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Murray Krieger
         Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the_Duplicity
            of Metaphor
         Our usual view of the Renaissance poetic, as we derive it from the
            explicit statements which we normally cite, sees it primarily as a
            rhetorical theory which is essentially Platonic in the universal
            meanings behind individual words, images, or fictions. Accordingly,
            poetic words, images, or fictions are taken to be purely
            allegorical, functioning as arbitrary or at most as conventional
            signs: each word, image, or fiction is seen as thoroughly
            dispensable, indeed interchangeable with others, to be used just so
            long as we can get beyond it to the ultimate meaning which it
            presumably signifies. This rather simple if not
            simplistic semiology leaves the body of poetry as empty as
            modern post-Saussurean linguistics often leaves the body of
            language. By treating all poetic devices as transparent elements
            through which various universal "truths" are revealed, the
            rhetorical/allegorical theory converts all the poet's dispositions
            of words into devices of persuasion on the service of a function
            higher than that of poetry. Such is the way that, for example, a
            conservative, widely influential theorist like Scaliger clearly
            formulated the principle. And for as careful a commentator on
            Renaissance imagery as Rosemund Tuve, these are the farthest
            reaches of the Renaissance poetic; she argues that any more subtle
            a claim is merely the consequence of the modern mind trying
            anachronistically to sophisticate an older tradition. Her
            examination of explicit statements by major Renaissance writers on
            poetics finds reinforcement in the logic of Petrus Ramus as she
            extends it to a total stylistics, or even to a linguistics.1
             
            ·  1. Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery:
            Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago, 1947).
             
            Murray Krieger, University Professor of English and director of The
            Irvine School of Criticism and Theory at the University of
            California at Irvine, is the author of, among other works, The
            Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, and, most recently, Theory of
            Criticism: A Tradition and its System. The present essay is part of
            his book, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical History
            and Theory. "Fiction, History, and Empirical Reality," his previous
            contribution to , appeared in the Winter 1974
            issue.
Peter Schwenger
         The Masculine Mode
         Is there really such a thing as a masculine style of writing? What
            are its characteristics and why just these characteristics? Can we
            distinguish the masculine style from the explicit masculine
            content? The writers I will examine in this context are necessarily
            a selection from the number of those who might be included. They
            are all twentieth-century authors. Perhaps, as Woolf suggests in A
            Room of One's Own, it is because of the beginnings of the women's
            movement in the preceding century that "virility has now become
            self-conscious."1 At any rate there seems to be little explicit
            questioning of the male role, in literature or outside it, until
            our own century. I do not mean to suggest, however, that these
            writers only question the received images of maleness; often they
            set out to validate those images or, through such images, to
            validate themselves. Their explorations of maleness are not
            abstract but intensely individual. They are not straightforward but
            riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. As a result, it is
            difficult to extract didactic points from their works. Always
            knowledge is rooted in experience and inseparable from it. The
            masculine mode is above all an attempt to render a certain maleness
            of experience.
             
            ·  1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1928; New York, 1963),
            p. 105.
             
            Peter Schwenger, assistant professor of English at Mount St.
            Vincent University in Halifax, has written Phallic Critiques, which
            examines the relation between masculinity and literary styles.
             
            See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by
            Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2
Moody E. Prior
         Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom
         The character of Tom has the proportions of a mythic figure. His
            story has little of the melodrama of the secondary plot for his
            heroism in meeting the trials of slavery is manifested not in
            outward risks and adventures but in inner strength. In Simon
            Legree, Tom's final adversary, Stowe provides a perfect antithesis,
            an ultimate image of what slavery must do to the master who takes
            advantage of his position and uses his power without restraint; for
            Legree is an ambitious Vermonter, not a Southern, an owner, not an
            overseer, and a product of the raw, final phase of slavery in the
            cotton plantations of the deep South. Legree bends every effort to
            brutalize Tom as though of necessity to prove that he and the South
            are right about Negroes and slavery, and Tom remains firm in his
            humanity and so disproves the sordid myth of his oppressor. It is
            Legree who is dehumanized by the institution of slavery. Tom
            emerges from the struggle as an example not simply of a black
            Christian slave, but of a heroic man in the face of intimidating
            and humiliating power.
             
            Moody E. Prior, emeritus professor of English and former dean of
            the graduate school of Northwestern University, is the author of
            The Language of Tragedy, Science and the Humanities, and The Drama
            of Power-Studies in Shakespeare's History Plays.
             
