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René Wellek
         The New Criticism: Pro and Contra
         The new methods, the tone, and new taste are clearly discernible
            first in the early articles and books of John Crowe Ransom, Allen
            Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Yvor Winters, and somewhat
            later in Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and William K.
            Wimsatt. . . . Still, something tells us that there is some sense
            in grouping these critics together. Most obviously they are held
            together by their reaction against the preceding or contemporary
            critical schools and views mentioned before. They all reject the
            kind of metaphorical, evocative criticism practiced by the
            impressionists. Tate, Blackmur, Burke, and Winters contributed to a
            symposium highly critical of the neo-Humanists, and others voiced
            their rejection elsewhere. They all had no use for Mencken and Van
            Wyck Brooks, particularly after Brooks became a violent enemy of
            all modernism. Furthermore, they were almost unanimous in their
            rejection of Marxism, with the single exception of Kenneth Burke,
            who in the thirties passed through a Marxist phase and, anyhow,
            after his first book moved away from his neo-critical beginnings.
            What, however, in the American situation mattered most was that
            they were united in their opposition to the prevailing methods,
            doctrines, and views of academic English literary scholarship.
            There, in a way the younger generation may find it difficult to
            realize, a purely philological and historical scholarship dominated
            all instruction, publication, and promotion. I remember that when I
            first came to study English literature in the Princeton graduate
            school in 1927, fifty years ago, no course in American literature,
            none in modern literature, and none in criticism was offered. Of
            all my learned teachers only Morris W. Croll had any interest in
            aesthetics or even ideas. Most of the New Critics were college
            teachers and had to make their way in an environment hostile to any
            and all criticism. Only Kenneth Burke was and remained a freelance
            man of letters, though he taught in later years occasionally at
            Bennington College and briefly at the University of Chicago. But he
            very early deserted the New Criticism. It took Blackmur, Tate, and
            Winters years to get academic recognition, often against stiff
            opposition, and even Ransom, R. P. Warren, and Cleanth Brooks,
            established in quieter places, had their troubles. Ransom's paper
            "Criticism, Inc." (1937) pleaded for the academic establishment of
            criticism, and thanks to him and others criticism is now taught in
            most American colleges and universities. But it was an uphill
            fight. I still remember vividly the acrimony of the conflict
            between criticism and literary history at the University of Iowa,
            where I was a member of the English Department from 1939 to 1946.
             
            René Wellek, Sterling Professor Emeritus of comparative literature
            at Yale University, is the author of Theory of Literature (with
            Austin Warren) and of A History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950. He
            has contributed "Notes and Exchanges Between René Wellek and Wayne
            C. Booth" (Autumn 1977) and "A Rejoinder to Gerald Graff" (Spring
            1979) to .
Stanley E. Fish
         Normal Circumstances, Literary Language, Direct Speech Acts, the
            Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without_Saying,_and
            Other Special Cases
         A sentence is never not in a context. We are never not in a
            situation. A statute is never not read in the light on some
            purpose. A set of interpretative assumptions is always in force. A
            sentence that seems to need no interpretation is already the
            product of one...No sentence is ever apprehended independently of
            some or other illocutionary force. Illocutionary force is the key
            term in speech-act theory. It refers to the way an utterance is
            taken as an order, a warning, a promise, a proposal, a
            request, etc. and the theory's strongest assertion is that no
            utterance is ever taken purely, that is, without already having
            been understood as the performance of some illocutionary act.
            Consider, as an example, the sentence "I will go." Depending on the
            context in which it is uttered, "I will go" can be understood as a
            promise, a threat, a warning, a report, a prediction, etc., but it
            will always be understood as one of these, and it will never be an
            unsituated kernel of pure semantic value. In other words, "I will
            go" does not have a basic or primary meaning which is then put to
            various illocutionary uses; rather, "I will go" is known only in
            its illocutionary lives, and in each of them its meaning will be
            different. Moreover, if the meaning of a sentence is a function of
            its illocutionary force (the way it is taken), and if illocutionary
            force varies with the circumstances, then illocutionary force is
            not a property of sentences, but of situations. That is, while a
            sentence will always have an illocutionary force (because otherwise
            it would have no meaning), the illocutionary force it has will not
            always be the same.
             
