Robert von Hallberg
         Donald Davie and "The Moral Shape of Politics"
         I have suggested that, despite his polemics on behalf of rightist
            attitudes, Davie is deeply committed to the liberalism of his
            generation of intellectuals. This commitment makes itself felt
            indirectly; it is in fact not fully expressed in the patently
            political poems. The poems that are frankly political, in terms of
            their content, are often rightist, but these poems, as I have
            indicated, do not show Davie's accomplishment; his poetic power
            lies elsewhere. In far better poems, Davie shows what I take to be
            a deeper allegiance, one that rests neither on his ideological
            beliefs nor on his class origins 22 but on certain habits of mind
            that derive from the liberal tradition. Although they operate
            throughout Davie's poetry, regardless of the particular subjects
            being treated, these habits always retain an almost silent gesture
            toward liberal ideals. Davie is often most deeply political when he
            seems to be least so. Of course one should not link away his
            rightist avowals; nor should one think of his rightism as deriving
            from the current critical perspective on liberal aspirations. His
            liberalism is nothing if not critical, and his righitst opinions
            express more desire than conviction. As I will try to show, below
            the level of content Davie as a poet shares the liberal
            presuppositions of his generation, and his rightism develops
            largely from a lack of faith in his audience.
            22. In answer to Hamburger, Davie makes a point of his still strong
            bond to his family, which he refers to as "undeniably and proudly
            proletarian; and they include Labour Party activists" ("A Mug's
            Game?" p. 18).
            Robert von Hallberg, associate professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, is the author of Charles Olson: The
            Scholar's Art and a coeditor of .
Paul Alpers
         What is Pastoral?
         Pastoral seems a fairly accessible literary concept; most critics
            and readers seem to know what they mean by it, and they often seem
            to have certain works in mind that count as pastorals. But when we
            look at what has been written about pastoral in the last decades -
            - when it has become one of the flourishing light industries of
            academic criticism -- we find nothing like a coherent account of
            either its nature or its history. We are told that pastoral "is a
            double longing after innocence and happiness"; that its universal
            idea is the Golden Age; that it is based on the antithesis of Art
            and Nature; that its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life;
            that its "central tenet" is "the pathetic fallacy"; that it
            expresses the ideal of otium; that it is "the poetic expression par
            excellence of the cult of aesthetic Platonism" in the Renaissance
            or of Epicureanism in the Hellenistic world; that it is "that mode
            of viewing common experience through the medium of the rural
            world."1 It sometimes seems as if there are as many versions of
            pastoral as there are critics who write about it.
            […]
            A definition of pastoral must first give a coherent account of its
            various features formal, expressive, and thematic and
            second, provide for historical continuity or change within the
            form. The basis of such a definition is provided by what Kenneth
            Burke calls a "representative anecdote":
            Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of
            reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are
            selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in
            certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar
            as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it
            has the necessary scope. In its selectivity, it is a reduction. Its
            scope and reduction become a deflection when the given terminology,
            or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is
            designated to calculate.
            Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of
            a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a
            "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity with
            which the vocabulary is constructed.6
            Burke uses "anecdote" and not a more philosophically respectable
            term (like "instance" or "example") in order to emphasize the
            contingencies inherent in all such intellectual choices. Anecdote
            implies that they are inseparable from the stuff of reality with
            which they deal and that of their selection does not escape the
            conditions of ordinary accounts of our lives. (On the other hand,
            the term does not carry its normal implications of a story, as the
            examples cited in the next paragraph will show.) "Representative,"
            as Burke uses it here, has a double meaning. An anecdote is
            representative in that (1) it is a typical instance of an aspect of
            reality and (2) by being typical it serves to generate specific
            depictions or representations of that reality.
            1. The allusions are to the following: "double longing" (Renato
            Poggioli, The Oaten Flute [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], p. 1, all
            further references to this work will be included in the text);
            Golden Age (W.W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama [1906;
            New York, 1959], p. 5); Art and Nature (English Pastoral Poetry,
            ed. Frank Kermode [1952; New York, 1972], all further references to
            this work will be included in the text; and Leo Marx, The Machine
            in the Garden [New York, 1967]); hostility to urban life (K.W.
