, Budapest, Madrid, Teheran, Washington, New
            York. Name-calling the Administration, Republicans threw out the
            term "socialist," and the bid for millions to build schools in the
            five boroughs of New York would finally have to dovetail with
            allocations of taxes for defense.
             
            The review of The Catcher in the Rye in the back pages of the Times
            made no mention of any of this. The kind of reality reported on the
            front page belonged to one world; the new novel was about to be
            assimilated into another, into the world of culture, which was
            split from politics and society. And this separation repeated
            itself in other reviews: typically, they did not mention the
            framework of world history contemporary with the novel; they did
            not try to relate Catcher to that framework even to the extent of
            claiming that there was only a partial relationship or complaining,
            however simplistically, that there was none. Our concern from here
            on will be to try to sketch what reviewers and what academic
            critics after them did see in the novel and what they might have
            seen in it. We are interested in the conceptual frameworks, the
            alternatives to history, they used to respond to and interpret
            Catcher as they passed it on to its millions of lay readers.
             
            Carol Ohmann is currently working on a book about Charlotte Bronte,
            George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. Her previous contribution to
            , "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemic Preface"
            (with Barbara Currier Bell), appeared in the December 1974 issue.
            Richard Ohmann's most recent book is English in America: A Radical
            View of the Profession. Both are professors in the department of
            English at Wesleyan University, and contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE:
            Universals and the Historically Particular" to  in
            the Summer 1977 issue.
John Holloway
         Supposition and Supersession: A Model of Analysis for_Narrative
            Structure
         The first and preliminary part of this discussion examines
            Todorov's remark, in his article "Structural Analysis of Narrative"
            (Novel 3, no. 1 [Fall, 1969]), on certain tales in the Decameron.
            These are advanced as dealing with a "concrete problem" which
            "illustrates" what Todorov "conceive[s] to be the structural
            approach to literature." The second part (Sections II-V) offers an
            alternative analysis of the Decameron tales. The third part
            comprises some observations, from a similar point of view, on Crime
            and Punishment. The anterior purpose of the whole discussion is to
            identify at least some points where insights about "structure," in
            a fairly strict sense, seem to bear genuinely upon the insights of
            the literary critic.
             
            John Holloway, Professor of Modern English at the University of
            Cambridge, is the author of, among others, The Victorian Sage, The
            Charted Mirror, The Story of the Night,Blake: The Lyric Poetry, The
            Proud Knowledge, Planet of Winds, and five volumes of verse. His
            previous contribution to , "Narrative Structure and
            Text Structure," appeared in the March 1975 issue.
J. Hillis Miller
         Ariadne's Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line
         The story of Ariadne has, as is the way with myths, its slightly
            asymmetrical echoes along both the narrative lines which converge
            in her marriage to Dionysus. Daedalus it was who told Ariadne how
            to save Theseus with the thread. Imprisoned by Minos in his own
            labyrinth, he escapes by flight, survives the fall of Icarus, and
            reaches Sicily safely. Daedalus is then discovered by Minos when he
            solves the puzzle posed publicly by Minos, with the offer of a
            reward to the solver: How to run a thread through all the chambers
            and intricate windings of a complex seashell? Daedalus pierces the
            center of the shell, ties a thread to an ant, puts the ant in the
            pierced hole, and wins the prize when the ant emerges at the mouth
            of the shell. Thread and labyrinth, thread intricately crinkled to
            and fro as the retracing of the labyrinth which defeats the
            labyrinth but makes another intricate web at the same
            time pattern is here superimposed on pattern, like the two
            homologous stories themselves.
             