            See also: "The Ethics of Uncle Tom's Children" by Tommie Shelby in
            Vol. 38, No. 3
Strother Purdy
         Stalingrad and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation
         In serious art, where the best talents of each generation work, we
            have seen the elimination of didacticism, moral lessons, and the
            sentimentality so characteristic of the preceding century; in their
            place we find the celebration of dryness, acerbity, irony,
            withdrawal from emotion, balance in tension, the reduction of the
            authorial and, finally, the human presence: "empty words,
            corresponding to the void in things."1 Literature as practiced and
            as taught in the schools has tended toward the allusive and the
            elusive, intellectual games, the pastiche, the echo, the comment on
            the comment. Brought into relation with twentieth-century political
            extremism, it has given a large allowance to the grotesque subject
            and mirrored that subject in an undermining of human consciousness,
            that naïvely assumed constant that enables moral judgment. While
            few regret the death of Emmeline Grangerford, it may be that she
            died only to bequeath us Oskar Mazerath. The corrective swing taken
            by our literature has given us harpsichord exercises in response to
            megalithic politics, and "tragedy," the name of our highest
            inherited literary form, a form we no longer pursue, becomes a
            devalued label to paste in traffic accidents and on My Lai. Like
            the Germans who found it "poor form" to talk about certain kinds of
            killing,2 we may be in a position where our aesthetics works to
            block our morality.
             
            ·  1. Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York, 1966), p. 259.
            ·  2. Raul Hilberg cites in relation to this point the 4 October
            1943 speech of Heinrich Himmler on the extermination of the Jews:
            "It was with us, thank God, an inborn gift of tactfulness, that we
            have never conversed about this matter, never spoken about it.
            Every one of us was horrified, and yet every one of us knew that we
            could do it again if it were ordered and if it were necessary" (The
            Destruction of the European Jews [Chicago, 1961], p. 652.
             
            Strother Purdy, professor of English at Marquette University, is
            the author of The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary
            Literature, and Henry James and articles of literary and film
            criticism. He has contributed "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Reply to Lawrence
            W. Hyman" (Summer 1980) to .
Mark Spilka
         The Robber in the Bedroom: or, The Thief_of_Love:_A_Woolfian
            Grieving in Six Novels and Two Memoirs
         Whether in her life or in her work, however, this difficulty with
            grieving recurs too often, and too insistently, to be passed off as
            a matter of artistic temperament. Its presence in her experimental
            fiction elegies for her dead brother in To the Lighthouse,
            the taboo on grieving in Mrs. Dalloway suggests rather a
            compulsive need to cope with death. Indeed, while writing To the
            Lighthouse she had even thought of supplanting "novel" as the name
            for her books with something like "elegy." Perhaps "abortive
            elegies for our times" would be more appropriate since she refuses
            in these books to deal with death and grieving in any direct or
            open way, and her elegiac impulse by which writer and reader
            alike may normally work out grief through formal measures is
            delayed, disguised, or thwarted, at best only partially appeased.
            Her refusal seems to me characteristic of our times, or of that
            struggle against Victorian odds which helped to make our times.
             
            Mark Spilka, professor of English at Brown University and editor of
            Novel, is the author of works on Lawrence, Dickens, and Kafka. The
            present essay will be a chapter in his Virginia Woolf's Quarrel
            with Grieving.
             
            See also: "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" by
            Barbara Currier Bell and Carol Ohmann in Vol. 1, No. 2
John Paul Russo
         A Study in Influence: The Moore-Richards Paradigm
         "Hard task to analyze a soul. . . ." We would do well to let
            Wordsworth's comment guide our questioning. Have we avoided "a
            mystical and idle sense" of an influence? Have we lost our way
            tracking the "most obvious and particular thought?" Have our
            conclusions been "in the words of reason deeply weighed?" We might
            well wonder with such a supreme influence on a life that is firmly
            stamped by independence and originality, a source of an immense
            influence in itself. [G. E.] Moore's philosophy provided the young
            [I. A.] Richards with terms and concepts for his psychological
            aesthetics and criticism, though Richards was not long in reacting
            to and passing beyond this influence. More enduring was the
            influence on the nature of meaning, on modes of comprehending
            through language analysis more enduring and pervasive, though
            less traceable. Then, there is Moore's example of employing
            multiple hypotheses to which, in his application, Richards would
            give the name of complementarity. Lastly, Moore's personal
            influence reached deeply into the student's character, and if the
            influence did not initiate, it fortified and still fortifies a
            quest for sincerity, a Socratic quest for which we can scarcely
            find a "beginning."
             