            Stanley E. Fish is the author of, among many other works, Is There
            a Text in This Class? Interpretative Authority in the Classroom and
            in Literary Criticism, and The Living Temple: George Herbert and
            Catechizing. His contributions to  include "Facts
            and Fictions: A Reply to Ralph Rader" (June 1975), "Interpreting
            the Variorum" (Spring 1976), "Interpreting 'Interpreting the
            Variorum'" (Autumn 1976), "A Reply to John Reichert; or, How to
            Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Interpretation" (Autumn 1979), and
            "One More Time" (Summer 1980).
Rudolf Arnheim
         A Stricture on Space and Time
         The clearest instances of Time experience in music can be observed
            when the melodic and harmonic structure of a work announces the
            approach to a climax, for example, the finale. A goal is
            established in the awareness of the listener and acts as an
            independent system toward which music is striving. Most other
            examples that come to mind are extra-musical, that is, they refer
            to music in relation to something outside of it. A listener who
            instead of moving with the flow of the musical happening remains
            outside of it and watches the arriving and passing of phrase after
            phrase as though he were watching a parade from a viewing stand
            places himself in a separate temporal system whose relation to that
            of the music itself is governed by Time. Compare also the radio
            performance scheduled to finish on the hour or the state of mind of
            a concertgoer anxious to make the 11:20 suburban train home.
             
            A literary narrative, like music, tends to be perceived as an
            ongoing flow. No reference to time is relevant for a description of
            the sequential action. The work sprouts and grows. But whenever the
            continuity is broken (for example, when one of the characters of
            the story reappears a while later), the appearances may form
            separate systems. The only medium that can bridge the gap may be
            Time, in which both are embedded. This is generally considered a
            compositional flaw. A skillful narrator avoids such a break by
            providing a filament that connects past and present appearances
            "amodally," as psychologists call it, that is, the way a train's
            progress is seen as remaining uninterrupted even when it is hidden
            for a moment by a tunnel. But when Time is embodied as an authentic
            literary character, such as the "devouring Time" of Shakespeare's
            nineteenth sonnet, which blunts the lion's paws and plucks the
            tiger's teeth, it becomes an active system of its own and thus
            deserves the capitalization.
             
            Rudolf Arnheim is the author of Art and Visual Perception: A
            Psychology of the Creative Eye, Toward a Psychology of Art, and The
            Dynamics of Architectural Form. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "On the Nature of Photography" (September 1974) and "A
            Plea for Visual Thinking" (Spring 1980).
John Hope Franklin
         George Washington Williams and the Beginnings of Afro-American
            Historiography
         But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his
            white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the
            blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called
            attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any
            acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the
            historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-
            Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their
            groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional
            historians, he gave heart and encouragement to future Afro-American
            historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887,
            nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk
            University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk
            Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we
            have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who
            judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The
            Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may
            justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G.
            Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life
            and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described
            Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable
            accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and
            Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-
            American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that
            George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of
            Afro-American historiography.
             
            ·  1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.
            ·  2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers
            and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was
            executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life
            and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915.
             
            John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical
            Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He
            is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of
            History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other
            works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americansand A
            Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North.
Edward W. Said
         The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions
         Derrida and Foucault are opposed to each other on a number of
            grounds, and perhaps the one specially singled out in Foucault's
            attack on Derrida that Derrida is concerned only with
            "reading" a text and that a text is nothing more than the "traces"
            found there by the reader would be the appropriate one to
            begin with here.1 According to Foucault, if the text is important
            for Derrida because its real situation is literally an abysmally
            textual element, l'écriture en abîme with which (Derrida says in
            "La double séance") criticism so far has been unable really to
            deal,2 then for Foucault the text is important because it inhabits
            an element of power (pouvoir) with a decisive claim on actuality,
            even though that power is invisible or implied. Derrida's criticism
            therefore moves us into the text, Foucault's in and out of it.
             