            J. Hillis Miller is Gray Professor of Rhetoric and chairman of the
            department of English at Yale. He is the author of Charles Dickens:
            The World of His Novels, The Disappearance of God, Thomas Hardy:
            Distance and Desire, Fiction and Repetition, and a study of
            narrative terminology, called Ariadne's Thread, of which his essay
            in this issue of  is a part. His contributions to
             are "The Critic as Host" (Spring 1977) and "Theory
            and Practice: Response to Vincent Leitch" (Summer 1980).
Jean Ricardou
         Composition Decomposed
         On the fictional level, La Route des Flandres deploys a world in
            the process of complete disintegration. The manifestly privileged
            situation is the debacle of the French army in 1940 in which a
            number of the novel's protagonists are involved: George, the
            narrator; his cousin, Captain de Reixach; Iglésia, previously the
            Captain's jockey, now his orderly; Blum, Wack, and their horses.
            The havoc wrought by the military debacle can be subdivided into
            five categories.
             
            With the dissociation and decimation of the army . . . and the
            disintegration of the discipline which had consolidated it . . . an
            entire military order is in the course of demolition.
             
            The breakdown of the military organization is accompanied by a
            parallel dissolution of the social order. Scattered along the
            roads, the civilians have lost their essential function, their
            trade. And, in an incident which occurs in front of the captain,
            when a peasant threatens the deputy mayor with his hunting rifle,
            we detect a direct reversal of the civic order.
             
            In the mechanical order, the all but dismembered automobiles . . .
            and the dismantlement of their motors contribute to the general
            tide of dilapidation and decay.
             
            The spatial order, represented here by the traditional military
            space, endowed with significance and hierarchically divided into
            front and rear, becomes depolarized with the disappearance of the
            battle lines and the inextricable entanglement of the two armies .
            . .
             
            The temporal order, the chronological arrangement of events, is
            subject to a similar vitiation.
             
            Jean Ricardou is equally well known for his fiction, including
            L'Observatoire de Cannes (Les Editions de Minuit, 1961), La Prise
            de Constantinople(Minuit, 1965),Les Lieux-dits (Gallimard, 1969),
            and his criticism, including Problèmes du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil,
            1967), Pour une Theorie du Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1971), and Le
            Nouveau Roman (Le Seuil, 1973)."ARTISTS ON ART: Birth of a Fiction"
            appeared in the Winter 1977 issue of . Erica
            Freiberg regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds
            degrees in French and Italian, philosophy and modern literature
            from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of
            Geneva.
Philipp Fehl
         Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in_the_History
            of Art
         It was the general practice until not at all long ago (and in some
            quarters it is still the practice) to look at Turner as one of the
            moderns, if not as one of the founding fathers of modern art. He
            was a man straddling the fence between two periods, but he was
            looking forward. In a history of art that marches through time,
            forever endorsing what is about to be forgotten, wrapping up, as it
            were, one style to open eagerly the package of the next, such a
            position is most enviable for, no matter where the times may be
            going, it is a hallmark of greatness to be ahead of one's time.
            There were things to be explained, of course, Turner himself, a
            keen pessimist, did not approved of the future and had little use
            for the present.1 His love of art was schooled on Reynolds'
            Discourses, and he remained loyal to them; his poets were Thomson
            and Pope and, among contemporaries, the rather frigid but delicate
            Samuel Rogers, a classicist par excellence. Above all, however,
            Turner looked back to classical antiquity for training and
            guidance, and for the delectation of his heart. And the poetry of
            the ancients, such as he could obtain it in translation, was as
            important to him as their art. What does one do with a declared
            classicist whom a historicizing hindsight feels compelled to rescue
            as a man of the future by making him a Romantic? It is a challenge
            stylistic analysis likes to meet, for it goes beneath what it
            declares to be the surface of a work of art to find its style, the
            essence that must conform to the presumed spirit of the age in
            question. The triumphant result of such studies in depth is a
            forgone conclusion as much as it is a surprise to the uninitiated.
            The facade of the Louvre, for example, used to suffice to make it a
            building in the classical style; it took the acumen of a Wölfflin
            to prove that it really was "baroque." The more the artist
            struggled not to be of his time, the more, poor man, he betrayed to
            the analyst that he was of his time. The Louvre facade stands
            convicted of being "classicizing-baroque."2
             
            ·  1. On Turner's view of the modern art of his time see John Gage,
            Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York, 1969), pp.97-105. On
            his literary education and taste see the seminal essay by Jerrold
            Ziff, "Turner on Poetry and Painting, " Studies in Romanticism 3
            no. 4 (Summer 1964): 193-215. Turner's poetical writings have been
            edited by Jack Lindsay, The Sunset Ship: The Poems of J.M.W. Turner
            (London, 1968). For the most recent and also most elegantly
            practical introduction to the work and life of Turner, see the
            catalogue of the Turner Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the
            Tate Gallery, Turner, 1775-1851 (London, 1975).
             
