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Geoffrey Hartman
         Literary Criticism and Its Discontents
         Literary criticism is neither more nor less important today than it
            has been since the becoming an accepted activity in the
            Renaissance. The humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
            centuries created the institution of criticism as we know it: the
            recovery and analysis of works of art. They printed, edited, and
            interpreted texts that dated from antiquity and which had been lost
            or disheveled. Evangelical in their fervor, avid in their search
            for lost or buried riches, they also put into circulation certain
            influential ideas. Perhaps the most important of these was that the
            authoritative version of a book is the original version, freed from
            interpolation and accretion. A correlative idea was that,
            similarly, one could rely on an original or natural light
            (ingenium) in the interpreter, an intuitive good sense that helped
            him to a true understanding of a text if it was a genuine text. . .
            .
             
            There are signs that we are now nearing the end of this Renaissance
            humanism. Not because of a determinist or providential march of
            history, but ideas eventually exhaust what influence they may have.
            Today, after all, there is no dearth of ancient texts, or of new
            ones. Editing, moreover, has become only too conscious of the
            difficulty of recovering an "original" version or edition: in
            Wordsworth scholarship, for example, the authority of the 1850
            Prelude, the text approved by the poet shortly before his death,
            was challenged by the 1805-6 Prelude printed by de Sélincourt in
            the 1920s; and the authority of this is in turn being eroded by
            antecedent manuscripts, the so-called "Five-Books Prelude" and
            "Two-Part Prelude." It is equally precarious to establish the text
            of Emily Dickinson's poems which of the variants are to be
            chosen as definitive? Or, from another angle, Melville's Billy Budd
            has become a mine for genetic speculation. Even when no editorial
            problem exists, a philosophicalissue arises as to the concept of
            originality itself.1
             
            ·   1. For the time being, it is enough to quote Hegel's
            provocative attack on all "Ur-Metaphysics": "What comes later is
            more concrete and richer; the first is abstract, and least
            differentiated."
             
            Geoffrey Hartman, professor of English and comparative literature
            at Yale University, is the author of The Unmediated Vision, Andre
            Malraux, Wordsworth's Poetry, Beyond Formalism, and most recently
            The Fate of Reading. He is currently working on a book to be
            published in late 1977, Criticism in the Wilderness.
Norman N. Holland
         Literary Interpretation and Three Phases of Psychoanalysis
         Let me start with my general thesis: that psychoanalysis has gone
            through three phases. It has been a psychology first of the
            unconscious, second as psychology of the ego, and today, I believe,
            a psychology of the self. . . .
             
            To a surprising extent, the modern American literary critic (and
            more recently the European) has sought the same impersonal,
            generalized kind of quasi-scientific knowledge. We anglophones
            reacted against the over-indulgence in subjectivity by Victorian
            and Georgian critics. We also reacted against the uncritical use of
            extraliterary knowledge, connections that were often aimless and
            unconvincing between literary works and their authors'
            autobiographies or literary periods. We sought instead an
            analytical rigor, at first by searching out the organic unity of
            particular literary works, then by extending the methods of close
            reading we developed that way to the total works of an author, to
            myths and popular arts, to the language of everyday life, and even
            to such artifices as Volkswagens, supermarkets, and political
            candidates.
             
            Norman N. Holland is professor of English and director of the
            Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the State
            University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of six books,
            of which Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1966), The Dynamics of
            Literary Response (1968), Poems in Persons (1975), and Five Readers
            Reading (1965) deal directly with problems of psychological
            criticism. His contributions to  are "Human
            Identity" (Spring 1978) and "Why Ellen Laughed" (Winter 1980).
Dore Ashton
         No More than an Accident?
         In the modern mind the circumstance of Jewishness has been burdened
            with many questionable associations, particularly in the arts.
            Although Harold Rosenberg writes that, "in regard to art, being
            Jewish appears to be no more than an accident,"1 vulgar
            associations of Jews with art stubbornly subsist, an extreme
            example being Nixon's "now the worst thing is to go to anything
            that has to do with the arts . . . the arts, you know they're
            Jews, they're left wing in other words, stay away. . . ."2
             
            Despite the recurrence of such cloudy associations, the issue has
            remained curiously submerged. It is commonplace in our century to
            find a kind of reflexive yoking of Jews with art, particularly
            avant-garde art. The incalculable effects of such attitudes on
            modern art itself are rarely weighted. Accidental as the Jewish
            artist may be in his own view, he remains a somewhat suspect
            accident in the eyes of others. Can we continue to regard the fact
            of being a modern Jewish artist as "accidental," or is there a
            significant context which must be acknowledged?
             