            ·  1. Michel Foucault's attack on Derrida is to be found in an
            appendix to the later version of Folie et déraison: Historie de la
            folie à l'âge classique (Paris, 1972), pp. 583-602; the earlier
            edition has been translated into English: Madness and Civilization:
            A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard
            (New York, 1965).
            ·  2. Jacques Derrida, La Dissémination (Paris, 1972), p. 297.
             
            Edward W. Said, Parr Professor of English and comparative
            literature at Columbia University, is the author of Orientalism and
            The Question of Palestine, along with numerous publications on
            literature, politics, and culture; his Beginnings: Intention and
            Method received the first annual Lionel Trilling Memorial Award.
            "The Problem of Textuality" will appear in a slightly different
            form in his Criticism between Culture and System.
Berel Lang
         Style as Instrumental, Style as Person
         The question, How is style possible? assumes the existence of style
            and sufficient evidence for this assertion, as well as for
            determining what it means, appears in the talk about style, in the
            deployment of stylistic categories. That talk extends in common
            usage to such attenuated references as styles in dress, styles of
            social exchange, life-styles. To limit the discussion, I speak here
            primarily of artistic style, but it will be clear that the
            ramifications of the argument extend beyond the arts, indeed beyond
            style as well.
             
            When we pursue this line of inference, the practical question of
            what the use or function of stylistic analysis is plays a
            controlling role and in effect sets a dialectic in motion. For if,
            as I suggest, there is a stopping short in the
            first adverbial or instrumental model of style and an
            amending completeness in the first verbial or
            transitive model, that difference starts from their
            respective conceptions of the function which stylistic analysis and
            finally style itself serve. It is important, then, to keep the
            question of function in mind, to allow it to spend its own force;
            that question serves, in fact, as a mediating link between the
            appearance of style and the discourse about it, on the one hand,
            and the final question of how style is possible, on the other. The
            two models of style to be described differ explicitly on the last
            of these points, and they differ at least tacitly in their
            conception of the mediating link, the question of the function or
            use of style. Those differences in turn make a practical difference
            even in the immediate description of particular styles.
             
            Berel Lang, whose "Space, Time, and Philosophical Style" appeared
            in the Winter 1975 issue of , is professor of
            philosophy at the University of Colorado, the author of Art and
            Inquiry, co-editor of Marxism and Art: Writings in Aesthetics and
            Criticism, and the editor of The Concept of Style. "Style as
            Instrument, Style as Person" is part of Person and Representation:
            The Intentions of Style.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik
         The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts_on_Music,
            Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment
         The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the
            individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise
            particularly strong reservations about any critical method as
            preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art
            and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the
            isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between
            music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the
            assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media
            within which the same techniques for verifying competence (in
            Chomsky's sense) and correctness of usage (related to Chomsky's
            "performance") can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that
            musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification
            through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what
            will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is,
            through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can
            test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a
            more general and a more particularized level of a system (such as
            the levels of sound and of meaning, or the underlying level of a
            code as opposed to the surface level of the message) and observing
            each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of
            verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have
            analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris
            (pp. 231-33) and of Noam Chomsky (pp. 392-92); interestingly these
            methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely
            far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments
            by single individuals, especially by individual "experts."
             
            · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation
            in Raw and Cooked (p. 24) differs from standard accounts such as
            André Martinet's (summarized by Nattiez, p. 421) and John Lyons' in
            Noam Chomsky (New York, 1970), pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to
            include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it
            is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of
            meaning which is both semantic and morphemic.
             
            Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the
            University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of
            nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation
            between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has
            contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical
            Music" (Autumn 1979) to .
Richard Shiff
         Seeing Cézanne
         While different groups of viewers may have sought different values
            in Cézanne's art, the artist's manner of painting and personality
            both contributed to the ambiguity of his work. Until the last
            decade of his life he seldom exhibited, and even then his paintings
            seemed unfinished. He was generally regarded as an "incomplete"
            artist and often as a "primitive," one whose art was in some way
            simple or rudimentary, devoid of the refinements and complexities
            of his materialistic, industrialized (and, some commentators added,
            atheistic) society.1 He was seen as an isolated man who lived apart
            from other painters and found human relationship and communication
            difficult.
             
            Yet for some symbolists it was this alienation and mystery which
            made Cézanne's art so attractive. As early as 1891, Fénéon found it
            appropriate to refer to "the Cézanne tradition," a designation
            which indicates the influence of the legendary account of the
            artist promulgated by Gauguin and his associates.2 Gauguin had
            painted landscapes with the reclusive artist during the summer of
            1881, was impressed by his odd style, both personal and pictorial,
            and in a letter to Emile Schuffenecker of 14 January 1885 described
            Cézanne as embodying the mysticism of the Orient.3 Such a
            characterization held special meaning for those like Gauguin who
            had come more and more to search for an ultimate truth in the
            experience of the mystical, the transcendental, the intensely real.
            For the symbolist painter or writer, primitives lived in harmony
            with the real world; they had an intuitive, mythic understanding of
            their environment. Most modern Europeans, in contrast, viewed the
            world through false and short-sighted analytic reason and thus saw
            only immediate causes and effects, not eternal universal
            principles. They were Christians who could not see the truth of
            Buddhism; they were socially indoctrinated Parisians who could not
            see the purer structure of human society in provincial Brittany;
            they were refined painters of nature who could not see the
            expressive power of a flat area of color surrounded by a broad
            outline. For Gauguin and the symbolists, Cézanne, living in
            isolation in his seemingly unsophisticated native Provence,
            qualified as an enlightened contemporary, an inspiring force, a
            primitive artist.
             
            · 1. For Cézanne as "incomplete," see, e.g. Thadée Natanson, "Paul
            Cézanne." Revue blanche 9 (1 December 1895), p. 496; and Gustave
            Geoffrey, "Paul Cézanne" (16 November 1895), in La Vie artistique
            (Paris, 1900), p. 218. For Cézanne as "primitive," see, e.g.,
            Georges Lecomte, L'Arte impressionniste (Paris, 1892), pp. 30-31;
            and Maurice Denis, "Cézanne" (9 September 1907), in Théories, 1890-
            1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un nouvel ordre classique,
            2d ed. (Paris, 1912), p. 246. The late nineteenth-century notion of
            the "primitive" artist was very broad. Included in the category of
            primitives were artists of the ancient Orient, artists of the
            earlier stages of development of various Western styles (such as
            the Archaic Greeks and the pre-Raphaelite Italians), provincial or
            uneducated European artists, and those of contemporary non-European
            societies. With regard to the negative evaluation of modern Western
            European society, see, e.g., Victor de Laprade, Le Sentiment de la
            nature chez les modernes, 2d ed. (Paris, 1870), pp. 483-88; and
            Albert Aurier, "Essai sur une nouvelle méthode de critique" (1892),
            "Le Symbolisme en peinture: Paul Gauguin" (9 February 1891), and
            "Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh" (January 1890), in Oeuvres posthumes
            (Paris, 1893), pp. 202, 216, 262-63.
            · 2. Félix Fénéon, "Paul Gauguin" (23 May 1891), in Oeuvres plus
            que complètes, ed. Joan Halperin, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1970), 1:192.
            · 3. Lettres de Gauguin à sa femme et à ses amis, ed. Maurice
            Malingue (Paris, 1946), p. 45. Félix Fénéon, André Mellerio, and
            Emile Bernard also associated Cézanne's style with mysticism.
             
