Erwin Panofsky
         The Concept of Artistic Volition
         Objections arise to the concept of artistic intention based upon
            the psychology of a period. Here too we experience trends or
            volitions which can only be explained by precisely those artistic
            creations which in their own turn demand an explanation on the
            basis of these trends and volitions. Thus "Gothic" man or the
            "primitive" from whose alleged existence we wish to explain a
            particular artistic product is in truth the hypostatized impression
            which has been culled from the works of art themselves. Or it is a
            question of intentions and evaluations which have become conscious
            as they find their formulation in the contemporary theory of art or
            in contemporary art criticism. Thus these formulations, just like
            the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves,
            can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products
            of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation.
            Here again this parallel phenomenon would, in its entirety,
            represent an extraordinarily interesting object of humanistic
            investigation, but it would be incapable of defining in detail a
            methodologically comprehensible volition. So, too, the view of art
            which accompanies a period's artistic output can express the
            artistic volition of the period in itself but cannot put a name to
            it for us. This view can be of eminent significance when we are
            seeking a logical explanation for the perception of tendencies
            dominating at a given time and thus also for the judgment of
            artistic volition at that time, which must also be interpreted.
            Erwin Panofsky, the renowned art historian, was professor at the
            Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, until his death
            in 1968. Among his many books and articles are Meaning in the
            Visual Arts, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Renaissance and
            Renascenes in Western Art. Kenneth Northcott is professor of German
            and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and the
            translator of Arnold Hauser's Sociology of Art(forthcoming). Joel
            Snyder is chairman of the committee on general studies in the
            humanities at the University of Chicago.
Jerome J. McGann
         The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner
         What does "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" mean? This question, in
            one form or another, has been asked of the poem from the beginning;
            indeed, so interesting and so dominant has this question been that
            Coleridge's poem now serves as one of our culture's standard texts
            for introducing students to poetic interpretation. The question has
            been, and still is, an important one, and I shall try to present
            here yet another answer to it. My approach, however, will differ
            slightly from the traditional ones, for I do not believe that we
            can arrive at a synthetic answer until we reflect upon the meaning
            of the question itself. I will begin, therefore, by reconsidering
            briefly the history of the poem's criticism. . . . A poem like the
            "Rime" encourages, therefore, the most diverse readings and
            interpretations. Since this encouragement is made in terms of the
            Christian economy, the interpretations have generally remained
            within the broad spiritualist terms, "heathen" terms, in Newman's
            view, which Coleridge's mind had allowed for. The historical method
            of the "Rime," however, had also prepared the ground for a
            thoroughly revisionist view of the poem, in which the entire
            ideological structure of its symbolist procedures would finally be
            able to be seen in their special historical terms.
Donald Wesling
         Difficulties of the Bardic: Literature and the Human_Voice
         Speech, like sound, "exists only when it is passing out of
            existence."1 Although confounded with the very breath of life,
            speech dies on the lips that give it form. This undulation of air,
            whose speechprint is so personal that we have not been able to
            build machines to recognize it, is born in the body but effaces,
            forgets the body. This quality of speech, that it takes support
            form the body but does not reside there, has evoked a debate about
            the role of voice which was doubtless begun earlier but has never
            been so sharply discussed, I think, as in the present generation:
            Must voice and the concept of the speaking subject be defined as a
            unity? Can we validate a definition of the self and what it means
            to be human through a physiology of voice or a metaphysics of
            voice? The logical and chronological priority of empirical speech,
            of utterances seemingly unplanned and unwritten, is what is at
            issue in this debate.2
            ·  1. Walter J. Ong, "The Word in Chains," In the Human Grain(New
            York, 1967), p. 53.
            ·  2. Spontaneous utterances are the subject matter of speech-act
            philosophy and sociolinguistics, disciplines that stress the social
            and communicative context which helps condition personal speaking.
            Such a privileging of voice also occurs in modern poetic theory,
            for example in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse" and in statements
            by Gary Snyder, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, but usually
            these writers show to what degree the oral must always remain a
            fiction in our era.
            Donald Wesling is professor of English at the University of
            California, San Diego. The author of The Chances of Rhyme: Device
            and Modernity, he is currently writing a critique of modern
            metrical theory, The Scissors of Meter: Grammetrics and
            Interpretation.