            ·  2. This is now a commonplace of art historical teaching. See,
            for example, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 6th ed. Horst de
            la Croix and Richard G. Tansey (New York, 1975), p. 632. On the
            theory behind the application to the particular case, see Heinrich
            Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New
            York, 1932).
             
            Philipp Fehl, artist and art historian, is currently preparing a
            collection of essays, Art and Morality: Studies in the History of
            the Classical Tradition. He is a professor in the department of art
            and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
            "Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
            and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting" was published in
            Summer 1979 in .
Ralph W. Rader
         The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms
         The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era
            offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting.
            The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this
            description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as
            "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a
            Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The
            Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda
            and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Stopping by
            Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems
            intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and
            autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer
            to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the
            "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link
            the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an
            approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single
            definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the
            idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple.
            All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine
            that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and
            preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is (a)
            nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and (b)
            complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is
            simple, definite, and logical.
             
            Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the
            University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to
             are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation"
            (December 1974), "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response
            to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" (June 1975), and "The Literary
            Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" (Winter 1979). Professor
            Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The
            Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example
            of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-
            century Studies."
Albert William Levi
         De Interpretatione: Cognition and Context in the History_of_Ideas
         One can sympathize with [Leo] Strauss' ultimate aim to
            protect the validity of moral judgment against that form of
            relativism which would assess the value of great philosophic works
            simply in terms of how they satisfied the needs of the times for
            which they were written. But in believing that "historicism " meant
            "relativism," and that all attention to the temporal relevance of
            great doctrines in the history of ideas was somehow perverse,
            Strauss was profoundly mistaken. Hermeneutics is not axiology.
            Questions of truth and validity are fundamental, but they are
            dependent upon a prior solution of the problem of meaning. And for
            the establishment of meaning, contextual analysis is crucial. For
            it is not as if (as Platonism maintains) ideas were the ghostly
            inhabitants of another world, logically cut off from human purposes
            and intentions. All three things exist: ideas, agents, and social
            contexts, and the best history of ideas is, I believe, constituted
            by the careful consideration of the multiple interrelationships
            between them. It is false to believe (as the New Critics, Hutchins
            and Adler, and Strauss did) that texts exhaust their own meaning.
            For there is always an historical grounding and a web of person and
            social events that give them wider and deeper significance. And
            this is precisely why we must ask such questions as: What sort of
            society was the author writing for and trying to persuade? What
            were the conventions of communication and the literary forms of
            discourse current at the time? What was the author's class
            affiliation, his place in the social hierarchy of his age? And
            perhaps above all: What were his moral commitments, the structure
            of his ideals?
             
            Albert William Levi, David May Distinguished University Professor
            of the Humanities at Washington University, Saint Louis, is the
            author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy
            and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics;and Philosophy as Social
            Expression, and The Idea of Culture. His "Culture: A Guess at the
            Riddle" appeared in , Winter 1977.
Douglas Bush
         Professor Fish on the Milton Variorum
         No one would deny that Mr. Fish is an acutely perceptive and
            provocative reader; nor, probably, would anyone deny his formidable
            prolixity, here as, on a large scale, in Self-Consuming Artifacts.
            A main reason seems to be that, while he charges formalists with
            "primarily sins of omission" (p. 469), he does not recognize his
            own sins of commission. Formalists assume a degree of intelligence
            in readers; Mr. Fish seems to assume that they are mentally
            retarded and must have every idea laboriously spelled out, as if
            their minds moved in unison with their lips. Whatever the
            occasional rewards, this assumption and procedure are not
            altogether winning.
             