            Gransden, "The Pastoral Alternative," Arethusa 3 [1970]: 103-21,
            177-96; see also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
            [London, 1973]); "pathetic fallacy" (E.W. Tayler, Nature and Art in
            Renaissance Literature [New York, 1964], p.154); otium (Hallett
            Smith, Elizabethan Poetry [Cambridge, Mass., 1952], p. 2),
            "aesthetic Platonism" (Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind
            [Oxford, 1969], p. 6); Epicureanism (Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The
            Green Cabinet [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969]; "viewing common
            experience" (John Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost [New
            Haven, Conn., 1960], p.9).
            6. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1969), p. 59. This is the beginning of the section entitled "Scope
            and Reduction."
            Paul Alpers is professor of English at the University of
            California, Berkeley, and is the author of The Poetry of "The
            Faerie Queene" and The Singer of the Eclogues: A Study of Virgilian
            Pastoral. The present essay is part of a larger study entitled
            "Pastoral Poetics."
             
James K. Chandler
         Romantic Allusiveness
         Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the
            texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the author of
            what Reuben Brower calls "the poetry of allusion."5 We envision
            Romantic poets carrying on their work in reaction to these
            Augustans and in mysterious awe, whether fearful or admiring, of
            most other poets sometimes even of each other. No self-
            respecting Romantic, it is usually assumed, will deliberately send
            his reader elsewhere for a meaning to complement the effect of his
            own words. If a reader's mind wanders to an earlier poem, that is
            not the Romantic poet's fault but a matter of accident or perhaps
            of cruel destiny. The Romantic wants to keep the poem an intimate
            affair just the two of us and does what he can to keep
            his reader's attention on himself.
            […]
            What follows is an effort to test the applicability of Wasserman's
            Augustan hypothesis to the poetic mode of high Romanticism. This
            effort should not be taken to imply either that the Romantics
            simply continue in the allusive mode of the Augustans or that the
            assumptions that lead Bloom and others to read Romantic poetry as
            they do are utterly mistaken. I will in fact be arguing quite
            otherwise. Nor must there be any confusion about Wasserman's
            conception of the Augustan mode. Some of the language of his
            summary, for example where he speaks of "the rich interplay between
            the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses,"
            might lead one to liken his work to the criticism now associated
            with the notion of "intertextuality." For the practitioners of this
            criticism, as Jonathan Culler explains, "to read is to place a work
            in a discursive space, relating it to other texts and to other
            codes of that space, and writing is a similar activity."8 Writing
            and reading a poem are in this account both acts of "intertextual
            location," if you will, but the reader of the poem need not concern
            himself with the aims and circumstances of its writer's "similar
            activity." The decisive difference between this view and the one
            Wasserman offers for the Augustans is that Wasserman's is
            intentionalist and historicist. This shows plainly in his
            exegetical commentary on the Rape, where his characteristic claim
            follows the formula: "Pope [expects, invites, prods, wants] his
            (contemporary) reader to [discover, exercise his wit on, recognize,
            see] X in his allusion to such-and-such a text." And to support his
            claim he repeatedly brings his historicist scholarship to bear on
            questions about "the kind of ready knowledge Pope demands of his
            reader" and what "facts [were] known to any serious reader" of the
            time.9
            5. See Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion
            (Oxford, 1959), esp. pp. 1-14.
            8. Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," MLN 91
            (1976): 1382-3; Culler refers primarily to the work of Roland
            Barthes and Julia Kristeva but notes that Bloom himself
            occasionally sounds curiously like an intertextualist critic.
            9. Wasserman, "Limits of Allusion," pp. 427, 429. For a response to
            Wasserman less sympathetic than mine, see Irvin Ehrenpreis,
            Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville, Va., 1974),
            pp. 12-15.
            James K. Chandler, an assistant professor of English at the
            University of Chicago, has published work on Wordsworth's poetry
            and politics and is currently completing a book on the subject.
Stanley Corngold
         Error in Paul de Man
         The power of literature to resist "totalization," to divide and
            oppose whole meaning, to separate Being from the word, or to name
            Being as itself divided this is de Man's oldest and best-
            defended idea. Behind its deconstructionist and semiological
            variations in the recent work is a long genealogy of such
            insistence.6 This "genealogy" (the metaphor is abhorrent to de Man)
            contains instructive continuities and aberrations. The continuities
            tend to show de Man to an extraordinary degree the captive of his
            beginnings. The aberrations pose a threat to the very criterion of
            rigor which he makes the touchstone of his position. I will
            restrict myself here to an account of what is coherent and what is
            incoherent in de Man's treatment of the category of error.
            […]
            Error is not mistake. The concept of the mistake is usable,
            perhaps, within the restricted teleology of pragmatic acts or
            within the quasi-rigorous language of scientific description.