Roy Harvey Pearce
         Whitman Justified: The Poet in 1855
         Whitman was not one to be troubled about the solution of the
            problem of knowledge in particular, much less in general, nor for
            that matter was Emerson. Their way was to postulate solutions to
            problems just before they encountered them. My point, however, is
            that Whitman, with Emerson, did encounter a problem, the Diltheyan
            solution to which has tempted philosophers of history into our own
            time. If quoting Dilthey as a gloss on Emerson I would seem to want
            to involve Whitman in philosophical issues beyond his ken, then
            instead I would recall an earlier, quite fundamental statement of
            the mood, rather than one of the mode: "That which hath been is
            now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth
            that which is past." The King James version of these words from
            Revelations 3:16 is perhaps clarified in the Revised Standard
            version: "That which is, already has been; that which is to be,
            already has been , and God seeks what has been driven away."
            Roy Harvey Pearce is a professor of American literature at the
            University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The
            Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind;
            The Continuity of American Poetry; and Historicism Once More:
            Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar.
Harold Beaver
         Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland Barthes)
         Just consider, for sheer paranoia, the range of synonyms when the
            mask is ripped, the silence broken, the deferment brutally
            concluded: angel-face, arse-bandit, auntie, bent, bessie, bugger,
            bum-banger, bum boy, chicken, cocksucker, daisie, fag, faggot,
            fairy, flit, fruit, jasper, mincer; molly, nancy boy, nelly, pansy,
            patapoof, poofter, cream puff, powder puff, queen, queer, shit-
            stirrer, sissie, swish, sod, turd-burglar, pervert. For
            Aristophanes, as for Norman Mailer and Mary Whitehouse, buggery
            equaled coprophagy: a corrupt, destructive, hypocritical,
            excremental, urban scatology. Heterosexuality equalled the fecund,
            rural norm. Aristophanes' diet for a giant dung beetle was turds
            from a buggered boy: "he says he likes them well kneaded."1
            To this day degeneracy often seems to be just another code word for
            homosexuality, as does perversion and decadence; this very essay
            will seem to many a "decadent" project. Nor would I balk at the
            term as long as it is interpreted in the French sense: intent on
            fulfilling Baudelaire's program of transforming the erotically
            passive to the intellectually active, the voluptuous to rational
            self-mastery.
            ·  1.Literally, "a hetairekos boy": male prostitute, or boy-friend
            (Aristophanes Peace 11).
            Harold Beaver, reader of American literature at the University of
            Warwick, was recently elected to the new chair of American
            literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely
            on American literature and is currently completeing a collection of
            his articles, The Great American Masquerade
Nelson Goodman
         Routes of Reference
         Yet while all features of reality are dependent upon discourse, are
            there perhaps some features of discourse that are independent of
            reality the differences, for example, between the ways two
            discourses may say exactly the same thing? The old and ugly notion
            of synonomy rattles a warning here: Can there ever be two different
            discourses that say exactly the same thing in different ways, or
            does every difference between discourses make a difference in what
            is said? Luckily, we can pass over that general question here. We
            are concerned only with the specific question whether organization
            into referential chains and levels is purely conventional,
            independent of everything beyond discourse. And the plain answer is
            that such organization of discourse participates notably in the
            organization of a reality. A label in any nonnull application,
            literal or metaphorical, marks off entities of a certain kind, and
            even where the denotation is null, the label marks off labels of a
            certain kind that apply to that label. Just such marking off or
            selection of entities and relevant kinds makes them such as
            distinguished from the results of alternative organizations.
            Nelson Goodman, emeritus professor of philosophy at Harvard
            University and the author of, among other works, The Structure of
            Appearance, Ways of Worldmaking, and Problems and Projects, is
            currently working on projects in the performing arts and on a new
            collection of essays. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "The Status of Style' (Summer 1975), "Metaphor as
            Moonlighting" (Autumn 1979), "Twisted Tales; or, Story, Study, and
            Symphony" (Autumn 1980), and "The Telling and the Told" (Summer
            1981).
Alexander Nehamas
         The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative_Ideal
         The aim of interpretation is to capture the past in the future: to
            capture, not to recapture, first, because the iterative prefix
            suggests that meaning, which was once manifest, must now be found
            again. But the postulated author dispenses with this assumption.
            Literary texts are produced by very complicated actions, while the
            significance of even our simplest acts is often far from clear.
            Parts of the meaning of a text may become clear only because of
            developments occurring long after its composition. And though the
            fact that an author means something may be equivalent to the fact
            that a writer could have meant it, this is not to say that the
            writer did, on whatever level, actually mean it.
            Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at the University of
            Pittsburgh, has written articles on ancient Greek philosophy,
            literary theory, Nietzsche and Thomas Mann.