            ·  1. Harold Rosenberg, "Jews in Art," The New Yorker, 22 December
            1975.
            ·  2. Nixon to Haldeman: Watergate tapes, Newsweek, 19 August 1974.
             
            Dore Ashton, professor of art history at The Cooper Union, has
            served as the curator of art exhibitions both in the United States
            and abroad and as an art critic for The New York Times. She is
            author of, among others, Abstract Art Before Columbus, Poets and
            the Past, The Unknown Shore, A Reading of Modern Art, The New York
            School: A Cultural Reckoning, and Yes But...A Critical Study of
            Philip Guston. She has also contributed "On Harold Rosenberg"
            (Summer 1980) to .
Leo Treitler
         Wozzeck and the Apocalypse: An Essay in Historical_Criticism
         Among the central meanings in Büchner's Woyzeck, there is one that
            comes clear only when we read the play in the context of the
            history of ideas specifically in the light of certain
            currents of thought about human history and eschatology. Aspects of
            the play's expression are thereby elucidated, that are forcefully
            brought forward through the organization and compositional
            procedures of Berg's Wozzeck.
             
            Near the end of the long third scene of the opera, Wozzeck appears
            suddenly at Marie's window and alludes cryptically to the
            mysterious signs that had come to him in the field the scene
            before, confiding to her that he is "on the track of something
            big." As those signs had first been presented through Wozzeck's
            eyes, they seemed like the imaginings and fears of a simple man
            about Freemasons and who knows what other objects of superstition,
            But now in the third scene he gives them a scriptural context, as
            though through a sudden insight: "Isn't it written, 'And behold,
            the smoke went up from the land, as the smoke from a furnace'?"
             
            What Wozzeck has recalled here is a passage in the Book of Genesis,
            chapter 19: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom brimstone and fire
            from the Lord out of heaven. . . . and, behold, the smoke went up
            from the Land as the smoke from a furnace." The image is repeated
            in the New Testament Book of Revelation (the Apocalypse), chapter
            9: "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven
            unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit;
            and there arose a smoke out of the pit as the smoke of the great
            furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the
            smoke of the pit."
             
            Both passages are about a holocaust visited by a wrathful God upon
            a corrupt and debauched people, and that is the idea that begins to
            form in Wozzeck's mind as he stands for the first time on the stage
            before his mistress. And he asks, "What will it all come to?" The
            answer to this thematic question lies in the strange unfolding of
            the drama, pressed forward by forces that lie, as Büchner had once
            put it, "Outside of ourselves"1 and by Wozzeck, who guarantees the
            outcome as he imagines himself becoming aware of what it must be.
             
            ·  1. Letter to his family, February 1834: "I scorn no one, least
            of all because of his understanding or his education, for it lies
            in no one's power not to become a dumbbell or a
            criminal because we have all become alike through like
            circumstances, and because the circumstances lie outside of
            ourselves . . ." Werner Lehmann, George Büchner: Såmtliche Werke
            und Briefe (Hamburg, 1971), 2:422.
             
            Leo Treitler, professor and chairman of the department of music at
            the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is the author of,
            among other works, "Dufay the Progressive" and "Homer and Gregory:
            The Transmission of Epic Poetry and Plainchant."
Cesare Segre
         Narrative Structures and Literary History
         In this article, I am starting with a question which many years ago
            was at the center of the debate on structuralism. Are structures to
            be found in the object (the literary work) or in the subject (the
            critic who analyzes the work)? If we take one of the famous
            analyses by Jakobson, we ascertain that as long as attention is
            brought to bear on the graphemic or phonological elements, or on
            rhymes and accents, then the objectivity of the examination is
            incontestable. The absolute or relative computation of phonemes or
            groups of phonemes and the specification of their place in the text
            are independent of the critic's subjectivity. Subjectivity begins
            to impose itself when categories like "abstract" and "concrete" or
            "metaphor" and "symbol" are introduced, and even more so when these
            categories are grouped into classes the denomination of which (a
            denomination which is discriminating according to the effects of
            the categories' own capacities) does not have its basis in the data
            offered by the text but in nomenclative schemata developed by the
            critic (such as intrinsic and extrinsic, empirical and
            mythological, etc.).
             