            Mistakes (or what de Man sometimes calls "mere error" [see, e.g.,
            BI, p. 109]) are without true value: trivial, in principle
            corrigible according to a norm already known. But the skew of error
            implies a truth. Furthermore, the concept of error supplies to the
            categories of blindness and insight as much coherence as they are
            able to achieve. As we shall see, it brings together the
            constituents of the essential ambivalence of all literary and at
            least some philosophical language (see BI, p. viii).
            6. In 1956, for instance, in a review of Nathalie Sarraute's L'Ère
            du Soupçon, de Man offered his reading of "the central moment of
            Ulysses, the carefully prepared encounter between Bloom and Stephan
            Dedalus": it "indicates, surely, the total impossiblity of any
            contact, of any human communication, even in the most disinterested
            love" (Monde Nouveau 11 [June 1956]:59; my translation).
            Stanley Corngold, professor of German and comparative literature at
            Princeton University, is the author of books and articles on Kafka,
            including The Commentator's Despair and an annotated translation of
            The Metamorphosis. A volume of his essays on the question of the
            self in Hölderlin, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Mann, and
            Heidegger is forthcoming.
Paul de Man
         A Letter
         Whenever a binary pair is being analyzed or "deconstructed," the
            implication is never that the opposition is without validity in a
            given empirical situation (no one in his right mind could maintain
            that it is forever impossible to tell night from day or hot from
            cold) but only that the figure of opposition involved in all
            analytical judgments is not reliable, precisely because it allows,
            in the realm of language to which, as figure, it belongs, for
            substitutions that cannot occur in the same manner in the world of
            experience. When one moves from empirical oppositions such as night
            and day to categorical oppositions such as truth and falsehood, the
            epistemological stakes increase considerably because, in the realm
            of concepts, the principle of exclusion applies decisively. The
            critical function of deconstruction is not to blur distinctions but
            to identify the power of linguistic figuration as it transforms
            differences into oppositions, analogies, contiguities, reversals,
            crossings, and any other of the relationships that articulate the
            textual field of tropes and of discourse. Hence the distinctively
            critical, in the not necessarily benign Kantian sense, function of
            texts, literary or other, with regard to aesthetic, ethical,
            epistemological, and practical judgements they are bound to
            generate. These judgements are never merely contingent mistakes or
            merely preordained errors, nor can they be kept in abeyance between
            the two mutually exclusive alternatives. As Pascal said with regard
            to the coercive choice between dogmatism and skepticism, the
            refusal to decide between them, since it is itself a conceptual
            rather than a contingent decision, is always already a choice for
            error over mistake. Conversely, any decision one makes with regard
            to the absolute truth or falsehood value of a text always turns out
            to be a mistake. And it will remain one unless the perpetrator of
            the mistake becomes critically aware of the abusive schematization
            that caused his mistake and thus transforms the mistaking of error
            (for mistake) into the error of mistaking.
            Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, is the author of Blindness and Insight and Allegories
            of Reading and is currently completing a book tentatively titled
            The Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiry are "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976) and "The
            Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978).
Françoise Meltzer
         Laclos' Purloined Letters
         The role of the reader is central to the epistolary genre because
            the letters anticipate a reader within the novel's framework. There
            is the letter's intended recipient (destinataire), the occasional
            interceptor, the invented publisher and/or editor who organize(s)
            the collected correspondence, and the extrafictional reader who
            reads the collection in its entirety, including the disclaiming or
            condemning prefaces which precede it. The epistolary form, however,
            with so many layers of readers, considerably complicates the issue
            of reader response. If we share, for example, Stanley Fish's
            assumption that "literature is in the reader," the epistolary novel
            apparently reverses the formula: the reader is in the literature.
            And yet it is in the novel of letters that the reader, the
            fictional reader, most clearly creates the text. Let us return to
            Merteuil's admonishment to Cécile: "Voyez donc à soigner davantage
            votre style…. Vous voyez bien que, quand vous écrivez à quelqu'un,
            c'est pur lui et non pas pour vous: vous devez donc moins chercher
            à lui dire ce que vous pensez, que ce qui lui plaît davantage."2 If
            a reader's response to a given sentence is colored by the previous
            one, the epistolary novel achieves the same effect within a larger
            unit: each letter is determined by the one which precedes it. In
            this sense the letter is a grammatical unit, a larger sentence.
