Barbara Herrnstein Smith
         Contingencies of Value
         One of the major effects of prohibiting or inhibiting explicit
            evaluation is to forestall the exhibition and obviate the possible
            acknowledgment of divergent systems of value and thus to ratify, by
            default, established evaluative authority. It is worth noting that
            in none of the debates of the forties and fifties was the
            traditional academic canon itself questioned, and that where
            evaluative authority was not ringingly affirmed, asserted, or self-
            justified, it was simply assumed. Thus Frye himself could speak
            almost in one breath of the need to "get rid of…all casual,
            sentimental, and prejudiced value-judgments" as "the
            first step in developing a genuine poetics" and of "the
            masterpieces of literature" which are "the materials of
            literary criticism" (AC, pp. 18, 15). The identity of those
            masterpieces, it seemed, could be taken for granted or followed
            more or less automatically from the "direct value-judgment of
            informed good taste" or "certain literary values…fully
            established by critical experience" (AC, pp. 27, 20).
            In a passage of particular interest, Frye wrote:
            Comparative estimates of value are really inferences, most valid
            when silent ones, from critical practice…The critic will find soon,
            and constantly, that Milton is a more rewarding and suggestive poet
            than Blackmore. But the more obvious this becomes, the less time he
            will want to waste belaboring the point. [AC, p. 25]
            In addition to the noteworthy correlation of validity with silence
            (comparable, to some extent, to Wimsatt's discreet
            "intimations" of value), two other aspects of
            Frye's remarks here repay some attention. First, in claiming
            that it is altogether obvious that Milton, rather than Blackmore,
            is "a more rewarding and suggestive poet [for the critic] to
            work with," Frye begged the question of what kind of work the
            critic would be doing. For surely if one were concerned with a
            question such as the relation of canonical and noncanonical texts
            in the system of literary value in eighteenth-century England, one
            would find Blackmore just as rewarding and suggestive to work with
            as Milton. Both here and in his repeated insistence that the
            "material" of criticism must be "the masterpieces
            of literature" (he refers also to a "feeling we have
            all had: that the study of mediocre works of art remains a random
            and peripheral form of critical experience" [AC, p. 17]),
            Frye exhibits a severely limited conception of the potential domain
            of literary study and of the sort of problems and phenomena with
            which it could or should deal. In this conceptual and
            methodological confinement, however (which betrays the conservative
            force of the ideology of traditional humanism even in the
            laboratories of the new progressive poetics), he has been joined by
            just about every other member of the Anglo-American literary
            academy during the past fifty years.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smithis University Professor of English and
            communications and director of the Center for the Study of Art and
            Symbolic Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the
            author of, among other works, Poetic Closure and On the Margins of
            Discourse. Her previous contribution to ,
            "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," appeared in
            the Autumn 1980 issue. The present essay is part of a full-length
            study of literary and aesthetic value and evaluation.
Charles Altieri
         An Idea and an Ideal of a Literary_Canon
         It is unfortunately a lot easier to raise an arch eyebrow than it
            is to describe critical terms that might account for the values in
            idealization while preserving a pluralistic sense of possible
            canons and their uses. Instead of facing the challenge directly, I
            shall rely on what I call a contrastive strategy. Were I simply to
            assert a traditional psychology with its attendant values, I would
            expose myself to a host of suspicious charges about my pieties and
            delusions. So I shall begin by concentrating on the limitations I
            take to be inherent in the empiricism of the critical
            historicists' position. If, by deflating idealization, their
            arguments prove reductive, they should provoke us to ask what it is
            they reduce. We will find ourselves forced back within the circle
            of literary and existential expectations I suspect most of us still
            share. But now we might appreciate the force and possible uses of
            that training when we measure it against all we cannot do if we
            accept an alternative stance. That we can measure at all, of
            course, may emerge as the most significant consequence of this
            experiment in using contrastive strategies.
            The subject of self-interest provides us with a clear test among
            these competing positions, and it establishes some of the
            psychological concepts we will need if we are to describe the
            cultural functions canons can serve. Critical historicism
            concentrates on two basic aspects of self-interest the desire
            for power over others and the pursuit of self-representations that
            satisfy narcissistic demands. Out of these aspects, ideologies are
            generated and sustained. But this is hardly an exhaustive account
            of needs, motives, and powers. I propose that at least two other
            claims seem plausible, each with important consequences for our
            understanding of the canon that some people can understand
            their empirical interests to a degree sufficient to allow them
            considerable control over their actions and that a basic motive for
            such control is to subsume one's actions under a meaning the
            self can take responsibility for.4
             