            John Paul Russo is associate professor of English at Camden
            College, Rutgers University, the editor of I. A. Richards'
            Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, and the author of Alexander
            Pope: Tradition and Identity.
Robert McGregor
         "Art" Again
         So far my examples have illustrated purely descriptive and
            evaluative uses of "work of art," but my main claim is that most
            uses are not pure. Take a controversial example. Christo recently
            hung a huge, bright orange curtain between the sides of a canyon in
            Rifle Gap, Colorado. The curtain stretched all the way across the
            canyon, filled the canyon from top to bottom, and had a hole cut
            out for the road at the base of the canyon to pass through. There
            was a good deal of controversy in Colorado at the time about
            whether the curtain was a work of art. . . . First, the curtain was
            not in a traditional medium, and this alone was enough to
            disqualify it as a work of art for some people. Still, it was an
            artifact, it was intended for public observation and contemplation,
            and it had no essential utilitarian function. That it met these
            criteria there could be no doubt, and this was enough for some to
            consider it a work of art. Others, however, required more before
            deciding. Of those, some said that a great deal of skill was
            required to produce it; that it definitely had significant formal
            qualities especially the dramatic contrast in line and color
            between it and the completely natural surroundings; that it was
            certainly a creative endeavor; and that it was most conducive to
            aesthetic experience comparable to certain natural phenomena.
            For these people it was, without a doubt, a work of art for both
            descriptive and evaluative reasons. Others, however, were much less
            charitable. They thought that if the production required skill at
            all, it was engineering not artistic skill; that not only did it
            not have significant formal qualities, it was formally trivial and
            sterile; that perhaps it was novel, but to call it creative was
            beyond the pale; that far from being conducive to aesthetic
            experience, it was a blight upon the landscape. Therefore, it was
            not a work of art. Finally, there were those people who were not
            sure which characteristics to attribute to the Christo production
            and were therefore uncertain whether it was a work of art.
             
            Robert McGregor is an associate professor of philosophy at the
            University of Denver and is the author of several articles on
            aesthetics.
             
            See also: "Christo's Gates and Gilo's Wall" by W. J. T. Mitchell in
            Vol. 32, No. 4
Rawdon Wilson
         The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term
         It is not possible to face a text and announce "I shall now talk
            about character" in the same way that one might say "I shall now
            talk about plot" or "metaphor." For several reasons not least
            of which is the absence of a thoughtful critical
            tradition character is much more difficult to talk about than
            most other literary concepts. Most of what has been written on the
            subject of character, whether in recent years or in the distant
            past, can be seen to come under one of four possible headings. I do
            not think of these classifications as being mutually exclusive,
            although the emphasis upon one aspect of the problem of character
            probably tends to pull one towards a definite position.
             
            Briefly, these positions are: (1) that characters are products of
            the author's mind memories, encapsulations of his experience
            or else (one might say) split-off slivers of his mind or self; (2)
            that characters are functions of the text in which they
            appear embodiments of theme and idea to be considered
            much as tokens, pieces, or counters in a game; (3) that characters
            are entirely artificial, constructs to be analyzed in terms of the
            compositional techniques that have gone into their making; (4) that
            characters are, for the purposes of critical reading, to be
            considered as if they were actual persons, and the emphasis in
            criticism its sole business, in fact to discuss the
            response they engender in an intelligent reader.
             
            Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of
            Alberta, has written widely on English and Spanish literature. His
            previous contribution to , "On Character: A Reply
            to Martin Price," appeared in the Autumn 1975 issue. The present
            essay was originally presented in an earlier form at the University
            of Melbourne and at the University of Alberta.
Reuven Tsur
         Levels of Information Processing in Reading Poetry
         I have based my psychological hypotheses on studies in perception
            and in personality. Research in these two areas began
            independently, but by the late forties the supposedly unconnected
            processes came to be seen as different aspects of one process. For
            instance, a low tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive
            dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with lack of
            emotional responsiveness, dogmatism, and authoritarianism;
            conversely, a high tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and cognitive
            dissonance was found to be significantly correlated with tolerance
            of emotional ambivalence, openness to new experience, and a liberal
            world view.1 Later studies, primarily those conducted in the
            sixties, then established strong correlations between these
            findings and information-processing styles.
             
            Information processing involves three stages: first, stimuli are
            selected from the environment (in our case, the "environment" will
            be that of poems); these stimuli are then arranged into
            "dimensions"; finally, if two or more dimensions result, they are
            compared and/or combined according to certain rules. H. M. Schroder
            and his colleagues (upon whose work I have drawn liberally) have
            established correlations between personality styles and styles of
            information processing.2 For example, an intolerant
            personality that is, one with a low integration
            index "identifies and organizes stimuli in a fixed way, and
            the rules derived from existing schemata are explicit in defining
            this one way" (p. 177). What psychologists call an "abstract
            personality" and identify in terms of "flexibility" or "tolerance
            of ambiguity" what in literary studies is most conveniently
            called "negative capability" is not necessarily characterized
            as lacking rules but rather as possessing a greater number of
            conflicting rules on a lower level which may be accommodated by
            rules on a higher level.
             