            Moreover, a letter-novel presents the possibility of an
            architectural as well as conceptual interruption. That is, whereas
            insufficiencies in a first-or third-person narrative must consist
            of circumlocutions, repetitions, and exclusions of information, the
            letter-novel can create a concrete insufficiency by a lost,
            suppressed, stolen, or interrupted letter. In such cases the letter
            must function without its precedent since the destinataire remains
            empty-handed. Thus, the epistolary novel has a great capacity for
            mise en abîme.
            Both inside and outside the narrative, there always is a
            destinataire; and even if he is the wrong one in the context of the
            récit he is the intended one for the histoire.3 In any case, the
            extrafictional reader is the final destinataire and holds a
            privileged position. And yet, he too is subject to interruptions:
            here the editor rears his head by claiming in footnotes that a
            letter is lost, too damaged to decipher, or so boring or obscene
            that he has seen fit to exclude it; these footnotes are the only
            "letters" addressed to and meant for us. At this point the editor
            removes his mask but remains on stage. Apart from such tricks,
            however, we do read every letter available, each of which is
            addressed to another reader, a system of the once removed or of the
            "letter in suffrance." Or, loosely interpreting Jacques Lacan, a
            purloined letter means that a letter always arrives at its
            destination.4
            2. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liasons dangereuses (Paris 1961),
            letter 105, p. 247; all subsequent quotations are taken from this
            edition and will be identified by letter and page number in the
            text. "Therefore attend more to your style....You must well know
            that, when you write to someone, it is for him and not for you: you
            must therefore seek less to tell him what you think, than what
            pleases him more"; here and elsewhere my translation.
            3. I am using the French terms of Gérard Genette to avoid confusion
            caused by English equivalents. "Récit is often translated as
            discourse, plot, narrative, subject, narration; histoire as story,
            events, myth, and so forth.
            4. See Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on'The Purloined Letter,'" trans.
            Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 38-72; all further
            references to this work, abbreviated as "SPL," will be included in
            the text. The final sentence reads as follows: "Thus it is that
            what the 'purloined letter,' nay, the 'letter in suffrance' means
            is that a letter always arrives at its destination." What Lacan
            means by this statement has to do with the language of the
            unconscious, or of unconscious Desire. Each individual sends his
            own message of "truth" of identity. Earlier in this passage Lacan
            says: "The sender, we tell you , receives from the receiver his own
            message in reverse form." ("Lettre" has for Lacan two meanings:
            epistle and typographical character.)
            Françoise Meltzer is an associate professor of Romance language and
            literatures and of comparative literature at the University of
            Chicago. Her previous contributions to  are "Color
            as Cognition in Symbolist Verse" (Winter 1978) and the translation
            of Christian Metz's "Trucage and the Film" (Summer 1977). She is
            presently working on the relationship between rhetoric and
            psychoanalytic terminology.
Jean Ricardou
         Proust: A Retrospective Reading
         Deliberately employing rather vague terms, let us postulate a
            literature of the past and a literature of today.
            Two very simple ways of bringing them into relation are
            conceivable. One might adopt a prospective attitude, which would
            consider today's literature in the light of the past's. Or one
            might adopt a retrospective attitude, which would consider the
            literature of the past in the light of today's. The two positions
            are not equivalent. The prospective attitude is threatened with
            sterility: it may well find itself mainly seeking in today's
            literature the trace of that which was active in the literature of
            the past, that is, the persistence of something which is now
            perhaps fading away. The retrospective attitude, on the other hand,
            has a good chance of proving fruitful: what it tends to seek in the
            literature of the past is a foreshadowing of that which is alive in
            the modern text, that is, the beginnings of what is now in effect.
            In short, the former tends to minimize the innovations of today's
            text; the latter tends to stress the innovations in the text of the
            past.
            Clearly, this does not mean that today's text has a metaphysical
            role that of containing a truth which would illuminate its
            inarticulate beginnings in the text of the past. Rather, today's
            text has an operative role that of an instrument with which
            to analyze the text of the past. And this retrospective analysis is
            threefold: it detects the way the text works; it explains the way
            the text works; it specifies the way the text works. In the first
            two operations, detection and explanation, the resemblances between
            a highly active process in a recent text and a less intense one in
            an old text are turned to account. In the third operation,
            specification, the differences between the two are stressed.
            If we subject Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to a
            retrospective analysis in the light of the recent literary movement
            that has been named the New Novel, we immediately perceive, in
            Proust's work, a highly significant process. We are, in fact,
            witness to the beginnings of a monumental metamorphosis: a famous
            linguistic operation, metaphor, undergoes a radical change in
            function. It used to be mainly expressive or representative; with
            Proust, it becomes productive. Let's see how.
