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Lawrence Lipking
         The Marginal Gloss
         The difference between Poe's and [Paul] Valéry's theory of
            notes between a theory that emphasizes the nonsensical
            unpredictability of notes and a theory that discovers in notes the
            essential logic not only of all reading but of the mind
            itself cannot be resolved. To some extent, perhaps, it
            derives from a conflict between two genres: marginalia, and the
            marginal gloss. Marginalia traces left in a book are
            wayward in their very nature; they spring up spontaneously around a
            text unaware of their presence. Nor could they have been considered
            publishable until the Romantic period had encouraged a taste for
            fragments and impulses, the suggestive part rather than the ordered
            whole. Significantly the term was introduced by Coleridge, that
            great master of the fragment; and Poe himself (so far as I can
            find) was the first author ever to publish his marginalia. The
            charm of such notes depends on their being on the edge: the borders
            of intelligibility (Poe) or consciousness (Valéry). The reader
            catches an author off his guard, intercepting a thought that may
            scarcely have risen to formulation. At their best, marginalia can
            haunt us like a few passing words overheard in the street; all the
            more precious because the context remains unknown.
             
            Lawrence Lipking, professor of English and comparative literature
            at Princeton University, is the author of The Ordering of the Arts
            in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Modern Literary
            Criticism 1900-1970. Some of the material in this article is drawn
            from a book currently in progress, The Poet-Critics, a study of the
            relations between poetry and criticism in the work of authors who
            have excelled in both. "Arguing with Shelly" appeared in the Winter
            1979 issue of .
Christian Metz
         Trucage and the Film
         Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this
            term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of
            the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the
            impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the
            feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a
            process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or
            "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the
            guise of eventlike appearances. In the opposite case, the spectator
            undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible
            material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a
            portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of
            agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached
            in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film
            makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it:
            here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the
            exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained,
            the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is
            no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game
            of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken
            for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total.
             
            Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema,
            is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma,
            Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et
            cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique
            des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of
            "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification
            au cinéma (Editions Klincksieck, 1972). Francoise Meltzer [the
            translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and
            of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the
            author of The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of
            Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary
            Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is
            published in  in the Winter 1978 issue.
Mark Roskill
         On the Recognition and Identification of Objects in_Paintings
         There are certain ways in which the spectator's response to a work
            of art is liable to interference or a potentially deflecting kind
            of persuasion. What one is told is there in the work, or relevant
            in it, may play such a role; and so may what one supposes to be
            there, as opposed to what actually is. Since similar problems apply
            in the perception of the real world, including the people and the
            actions in it, to say this is not yet to say that there is, or
            should be, a pure and untrammeled kind of perception that one aims
            at or learns to use in front of works of art; that being already a
            form of critical theorizing which places some kinds of limits or
            ideal construction on what is permissible in the form of a
            response. But there are in fact two distinct realms in which
            perception and related cognitive processes occur, one artistic, the
            other nonartistic. For the present purposes, rather than any larger
            presupposition being entertained here, it is assumed simply that,
            differences of situation and context notwithstanding, there is no
            type of statement concerning the perception of a work of art which
            does not have a parallel or equivalent in the perception of the
            real world. Such is the philosophical basis for the line of inquiry
            to be followed here.
             
            Mark Roskill is the author of a book-length interpretation of
            cubism, from which the present essay has been adapted. The author
            of Van Gogh, Gauguin and the Impressionist Circle, What is Art
            History?, and a book on photography, he teaches courses in the
            history of modern art and in critical theory at the University of
            Massachusetts at Amherst. He has contributed "A Reply to John
            Reichert and Stanley Fish" to the Winter 1979 issue of Critical
            Inquiry.
Richard Wollheim
         Representation: The Philosophical Contribution to Psychology
         Armed with a theory of representation, or with answers to the two
            questions, What is a representation? and What is it to represent?,
            we might imagine ourselves approaching a putative representation
            and asking of it, Is it a representation?, and then, on the
            assumption that the answer is yes, going on to ask of it, What does
            it represent? Now, the answers that such questions receive might be
            called the applied answers of the theory that we are armed with. It
            is in terms of this notion that of the applied answers of a
            theory that we may introduce the second way of classifying
            theories of representation. Theories of representation might be
            classified according to the degree of dependence or independence
            between the applied answers they provide in the case of any given
            representation.
             