            ·  1. See Jerome S. Bruner and David Krech, eds., Perception and
            Personality,2nd ed. (New York, 1968) and Robert R. Blake and Glenn
            V. Ramsey, eds., Perception: An Approach to Personality (New York,
            1951). Although, as Else Frenkel-Brunswick says, "rigidity in one
            respect may go with flexibility in another," she also adds: "There
            is some indication that in the case of distinct intolerance of
            emotional ambivalence one may as a rule be able to locate at least
            some aspects of intolerance of cognitive ambiguity although these
            may often be more apparent on a higher level than that of
            perception proper" ("Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional and
            Perceptual Personality Variable," in Perception and Personality,
            pp. 139 and 140.) The present essay, since it is one section of a
            projected larger study, deals with the issues inherent in this
            approach in only a limited fashion. (For a related essay, see my
            "Two Critical Attitudes: Quest for Certitude and Negative
            Capability," College English 36 [March 1975]: 776-88.) One could,
            for instance, quote whole essays in this branch of psychology
            dealing with ambiguity and point to their relevance for some
            aspects of literary study and the teaching of literature.
            Ambiguity, of course, is also a central term in New Criticism. See
            William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1930) and Ernst
            Kris and Abraham Kaplan, "Aesthetic Ambiguity," in Psychoanalytic
            Explorations in Art, ed. Kris (New York, 1951), pp. 243-64.
            ·  2. H. M. Schroder, M. J. Driver, and S. Streufert, "Levels of
            Information Processing," in Thought and Personality, ed. Peter B.
            Warr (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 174-91. All citations to this work
            will appear in the text.
             
            Reuven Tsur, senior lecturer in Hebrew literature at Tel-Aviv
            University, is the author of several books in Hebrew on medieval
            and modern Hebrew poetry and, in English, A Perception-Oriented
            Theory of Metre.
Philipp P. Fehl
         Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni_Domenico_Tiepolo
            and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting
         Capricci are nonsense drawings that delineate an elusive but
            inevitable sense behind or, better, within the palpable nonsense of
            the elementary proposition of a drawing; they are capers on a
            tightrope stretched between the poles of pathos and the ridiculous.
            We shall succeed in not falling only if we step forward boldly and
            know not only what we are doing but also what we are up against in
            the making of a picture as well as in living in the world. For the
            world, in its yawning impudence of death and the dance of blind
            eagerness, ambition, and noisy speechlessness, makes us look to art
            not, or not necessarily, to escape from the world (even if escaping
            is a birthright) but rather to learn how to take its measure. . . .
            There is a painting ["St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching"] joined to the
            Passion cycle in S. Polo which demonstrates as well as any paradox
            ever will how Giandomenico joined piety and irony in his religious
            art without curtailing the glory of either. He arrives, as it were,
            at a God-fearing irony. We see St. Vincent Ferrer preaching. He
            speaks so eloquently, so convincingly in praise of the divine
            truth, that light shines forth from him and angel's wings grow on
            his shoulders. Fascinated by the miracle but even more so by the
            saint's words, his audience sits spellbound at his feet; in the
            foreground, however, sits a youth, a fop perhaps, gorgeously
            dressed, with a singular smile on his face, his hand musingly
            poised to his cheek, who looks at us quizzically. He is the link
            between us and the miracle. "Can you believe it?" says the smile,
            and perhaps "I did not and yes how can you now not
            believe it, you need but look - as I did - for there it is!" It is,
            I think, the face of one who knows about the truth of the absurd
            and its inner logic. Credo quia absurdum: if it were not so, we
            could prove the existence of God by feeding data into a computer,
            and there would be many believers, whose faith, in turn, deserved
            but little credit. Needless to say, perhaps, the face that so
            speaks to us in laughter joined to wonder is a self-portrait.1
             
            ·  1. In S. Polo the painting of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching hangs
            opposite a matching picture of The Finding of the True Cross. There
            is a beautiful young woman on the right who looks at us
            beseechingly and with her right hand points at the cross. Giovanni
            Domenico Tiepolo who looks out of St. Vincent Ferrer Preaching
            cannot help but see this lady (who may be a portrait figure) and be
            affected by her earnest gesture. For a reproduction of the
            painting, see Maruz, G. D. Tiepolo, plate 22.
             
            Philipp P. Fehl is a professor in the department of art and design
            at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has edited
            (with Raina Fehl and Keith Aldrich) Franciscus Junius: The
            Literature of Classical Art. His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Turner's Classicism and the Problem of Periodization in
            the History of Art," appeared in the Autumn 1976 issue; the present
            essay was delivered in an earlier version at Stanford University in
            1976 and is included in his collection of essays, Art and
            Mortality. His capricci, Birds with Titles, were exhibited in a
            one-man show at Kenyon College.