            4. I use the term "empirical interests" in what I take
            to be a Kantian sense. "Empirical" refers to interests
            one simply accepts as preferences, without any need for
            justification. These interests invite ideological analysis, since,
            for Kant, they come essentially from outside as heteronomous rather
            than autonomous features of a subject's life. The opposite of
            "empirical," in this sense, is interests one tries to
            rationalize on principles that, at some level, have criteria not
            selected by the agent and also applicable to some other agents. For
            a historical account of the concept of interests, see Albert O.
            Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for
            Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J., 1977). For a clear
            conceptual analysis of problems in attributing all motives to self-
            interest, see Paul W. Taylor, Principles of Ethics: An Introduction
            (Belmont, Calif., 1978), chap. 3.
             
            Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature
            at the University of Washington. He is the author of Act and
            Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding
            (1981) and Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry
            (forthcoming) and is presently working on value in ethics and
            esthetics. His previous contributions to Critical
Lawrence Lipking
         Aristotle's Sister: A Poetics of Abandonment
         In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a
            woman's literary criticism in Western tradition, or more
            accurately the first miscarriage of a woman's criticism,
            occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of
            suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful
            of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy significantly, the
            matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She
            comes down the stairs to protest.
                        "Phêmios, other spells you know, high deeds
                        of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them;
                        let these men hear some other, while they sit
                        silent and drink their wine. But sing no more
                        this bitter tale that wears my heart away.
                        It opens in me again the wound of longing
                        For one incomparable, ever in my mind 
                        His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos."
            It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate
            brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus.
                        "Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel
                        Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead?
                        Poets are not to blame, but Zeus
            who gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men.
            Here is no reason for reproof: to sing
            the news of the Danaans! Men like best
            a song that rings like morning on the ear.
            But you must nerve yourself and try to listen.
            Odysseus was not the only one at Troy
            never to know the day of his homecoming.
            Others, how many others, lost their lives!"9
            Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so
            personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her
            son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep.
            Telemachus' words do not seem very much to the point.
            Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to
            sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some
            other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that
            others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as
            well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason
            for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her
            husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying
            "Odysseus." By proclaiming his own indifference to
            pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point.
            The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He
            proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by
            rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman.
            Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors.
             
            Lawrence Lipkingis Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at
            Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative
            literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts
            in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won
            the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous
            contributions to  are "The Marginal
            Glass" (Summer 1977) and "Arguing with Shelly"
            (Winter 1979). The present essay was originally given as a lecture
            at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is
            part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to
            appear in 1984.
James E. G. Zetzel
         Re-creating the Canon: Augustan Poetry and the Alexandrian_Past
         The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at
            the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not
            preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and
            for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal
            context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical
            poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part
            of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions
            and performed by its citizens. But eh conquests of Alexander had
            altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an
            astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of
            the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of
            Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot
            community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and
            bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what
            was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of
            early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian
            poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a
            childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a
            rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more
            manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of
            Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a
            mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was
            impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer,
            lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria
            admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was
            incomparable and inimitable, to be studied but not to be
            copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable
            scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric,
            epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and
            unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the
            grandeur of the past.
             
            James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton
            University and editor of the Transactions of the American
            Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual
            Criticism in Antiquity (1981) and, with Anthony T. Grafton and
            Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf's
            Prolegomena ad Homerum (forthcoming).
Joseph Kerman
         A Few Canonical Variations
         Since the idea of a canon seems so closely bound up with the idea
            of history, there should be something to be learned from the
            persistent efforts that have been going on for nearly two hundred
            years to extend the musical repertory back in time. What is
            involved here is nothing less than a continuous effort to endow
            music with a history. From the workings of this process in the
            nineteenth century, we learn that where the ideology is right the
            past can indeed yield up a canon of works and even a canon of
            performance.
             