            Douglas Bush, Gurney Professor of English literature emeritus at
            Harvard University, responds in this essay to Stanley E. Fish's
            "Interpreting the Variorum" (, Spring 1976). In
            addition to the Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton,
            Professor Bush's many influential contributions include English
            Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, John Milton, John
            Keats, and Jane Austen.
Steven Mailloux
         Stanley Fish's "interpreting the Variorum": Advance or Retreat?
         The crux of Fish's argument in "Interpreting the Variorum" is that
            people read in different ways (they write different texts) because
            they belong to different interpretive communities. True enough.
            However, in the course of his argument Fish seems to collapse the
            distinction between the interpretive act of reading and the
            interpretive act of criticism. Fish uses the term interpretive
            strategies to refer to both the interpretive strategies performed
            by readers and to his critical strategy which describes these acts.
            However, critical models are not isomorphic with reading
            strategies; that is, critical interpretations like Fish's are
            descriptions of perpetual strategies (in reading) and not the
            strategies themselves. Fish's implicit dismissal of the reading
            process/reading description distinction for his own approach leads
            him to dismiss the distinction for other approaches. And since he
            has already acknowledged that people read in different ways, he
            concludes that different critical models are equally valid.
            Therefore, according to Fish, critics disagree because they read
            differently.1 But, as I will show, critical interpretations differ,
            not because critics belong to different interpretive communities of
            readers, but because they belong to different interpretive
            communities of critics.
             
            ·  1. Of course, the definition of readingbecomes crucial here. I
            am using the term to refer to the temporal interaction of the
            reader with the text, the moment-by-moment psycholinguistic process
            that occurs from the instant I open a book and perceive the title
            or first line, "In my younger and more vulnerable years . . ." to
            the moment I comprehend the final sentence, "So we beat on, boats
            against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
             
            Steven Mailloux, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric, linguistics, and
            literature at the University of Southern California, is coeditor of
            Checklist of Melville Reviews, and his Herman Melville: The
            Critical Receptionand Henry David Thoreau: A Reference Guide are
            now in press. He is currently working on a book about contemporary
            movements in American literary criticism.
Stanley E. Fish
         Interpreting "Interpreting the Variorum"
         Together Professor Bush and Mr. Mailloux present a problem in
            interpretation not unlike those that were the occasion of the paper
            they criticize: Professor Bush takes the first section of the paper
            more seriously (or at least with a different kind of seriousness)
            than I do, and Mr. Mailloux complains that I do not take it
            seriously enough. In their different ways they seem to miss or
            slight (or perhaps resent) the playfulness of my performance, the
            degree to which it is an attempt to be faithful to my admitted
            unwillingness to come to, or rest on, a point. Professor Bush seems
            to think that I am mounting an attack on the Variorum. Let me say
            at the outset that I intended no such attack, that I am sorry if
            anything I wrote gave that impression, and that I regret any
            offense that may have been taken. Professor Bush and I view the
            Variorum from different perspectives, both of which seem to me to
            be perfectly legitimate. He views it as a document, while I view it
            as a text. As a document, as a record and history of research and
            interpretation, it is a model of its kind, full, judicious, and
            above all, honest. The editors pay us the compliment of not
            pretending to an impossible objectivity. They leave us the valuable
            record of their own occasional disagreements, and thus suggest (to
            me at least) that they know very well that theirs is an interim
            report. My inquiry is into the significance of that report; it is
            not a brief against the compiling of its materials but an attempt
            to put to them a question the editors quite properly do not ask:
            what does the history of the effort to determine the meaning of
            Milton's poems mean? In short, I am extending the scope of
            interpretation to include the interpreters themselves and, rather
            than attacking the Variorum, taking one step further the task it
            has so well begun.
             
            Stanley E. Fish's "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech
            Act Theory and Literary Criticism" was published in the Special
            Centennial Issue of Modern Language Notes, Summer 1976. His
            contributions to  include "Facts and Fictions: A
            Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting the Variorum"
            (Spring 1976), "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).