            Jean Ricardou is the author of many works of fiction and criticism.
            His most recent critical works are Nouveau problèmes du roman and
            the forthcoming Le théâtre des métamorphoses. His previous
            contributions to  are "Birth of a Fiction" (Winter
            1977) and "Composition Discomposed" (Autumn 1976). Erica Freiberg
            regularly translates Jean Ricardou's works. She holds degrees in
            French and Italian, philosophy, and modern literature from the
            University of Paris (Sorbonne) and the University of Geneva.
Carolyn Burke
         Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle_of_Female
            Friendship
         For ten years, between 1903 and 1913, Gertrude Stein saw human
            relationships as painful mathematical puzzles in need of solutions.
            Again and again, she converted the predicaments of her personal
            life into literary material, the better to solve and to exorcise
            them. The revelation that relationships had a structural quality
            came to her during the composition of Q.E.D. (1903), when she
            grasped the almost mathematical nature of her characters' emotional
            impasse. Stein's persona in the novel comments on their triangular
            affair, "Why it's like a piece of mathematics. Suddenly it does
            itself and you begin to see."1 The theory encouraged her to examine
            such situations as if they were case histories: she continued to
            study the same piece of mathematics from different angles in
            Fernhurst(1904), Three Lives (1905-6), and The Making of Americans
            (1906-11). But whatever the sexual arrangements in these triangles,
            the powerful generally managed to impose their wills upon the less
            powerful, and the triangles resolved themselves into oppositional
            structures, pitting two against one. Gradually, when the couple
            began to replace the triangle as her structural model, Stein
            composed numerous verbal portraits of couples and their
            relationships. In two of these, "Ada" and "Two Women," Stein
            applied her general theory of relationships to the particular
            puzzle of female friendships because, I think, she felt that
            women's characters were most intensely molded in same-sex
            involvements. Although she attempted to "prove" these theories in
            distanced, deliberately depersonalized prose, we as readers must
            examine "the complex interplay of self-discovery and writing" from
            which her portraits emerged.2
            Stein's portraits of women entangled in familial and erotic bonds
            seem to invite us into "the process whereby the self creates itself
            in the experience of creating art"; to read them, we must "join the
            narrator in reconstructing the other woman by whom we know
            ourselves."3 This task of reconstruction implies that we must also
            rethink the place of biography generally dismissed by New
            Criticism and its subsequent post-structuralist permutations as
            "mere" biography in feminist critical projects. If it is true
            that "in reading as in writing, it is ourselves that we remake,"
            then feminist critics have a special stake in understanding the
            biographical, and autobiographical, impulses at work in these
            activities.4 Stein's portraits, which hover between fiction and
            biography, raise important questions about the ways in which
            biographical information can justify our suspicion that female
            writers may be "closer to their fictional creations than male
            writers are."5 Recently, feminist critics have adapted
            psychoanalytic theory to examine the particular closeness of female
            characters in women's writing or to suggest a related closeness
            between the female author and her characters. We find it useful to
            speak of the pre-Oedipal structures and permeable ego boundaries
            that seem to shape women's relationships. Although Stein used very
            different psychological paradigms, she approached these same issues
            in her own studies of female friendships. Realizing that she
            preferred to write about women, she observed, "It is clearer…I know
            it better, a little, not very much better."6 In spite of her
            qualifications, she knew that she could see the structuring
            principles of relationships with greater clarity when writing from
            her own perspective.
            1. Stein, "Fernhurst," "Q.E.D.," and Other Early Writings, ed. Leon
            Katz (New York, 1971), p. 67.
            2. Elizabeth Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," Signs 6 (Spring 1981): 444.
            For a very useful critical discussion of this complex issue, see
            Abel, "(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in
            Contemporary Fiction by Women," and Judith Kegan Gardiner, "The
            (US)es of (I)dentity: a Response to Abel on '(E)Merging
            Identities,'" in the same issue of Signs (pp. 413-35, 436-42).
            3. Gardiner, "The (US)es of (I)dentity," p. 442.
            4. Jonathan Morse, "Memory, Desire, and the Need for Biography: The
            Case of Emily Dickinson," The Georgia Review 35 (Summer 1981): 271.