            Bach, to take the most weighty example, would appear to have
            entered the canon Hoffman's canon before entering
            the repertory. The history of the nineteenth-century Bach revival
            begins as a triumph of ideology over practice. Only after J. N.
            Forkel, in his famous biography, canonized Bach as the archetypal
            German master was The Well-tempered Clavier published for the first
            time and if any one work of music deserved to be called
            canonic, it would have to be The Well-tempered Clavier.14 (But when
            did it really enter the repertory? Not really until the formation
            of a new repertory, the repertory of the modern harpsichord, in our
            own time.) Gradually other Bach works, works which fitted better
            into nineteenth-century concert life, did enter various nineteenth-
            century repertories; Mendelssohn's revival of the St. Matthew
            Passion is a famous landmark, and various piano transcriptions and
            orchestral arrangements, not to speak of Gounod's "Ave
            Maria," followed in due course. Bach was made to sound like a
            premature Romantic. There was as yet no call for historical
            "authenticity." But I do not think it was Bach that
            Hood was thinking of when he complained of musical traditions of
            the past whose "real identities are gone." The skeleton
            may not have been bodied out with authentic flesh and blood, but it
            was made into a handsome waxwork which was quite real enough for
            the nineteenth century.
             
            14. This point is made by Crocker, "Is There Really a
            &lsquo;Written Tradition'?"
             
            Joseph Kerman, professor of music at the University of California,
            Berkeley, is the author of Opera as Drama, The Beethoven Quartets,
            The Masses and Motets of William Byrd,and (with Alan Tyson) The New
            Grove Beethoven. He is also coeditor of Beethoven Studiesand
            Nineteenth-Century Music and is presently working on a concise
            study of modern musical scholarship. "How We Got into
            Analysis, and How to Get Out," his previous contribution to
            , appeared in the Winter 1980 issue.
Jerome J. McGann
         The Religious Poetry of Christina Rossetti
         I want to argue…that to read Rossetti's religious poetry with
            understanding (and therefore with profit and appreciation) requires
            a more or less conscious investment in the peculiarities of its
            Christian orientation, in the social and historical particulars
            which feed and shape the distinctive features of her work. Because
            John O. Waller's relatively recent essay on Rossetti,
            "Christ's Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the
            Premillenarianist William Dodsworth," focuses on some of the
            most important of these particulars, it seems to me one of the most
            useful pieces of scholarship ever written on the poet. The essay
            locates the special ground of Rossetti's religious poetry in
            that peculiar Adventist and premillenarian context which flourished
            for about fifty years in mid nineteenth-century culture. In point
            of historical fact and it is a historical fact which has
            enormous significance for the aesthetic character of
            Rossetti's poetry her religious verse is intimately
            meshed with a number of particular, even peculiar, religious
            ideas.18 From the vantage of her strongest poetry, the most
            important of these ideas (along with the associated images and
            symbols they helped to generate) were allied to a once powerful
            religious movement which later toward the end of the
            century slipped to a marginal position in English culture.
            The whole question [of premillenarianism] was overshadowed first
            and last by the Tractarian Movement, Anglo-Catholicism, and the
            resulting Protestant reaction. And we can see in retrospect that
            all through the years [1820-1875] the theological future actually
            belonged to liberal, or Broad Church, principles. By the middle
            1870s, apparently [the issues raised through the premillenarian
            movement] were no longer very alive.19&shy;&shy;
            In this context we may begin to understand the decline of
            Rossetti's reputation after the late nineteenth century, when
            she was still regarded as one of the most powerful and important
            contemporary English poets. Her reputation was established in the
            1860s and 1870s, when Adventism reached the apogee of its brief but
            influential career. Thereafter, the availability of religious
            poetry was mediated either through the Broad Church line (which
            stretches from Coleridge and the Cambridge Apostles and Arnold, to
            figures like Trilling and Abrams in our own day) or through the
            High Church and Anglo-Catholic line (which was defined backwards
            from certain influential twentieth-century figures like Eliot to
            include the Noetics, Hopkins, and various seventeenth-century
            religious writers). The premillenarian and evangelist enthusiasm
            which supported Rossetti's religious poetry had been moved to
            the periphery of English culture when the canon of such verse began
            to take shape in the modern period.
            To read Rossetti's poetry, then, we have to willingly suspend
            not only our disbelief in her convictions and ideas but also our
            belief in those expectations and presuppositions about religious
            poetry which we have inherited from those two dominant ideological
            lines Broad Church and High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Waller
            has drawn our attention to the general premillenarian content of
            her work, and I should like to follow his lead by emphasizing
            another crucial and even more particular doctrinal feature of her
            poetry.
             