            Cesare Segre, director of the Institute of Romance Philology at the
            University of Pavia and president of the International Association
            of Semiotic Studies, is coeditor of the journals Strumenti Critici
            and Medioevo Romanza and the series Critica e Filologia. His
            principal works of linguistic and semiotic criticism are Lingua,
            stile e società, Esperienze ariosteche, Semiotics and Literary
            Criticism (also in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese), I metodi
            attuali della critica in Italia (in collaboration with M. Corti),
            La tradizione della Chanson de Roland, and Le strutture e il tempo
            (also in Spanish). His editions of old Italian and French texts are
            Fornival's Li bestiaires d'Amours, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso,
            Giamboni's Libro de' Vizi e delle Virtudi, and the Chanson de
            Roland. "Narrative Structures and Literary History" originally
            appeared in Strumenti Critici (1975). His contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Culture and Modeling Systems," appeared in Spring 1978.
            Rebecca West's previous contribution to  was the
            translation of Guilio Carlo Argan's "Ideology and Iconology"
            (Winter 1975).
Paolo A. Cherchi
         Tradition and Topoi in Medieval Literature
         It is embarrassing, to say the least, to admit in limine the
            impossibility of defining the key concepts of this paper, for I do
            not know either what tradition is or what topoi are. And what is
            even worse, I have no theoretical conclusions to present. But,
            after all, why define tradition? We all know what tradition is
            since it is one of the staples of our academic fare. Even the word
            itself is in great part an academic one. As a matter of fact, in
            classical Latin, what we mean by tradition was expressed by words
            like memoria or institutum or mos vetus, whereas traditio meant
            surrender or the handing over of a city or of an enemy, although
            the meaning of instruction, training,teaching is also attested. It
            was the latter meaning that prevailed in the humanistic period,
            though with the technical sense of transmission of a text; and in
            this special meaning the word traditio still survives in the
            discipline of textual criticism. Of course, the transmission of the
            text was understood not only in the material sense but also as a
            means of conveying ancient wisdom, as a witness to its institutions
            and mores. So the revival of ancient learning implied a
            reconstruction of a tradition which was thought to have been broken
            during the Middle Ages. Thus, the studia humanitatis were defined
            as study of the past, a very well circumscribed past. Even today
            when we talk about humanistic studies we understand in great part
            the study of the institutions, mentality, literary movements of the
            past.
             
            Paolo A. Cherci, associate professor in the department of Romance
            languages and literatures at the University of Chicago, is the
            editor of Tommaso Garzoni's Works and the author of the forthcoming
            works, Capitoli di Critica Cervantina, Effemeridi Romaunze, and a
            collection of short stories, Erostratismo.
Garrett Stewart
         Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of_Self-Reflection
         Charles Chaplin, like Charles Dickens, knew the deep allegiance
            between theme and visual symbol, and the greatest popular genius of
            our century, when he began a film called Modern Times with a
            nondescript clockface upon which the second hand inexorably spins,
            negotiated this alliance between satiric narrative and its props
            with the bold assurance of the nineteenth-century master. To have
            seen Modern Times again for the first time in nearly a decade, as I
            did recently, after in the interval having reread, taught, and
            written about Dickens' Hard Times, was to see Chaplin's masterpiece
            virtually for the first time and to wonder anew at the
            critics. I will shortly return to the symbolic devices by which the
            pervasive motif of modern time is propped and propelled in both
            Chaplin's film and Dickens' novel, but it is important to question
            first why the very thirst for overt social satire which draws a
            certain kind of reader to Hard Times, often one who has little
            converse with the other and greater Dickens novels, tends to go
            bafflingly unsatisfied where Modern Times is concerned. In the most
            recent book-length study of Chaplin, by noted film historian Roger
            Manvell, we hear that "Though highly entertaining, Modern Times had
            little social comment and no political party implications
            whatsoever."1 To grieve over this would be like dying of thirst in
            a rainstorm. Although Walter Kerr, in his far more searching
            treatment of Chaplin in The Silent Clowns, observes "at least two
            dazzling opportunities for the ironic social comment" in the
            opening factory sequence, on the whole he decides that "Chaplin's
            true theme lies elsewhere and is much more personal."2 Yes and no;
            more than any other artistic predecessor, Dickens can help us see
            the deeply-rooted grip of industrial satire on the apparent
            discrete, episodic comedy of Modern Times.
             