            See also J. Gerald Kennedy's suggestive remarks on the "tension
            between personal confession and implacable theory" in Barthes'
            later work ("Roland Barthes, Autobiography, and the End of
            Writing," in the same issue of The Georgia Review, p. 381).
            5. Abel, "Reply to Gardiner," p. 444.
            6. Stein, The Making of Americans, cited in Richard Bridgeman,
            Gertrude Stein in Pieces (New York, 1970), p. 78.
            Carolyn Burke, an Affiliated Scholar at the Center for Research on
            Women, Stanford University, has published articles on French
            feminist writing and on Mina Loy, whose biography she is now
            completing. The theoretical implications of this essay will be
            explored in her related study in progress on feminist biography.
Gary Tomlinson
         Music and the Claims of Text: Monteverdi, Rinuccini,_and_Marino
         The composer of vocal music writes as poet and scholiast. His
            message is autonomous but not wholly his own. He sets to work with
            a preexistent artwork before him a poem or passage of prose,
            often written without thought of musical setting and fashions
            his song under its constraints. He welcomes to his work a second,
            distinct language, one which corresponds to his own at most only
            partially in syntax and significance.
            The composer's unique act of accommodation, structuring his setting
            after certain requisites of his text, may have far-reaching
            implications for his musical style implications too often
            ignored in today's musical analysis and criticism. Which particular
            textual characteristics the composer chooses to emphasize will
            depend on much beyond the text itself: on his view of the nature
            and capabilities of musical discourse, shaped internally by musical
            procedures developed from the canon of his predecessors, externally
            by general expectations and aspirations of his culture; and on his
            equally rich conception of the tradition behind his text. The text-
            music interface is therefore a provocative area of exploration for
            critic and historian alike. It points to the expressive aims of a
            composer in a given work, and it elucidates broader cultural
            assumptions concerning the nature of musical and poetic discourse.
            Gary Tomlinson, assistant professor of music history at the
            University of Pennsylvania, is the author of articles on
            Monteverdi, early opera, and Verdi. He is currently writing a book
            on Monteverdi and late-Renaissance culture.
Hans Robert Jauss
         Poiesis
         Historically, the productive aspect of the aesthetic experience can
            be described as a process during which aesthetic practice freed
            itself step by step from restrictions imposed on productive
            activity in both the classical and the biblical tradition. If one
            understands this process as the realization of the idea of creative
            man, it is principally art which actualizes this idea.1 First, when
            the poietic capacity is still one and undivided, it asserts itself
            subliminally; later, in the competition between technical and
            artistic creation, it explicitly claims to be a production of a
            special kind. It is in that history of the concepts labor and work
            that the restrictions become most palpable.2 In the Greek
            tradition, all producing (poiesis) remains subordinate to practical
            action (praxis). As the activity of slaves who are rigorously
            excluded from the exercise of the virtues, poiesis occupies the
            lowest rank in social life. In the Christian tradition, handiwork
            is cursed, which means that man is meant to maintain himself only
            by toiling against a resistant nature ("cursed is the ground for
            thy sake" [Gen. 3:17]); salvation can only be found beyond his
            activity in this world. But in both the classical and the Christian
            conceptual fields relating to labor, we already encounter
            ambivalent definitions which could introduce and justify an upward
            revaluation of man's labor.
            1. See Hans Blumenberg, "'Nachahmung der Natur': Zur Vorgeschichte
            des schöpferischen Menschen," Studium Generale 10 (1957): 266-83,
            still unexcelled. I also base my discussion on Jürgen Mittelstrass,
            Neuzeit und Aufklårung; Studien zur Entstehung der neuzeitlichen
            Wissenchaft und Philosophie (Berlin, 1970), and to the results of
            two seminars at Constance held jointly and to which I owe essential
            insights.
            2. See Werner Conze, "Arbeit," in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe:
            Historiches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland,
            ed. Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck, 4 vols.
            (Stuttgart, 1972), 1:154-215, and Walther Bienert, Die Arbeit nach
            der Lehre der Bibel (Stuttgart, 1954); an abbreviated version
            appears in Bienert's "Arbeit," Die Religion in Gescheichte und
            Gegenwart (Tübingen, 1957).
            Hans Robert Jauss is professor of literary criticism and Romance
            philology at the University of Constance. He is the author of many
            books and articles, including two works forthcoming in English,
            Toward an Aesthetic of Receptionand Aesthetic Experience and
            Literary Hermeneutics, from which the present essay is taken.
            Michael Shaw has translated many works, among them Max Horkheimer's
            Dawn and Decline.