            Richard Shiff is an associate professor of art at the University of
            North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written a related article,
            "The End of Impressionism: A Study of Theories of Artistic
            Expression". His contributions to  are "Art and
            Life: A Metaphoric Relationship" (Autumn 1978) and, with Carl
            Pletsch, "History and Innovation" (Spring 1981).
Kenneth Burke
         (Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action
         Cicero could both orate and write a treatise on oratory. A dog can
            bark but he can't write a tract on barking.
             
            If all typically symbol-using animals (that is, humans) were
            suddenly obliterated, their realm of symbolic action would be
            correspondingly obliterated.
             
            The earth would be but a realm of planetary, geologic,
            meteorological motion, including the motions of whatever nonhuman
            biological organisms happened to survive.
             
            The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action;
            but there could be no symbolic action unless grounded in the realm
            of motion, the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our
            symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when
            motions go on after all our breed will have vanished.
             
            Kenneth Burke is now developing the implications of the position
            stated in the present essay. He is also editing his Symbolic of
            Motives, a work designed to complement his Grammar of Motives and
            Rhetoric of Motives. His contributions to  are "In
            Response to Booth: Dancing with Tears in my Eyes" (September 1974),
            "Post-Poesque Derivation of a Terministic Cluster" (Winter 1977),
            "A Critical Load, Beyond that Door; or, Before the Ultimate
            Confrontation; or, When Thinking of Deconstructionist
            Structuralists; or, A Hermeneutic Fantasy" (Autumn 1978), and
            "Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment"
            (Winter 1978). The first section of "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/
            (Symbolic) Action" was presented at a symposium at New York
            University in May 1976 and will appear in a slightly altered
            version in the report of those proceedings, Psychoanalysis,
            Criticism, and Creativity: A French-American Dialogue.
James R. Kincaid
         Pluralistic Monism
         I admire Robert Denham's enlightening and often very amusing
            response ("The No-Man's Land of Competing Patterns," Critical
            Inquiry 4 [Autumn 1977]: 194-202) to my "Coherent Readers,
            Incoherent Texts"  3 [Summer 1977]:781-802). Not
            surprisingly, however, I remain unconvinced by its arguments, large
            or small. This may sound defensive, partly because it is, but I do
            wonder if his use of pluralistic sound sense is quite so fresh or
            so formidable as he takes it to be. . . . I think Denham
            understands quite accurately my use of "genre" as representing a
            traditional structure for organizing plot, character, images,
            tones, and the like. I think it is true, also, that I use the word
            to refer both to narrative pattern and to what he calls
            "intention," that I use both Frye and Sacks as examples of
            convincing distinctions among ordering patterns. Of course Denham
            is right in saying that these systems are not necessarily
            coordinate, that they cover species and subspecies alike, and that
            the generic patterns are not of the same order. One might have a
            represented action that is comic, tragic, or even "serious." I
            wonder if all this really makes my argument "sometimes difficult to
            follow" (p. 196). I had thought that I was signaling clearly the
            switch from Frye to Sacks, that neither was using "genre" in an
            unfamiliar or restrictive sense, and that both presented useful
            systems that were comprehensive and thus adaptable as time
            has surely shown for the labeling and pigeonholing needs of
            those seeking coherence at all costs. Since Frye sees narrative
            patterns as "pre-generic," it would not be difficult to work out
            coordination simply by saying that Sacks' three general categories
            of fiction could each exist in any of Frye's twenty-four phases.
            But things are not that simple, and more important, such devices
            would surely distract a reader I wanted to be in search of other
            game. Most of us switch freely from system to system, understanding
            "genre" to refer to a class that includes epic-drama-lyric-novel, a
            class that includes comedy-tragedy-romance-irony, a class that
            includes apologue-satire-represented action. As I see it, the only
            danger lies in mixing incompatible systems.
             
            James R. Kincaid is professor of English at the University of
            Colorado at Boulder. His works include Dickens and the Rhetoric of
            Laughter, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns,
            and The Novels of Anthony Trollope. His contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Coherent Readers, Incoherent Text" (Summer 1977), and
            "Fiction and the Shape of Belief: Fifteen Years Later" (Winter
            1979).