            · 1. Roger Manvell, Chaplin (Boston, 1974), p. 143.
            · 2. Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns (New York, 1975), p. 357.
             
            Garrett Stewart, associate professor of English at the University
            of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the
            Trials of Imagination,Film on Film, and a book on the symbolism of
            death in modern British fiction, Point of Departure: The Death
            Scene since Dickens, as well as essays on film. He has contributed
            "Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity" (Spring 1981) to
            .
Fernando Lázaro Carreter
         The Literal Message
         The opposition prose/verse can only be established in the heart of
            literal language. The only way of producing nonliteral language is
            in conversation. . . . Enrique Anderson Imbert published a book in
            1958 titled ¿Qué es la prosa? (What is prose?), in which he says:
            'No, we do not speak in prose. Prose is not a projection of
            everyday speech, but rather artistic elaboration."1 But my
            adherence to his intelligent point of view is not total because he
            situates prose in the heart of written language, and I think that
            it should be ascribed to literal language. For Anderson Imbert such
            an idiomatic modality results in an artistic elaboration; but the
            intention of prose can be quite different. The reader, for
            instance, by virtue of his reading, can transform prose into
            literature; and unwritten prose does exist, as has been stated. In
            many cases it is impossible to compose the texts in verse;
            structurally, then, an opposition cannot be established, just as in
            the case of the student who takes notes following the explanations
            of the professor. These texts can only be what they are: a more or
            less truthful transcription, a "copy" of oral language, a mere
            change of substance, abbreviated in order to bring it closer, as a
            simple memento, to the elliptical articulations of inner language.
             
            · 1. "No, no hablamos en prosa. La prosa no es proyección del habla
            corriente, sino elaboración artística." Enrique Anderson Imbert,
            ¿Que es la prosa? 4th ed. (Buenos Aires, 1971), p. 31.
             
            Fernando Lázaro Carreter is the director of the department of
            Spanish at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a member of the
            Real Academia Española. The author of books on both linguistics and
            criticism, his published works include: Las ideas lingüísticas en
            España durante el siglo XVIII; Diccionario de términos filológicos;
            Estilo barroco y personalidad creadora; Ensayos de Poética (La obra
            en si);and Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca. This article is a
            preliminary statement of a problem he is currently investigating:
            literary language understood as "literal language."
Leslie Hill
         Flaubert and the Rhetoric of Stupidity
         Flaubert himself, in an early and now famous letter, identifies in
            "bêtise" the effect of an inordinate desire to conclude: "Oui, la
            bêtise," he writes, "consiste à vouloir conclure. Nous sommes un
            fil et nous voulons savoir la trame" (2:239). This is to say
            stupidity, to Flaubert, is less a given content of discourse than a
            particular order of that discourse itself.1 It is the sign of an
            hasty and elliptical intervention into thought of a series of
            preconceived conclusions, the source of which may be situated in
            the doxa and in the rhetoric of verisimilitude that sustains the
            persuasive power of the doxa. Stupidity, as the project of the
            Dictionnaire demonstrates, is an endless fabric of maxims and
            probable syllogisms the function of which is to determine the
            particular and the specific, the singular and the different, as
            paradigmatic exempla of the larger discourse of encyclopaedic
            universality expressed in the verisimilitude of received ideas. It
            is in this sense that one can see in Flaubert's notion of "bêtise"
            the denunciation by the writer of an especially vulgarised form
            (founded upon scientific positivism and upon the self-confidence of
            the middle classes) of the Aristotelian concept of verisimilitude,
            which, built around the rhetorical figures of the probable
            syllogism the enthymeme and the exemplum (paradeigma),
            is directed towards winning adhesion to a particular thesis by
            appealing to generalities and probabilities, and which constructs
            its arguments from material drawn from the doxa.2 It is this
            rhetoric of persuasion by verisimilitude that Flaubert, in the
            various discourses of the lover, the dreamer, and the politician,
            will throw into ironic relief in Madame Bovary and L'Éducation
            sentimentale.
             