            Richard Wollheim is Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and
            Logic in the University of London and the author of F. H. Bradley,
            Socialism and Culture, Art and its Objects, Sigmund Freud, On Art
            and the Mind, and the novel, A Family Romance. He is currently
            working on a book dealing with pictorial style. In somewhat
            different form this paper was originally presented at the Annual
            Conference of the Developmental Section of the British
            Psychological Society, Surrey, 1976. The proceedings of that
            conference are published as The Child's Representation of the
            World, Plenum Press, 1977.
Robert E. Streeter
         WASPs and Other Endangered Species
         After all, ever since the abandonment of the classical curriculum
            in the mid-nineteenth century, the courses of studies in American
            colleges have been characterized by ever-increasing diversity,
            responses to highly particular social and individual demands, spin-
            offs from traditional disciplines, specializations breeding
            subspecializations, and the like. Stringent counterrevolutions,
            such as the one undertaken in the College of the University of
            Chicago some thirty years ago, have been infrequent and brief.
            What, then, is so special about the present seductive disarray in
            literary studies. Chiefly, I think, the importance of this
            compartmentation lies in the way we are encouraged to think of
            literary works and to respond to them. If we persuade ourselves
            that novels and plays and poems are written by members of an
            identifiable subgroup whether that group be defined in
            national, ethnic, sexual, class, or special interest
            terms and can be properly understood, and appreciated only by
            those who know the code of the same subgroup, we should be prepared
            to accept the implications of the position we are espousing. If, to
            cite a specific example, what is called the Black Aesthetic points
            to a mode of artistic apprehension that is not available to non-
            Blacks, it casts the rest of us, however curious and interested, in
            the roles of voyeurs and eavesdroppers. Here, as so often, our best
            writers anticipate and dramatize notions which become solemn
            critical propositions later on. In Saul Bellow's second novel, The
            Victim, published thirty years ago, the protagonist, Leventhal,
            recalls a party at which two of his friends, both Jewish, were
            singing spirituals and old ballads. They were being needled by a
            drunken New England WASP named Kirby Albee.
             
            "Why do you sing such songs?" he said. "You can't sing them."
            "Why not, I'd like to know?" said the girl.
            "Oh, you, too," said Albee with his one cornered smile. "it isn't
            right for you to sing them. You have to be born to them, it's no
            use trying to sing them."
             
            Robert E. Streeter served for many years as Dean of the College and
            later as Dean of the Humanities at the University of Chicago where
            he is now Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor. He is
            one of the editors of . "WASPs and Other Endangered
            Species" was presented as the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture at
            the University of Chicago on 5 April 1977.
John Gardner
         Death by Art; or, "Some Men Kill You_with_a_Six-Gun,_Some_Men_with
            a Pen"
         My object here is to try to make the idea of moral criticism, and
            its foundation, moral art, sound at least a trifle less outrageous
            than it does at present. I'd like to explain why moral criticism is
            necessary and, in a democracy, essential; how it came about that
            the idea of moral criticism is generally hoo-hooed or spat upon by
            people who in other respects seem moderately intelligent and civil
            human beings; and that the right kind of moral criticism is, or
            should be. Partly this involves explaining why sophisticated modern
            free society tends to be embarrassed by the whole idea of morality
            and by all its antique, Platonic- or scholastic-sounding
            manifestations: Beauty, Goodness, Truth. In other words, it
            involves, partly, explaining how perverse and false philosophers,
            and educated but sequacious mind, obscuring truths once widely
            acknowledged; and partly it involves sketching out a way of
            thinking that might supplant the cowardly Laodicean habits into
            which American intellectuals (among others) have in recent times
            fallen.
             
            John Gardner, novelist, poet, and essayist, has received the
            National Book Critics Circle Award for his latest novel, October
            Light. His other popular works of fiction include Grendel, The
            Sunlight Dialogues, and the book-length poem, Jason and Medeia. He
            has, as well, prepared modern versions of the Gawain poems, an
            alliterative Morte Arthure and five other Middle English poems and
            written The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle, The Poetry of
            Chaucer, and the biography, The Life and Times of Chaucer. "Death
            by Art" is the first chapter of a book concerned with morality in
            literature.
Carol and Richard Ohmann
         Universals and the Historically Particular
         To address, as Miller does, the text of Catcher particularly, we
            would argue that Holden's experiences of old age, physical
            repulsiveness, sex, aloneness and isolation, and even death are
            embedded in his full experience of society, and that his responses,
            moment by moment, bear the imprint of his total response to the
            competitive, dehumanizing world he is in the process of rebelling
            against and rejecting. He finds old Spencer pathetic (and very
            touching) not just because he is elderly and arthritic and snuffy
            with flu, but because he is relatively powerless, not very well
            off, and naïve (though uncomfortable) in urging upon Holden his
            teacherly prescriptions for life: be sensible, do your lessons,
            take care for your future as if with one's own efforts alone
            could guarantee one's worldly future. (Ours is, of course, a
            society where the worth of people is primarily defined by their
            ability to earn and/or exercise power; in the war of all against
            all, old age is a handicap and hence a cause for disrespect; it has
            always been so in our culture and is not everywhere so today.)
             