            · 1. Cf. Valéry, Oeuvres, 1:1452.
            · 2. The concept of verisimilitude is a difficult one and one which
            had received much critical attention in recent years. I have taken
            the term here to refer to the complex network of constraints by
            which the mimetic novelist, like the rhetorician, is able to engage
            his audience in a contract of mutual recognition and to persuade
            them of the "sense of reality" of his narrative, that his is a
            plausible interpretation of reality, worthy of belief (compare
            Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a). It is here that Aristotle's elaboration
            of mimesis and of the art of rhetoric is decisive. Both in the
            Poetics (1461b) and in the Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes two
            concepts with regards to the manner in which the artist or the
            rhetorician solicits from his audience the belief in the justness
            of his reconstruction of reality. The first concept is that of
            pithanon, the plausible or the persuasive. This corresponds to the
            speculative consideration of what strategy will be most forceful in
            any given case. Rhetoric is indeed defined as "the faculty
            (dunamis) of observing in any given case the available means of
            persuasion (pithanon)" (1355b). As such, pithanon is the sign of a
            desire to convince, a decision on the part of an individual in a
            particular situation. For this desire to convince to become fully
            operative in the context of an audience, it needs to be recast not
            as a plausibility, but as a probability, as eikos. Aristotle
            defines eikos as "a thing that usually happens: not . . . anything
            whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class
            of the 'contingent' or 'variable.' It bears the same relation to
            that in respect of which it is probable as the universal bears to
            the particular" (1357a). Eikos is on one level a collection of
            contents, of topoi. But it is more than this. For otherwise this
            would mean that works deriving from different historical contexts
            would become unintelligible to the uninitiated reader. Eikos is a
            patterning of discourse, a rhetorical syntax, based upon the
            integration of the singular in the universal, and translated in the
            text by the enthymeme (and the maxim) and the exemplum. The
            homogeneity of the mimetic novel derives from the way in which the
            desire to convince (pithanon) is mediated and dissimulated by a
            totalising, "natural" eikos, when, in other words, the narrator is
            "objective." It is when these two dimensions are dissociated, as in
            Bouvard et Pécuchet, that all manner of disturbance is generated.
            (All quotations from the Rhetoric are from the translation by W.
            Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. W.D. Ross, vol. 11
            [Oxford, 1924]).
             
            Leslie Hill, fellow in Clare College, Cambridge University, is
            presently doing research on Flaubert and on general aspects of the
            modern French novel. This is his first publication.
Esther Jacobson-Leong
         Place and Passage in the Chinese Arts: Visual_Images_and_Poetic
            Analogues
         In a society which traditionally valued the moral and expressive
            forces of art, landscape painting became one of the most esteemed
            art forms. In China, "landscape" has always meant what its Chinese
            name shan shui (mountains, water) implies: paintings
            dominated by peaks and streams supplemented by trees, rocks, mists,
            and plunging waterfalls. Despite major changes in style, landscape
            painting in China between the eighth and eighteenth centuries was
            remarkably stable in subject matter. Chinese artists painted the
            natural settings which surrounded them in their home provinces or
            those which they discovered in their travels; and such settings
            were dominated by mountains and rivers. Moreover mountains and
            water were imbued with symbolic value. Traditionally the mountain
            has been considered the symbol of the emperor the son of
            Heaven and of virtue and masculine energy. The ridges and
            folds of the mountains display the veins of energy that course
            through the earth and the continuous process of change which
            characterizes the Universe. Water (in the form of river, stream,
            lake, or mist) represents the origin of life, the female principle,
            vitality itself. Trees, stones, bamboo, and many flowers were
            similarly endowed with cosmogonic and moral significance. Given the
            symbolic value with which elements of nature were traditionally
            endowed, Chinese landscape painting is properly considered the
            normative form through which artists (and society) reasserted
            correct social relationships, moral order among men, and moral
            order in nature.
             