            This essay is a reply to disagreements raised by James E. Miller,
            Jr. (Spring 1977) to the Ohmanns' "Reviewers, Critics, and
            The Catcher in the Rye" (Autumn 1976). Carol Ohmann has also
            contributed "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface"
            (December 1974) with Barbara Currier Bell.
James R. Kincaid
         Coherent Readers, Incoherent Texts
         The frontiers of pluralism, it appears, are fortified right at the
            deconstructionists' borders. Admitting freely the possibility of
            ambiguities, even radical ones, M. H. Abrams still insists on the
            text as a product of an intention, however complex. Writers write
            "in order to be understood," he says; there is a certain limited
            degree of interpretative freedom, but we must always respect the
            fact that "the sequence of sentences these authors wrote were
            designed to have a core of determinate meanings."1 Hillis Miller's
            deconstruction of the hybrid Booth/Abrams charge "every
            effort at original or 'free' interpretation is plainly and simply
            parasitical" on "the obvious or univocal reading"2 attempts
            to demonstrate that the "obvious or univocal reading"
            is an illusion. These are positions so extreme and so starkly clear
            that no one needs a comparative listing of the assumptions at work.
             
            ·  1. M. H. Abrams, "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural
            History: A Reply to Wayne Booth,"  2, (1976): 457.
            ·  2. Wayne C. Booth, "M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as
            Pluralist,"  2, (1976): 441.
             
            James R. Kincaid is the author of Dickens and the Rhetoric of
            Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns,
            and a new book scheduled to appear this autumn, The Novels of
            Anthony Trollope. He is a professor of English at Ohio State
            University. His contributions to  are "Pluralistic
            Monism" (Summer 1978), and "Fiction and the Shape of Belief:
            Fifteen Years Later" (Winter 1979). A response to the present
            article comes from Robert Denham's "The No-Man's Land of Competing
            Patterns" in the Summer 1977 issue of .
Morse Peckham
         The Infinitude of Pluralism
         It is idle of [J. Hillis] Miller and [Wayne C.] Booth, and [M. H.]
            Abrams too, to talk about the methodology of interpreting complex
            literary texts before they have determined what interpretational
            behavior is in ordinary, mundane, routine, verbal interaction. The
            explanation for this statement lies in the logical and historical
            subsumption of literary written texts by all written texts. In the
            subsumption of written texts by spoken verbal behavior, in the
            subsumption of spoken verbal behavior by semiotic behavior, and in
            the subsumption of semiotic behavior by whatever it is we are
            responding to when we use the word "meaning." If Professor Booth
            goes into his usual coffee shop to get his morning coffee, and says
            to the waiter, "I'd like a cup of coffee, please," and the waiter
            brings it to him, what has happened? What is the methodology of the
            waiter? It is not absurd to ask why the waiter does not bring the
            America Cup filled to the brim with unroasted coffee beans, nor why
            Professor Booth does not say, "I asked you for a cup of coffee, but
            you have brought me a cup of mostly hot water." Moreover, if
            Professor Booth searches the literature of linguistics and of
            psychology in order to locate those studies and experiments which
            will tell him about the methodology of the waiter, he will find
            very little. The original program of linguistics set forth a
            hierarchy of investigation, beginning with phonemics, and going on
            through morphemics, syntactics, semantics, to pragmatics. But as
            yet very little has been accomplished above syntactics.
            Psychologists, at least of the typical academic breed, seem to be
            unaware of the problem.
             
            Morse Peckham, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at the University of South Carolina, is the author of
            Beyond the Tragic Vision, Man's Rage for Chaos, Victorian
            Revolutionaries, Art and Pornography, Explanation and Power: An
            Inquiry into the Control of Human Behavior, and two volumes of
            collected essays, The Triumph of Romanticism and Romanticism and
            Behavior.