            Esther Jacobson-Leong, associate professor of art history at the
            University of Oregon, is currently working on problems in the
            significance in Steppe art and related traditions.
Paul Hernadi
         Literary Theory: A Compass for Critics
         Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between parole and langue has
            greatly helped linguists to clarify the relationship between
            particular speech events and the underlying reservoir of verbal
            signs and combinatory rules. The relationship emerges from
            Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale as one between concrete
            instances of employed language and a slowly but permanently
            changing virtual system.1 It seems to me that the more recent
            literary distinctions between the implied author of a work and its
            actual author and between the implied and the actual reader point
            to similar relationships along the rhetorical axis of
            communication.2 For example, the respective authors implied by The
            Comedy of Errors and by The Tempest are in a sense fixed, concrete
            manifestations of the actual author whose permanently shifting
            potential of manifesting himself in literary works or otherwise was
            only partially realized between 1564 and 1616; his full potential
            has thus forever remained virtual. The congenial readers implied by
            the respective plays are in turn two of many "roles" which an
            actual reader may attempt to slip into for the length of time it
            takes him to read one work or another. Even a book like Mein Kampf
            will be adequately understood only by men and women able and
            willing temporarily to become Adolf Hitler's implied readers. The
            price may be high, but having shed the mental mask and costume
            required for the proper "performance" of the text, a discerning
            person will emerge from the ordeal with a keener sense of the
            despicable part assigned to the book's actual readers. I hardly
            need to add that works of imaginative literature tend to imply
            readers whose intellectual, emotive, and moral response is far less
            predetermined than is the response of the reader implied by the
            typical work of assertive discourse.
             
            · 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916),
            4th ed. (Paris, 1949). Since this book was posthumously compiled
            from the notes of students attending three different sets of
            lectures, I am not overly troubled by the fact that the letter (if
            not the spirit) of at least two sentences seems to contradict my
            characterization of langue as a virtual and changing system: "La
            langue n'est pas moins que la parole un objet de nature concrète"
            (p. 32) and "tout ce qui est diachronique dans la langue ne l'est
            que par la parole" (p. 138). See also Wade Baskin's English trans.,
            Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1959), pp. 15 and 98.
            · 2. See esp. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago,
            1961) and Wolfgang Iser Der implizite Leser (Munich, 1972), trans.
            as The Implied Reader (Baltimore, 1974).
             
            Paul Hernadi is professor of English and comparative literature at
            the University of Iowa. His book, Beyond Genre: New Direction in
            Literary Classification, is soon to appear in Spanish translation.
            He has edited a collection of essays titled What is Literature? and
            written a book on modern historical tragicomedy. "On the How, What,
            and Why of Narrative" was contributed to  in the
            Autumn 1980 issue.
Wright Morris and Wayne C. Booth
         The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation
         MORRIS: But come back to that other kind of fiction, in which the
            author himself is involved with his works, not merely in writing
            something for other people but in writing what seems to be
            necessary to his conscious existence, to his sense of well-being.
            For such a writer, when he finished with something he finishes with
            it; he is not left with continuations that he can go on knitting
            until he runs out of yarn.
             
            This conceit reflects my own experience as a writer, relying on the
            sap that keeps rising, the force that drives the flower, as Dylan
            Thomas put it. It is plantlike. We put it in the sun and when it
            doesn't grow, we take it and put it in another room. I don't think
            of repotting the plant. The plant must make its own way.
             
            BOOTH: I like the organic metaphor, but I keep wanting to come back
            to particular cases to see how you actually work, in literal
            detail. Even the organic novelist obviously still has the matter of
            collecting notes, starting a novel, having it fail to go. Let me
            put a simple question, and move out from there. How many actual
            novels, whether they ever reach fruition or not, do you have
            "growing" at a given time?
             
            MORRIS: You don't mean simultaneously?
             
            BOOTH: I mean actual notes that exist in some kind of manuscript
            form, starts on a novel, something you are actually working on.
             
            MORRIS: It is so unusual for me to have more than one or two things
            in mind at once that I don't find this a fruitful question.
             
            Wright Morris's work as a novelist, essayist, and photographer is
            examined by prominent critics in Conversations with Wright Morris;
            the collection, edited by Robert E. Knoll, was published in the
            spring of 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. "The Writing of
            Organic Fiction" is a chapter in that book. 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), "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic
            as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "'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), and, with
            Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979"
            (Spring 1979).