            19. Waller, "Christ's Second Coming," p. 477. For
            a general discussion of millenarianism in the early nineteenth
            century, see J. E. Harrison, The Second Coming, Popular
            Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London, 1979).
             
            Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of
            Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His two most
            recent books are The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation
            (1983) and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (1983). His
            previous contributions to  are "Formalism,
            Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again"
            (Spring 1976) and "The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner"
            (Autumn 1981).
Arnold Krupat
         Native American Literature and the Canon
         Although not exactly continuous, the Native American challenge to
            the canon, as I have tried to show, has been of comparatively long
            standing. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Native American literary
            production and Euramerican writing influenced by it have only
            barely begun to enter the courses in and the anthologies of general
            American literature, that challenge cannot be said to have been
            effective as yet. No doubt it will take more time for poets and
            teachers to recognize what Native American literatures aboriginally
            were and, to some extent, still are; to recognize when and if the
            influence of these literatures is present in work by Native and
            non-Native writers. It is only since the 1950s and 1960s that
            philological and structural work has begun to make this recognition
            possible in any case.
            It is only more recently still that an adequately sophisticated
            criticism for these literatures has begun to develop, with the
            publication of Abraham Chapman's basic and eclectic
            collection of essays, Literature of the American Indians: Views and
            Interpretations (1975); Karl Kroeber's uneven but valuable
            introduction to the subject, Traditional Literatures of the
            American Indian: Texts and Interpretations (1981); and Hymes'
            "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native
            American Ethnopoetics (1981), a collection of Hymes' seminal
            and indispensable work. The broadest and most sophisticated
            collection of essays gathering work by Hymes, Tedlock,
            Toelken, Kroeber, and others has only just appeared: Smooting
            the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature (1982) is
            edited by Brian Swann, a poet and translator of Mative American
            song.61 These developments are encouraging for Native American
            literatures. As American society continues to move away from
            anthropocentrism and textual authority, the Native tradition may
            for the first time effectively assert its claim upon the canon of
            American literature.
             
            61. For his translations, see, for example, Swann's Song of
            the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems (forthcoming).
            Swann works from texts, not performances, from English language
            versions, not transcriptions of Native languages; as a result, he
            has made a point of insisting, "These poems of mine are not
            translations" but instead "versions" of Native
            American poetry. Although he has given up specific claims to
            authenticity, Swann has nonetheless shown how much can be done by
            the non-Native poet and scholar responding to the Native tradition
            as a powerful source.
             
            Arnold Krupat is a member of the literature faculty at Sarah
            Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of the University of Nebraska
            Press' Native American Autobiography Series and is currently
            completing an anthology of Native American autobiographies, Indian
            Lives. His previous contribution to , "An
            Approach to Native American Texts," appeared in the December
            1982 issue.
John Guillory
         The Ideology of Canon-Formation: T. S. Eliot and_Cleanth_Brooks
         Nostalgia is only the beginning of a recognizably ideological
            discourse. The way through to the ideological sense of
            Tennyson's "failure," beneath the phenomenal glow
            of Eliot's nostalgia, lies in the entanglement of minority in
            this complex of meanings, the determination that Tennyson is
            properly placed when seen as a "minor Virgil." The
            diffusion of a major talent in minor works suggests that what
            Tennyson or Eliot might have been was another Virgil, and for Eliot
            that means simply a "classic." In "What Is a
            Classic?," we are told that English literature has no classic
            poet who would exalt, as Virgil or Dante did, the truths of his
            age.14 The absence of a modern classic reflects not an individual
            failure but rather the absence of a universal truth, which has been
            hidden in the minor works. Here is the reason both for the
            ambivalence Eliot expresses about the fact of minority (a valuing
            of the right things and yet a deferral of greatness) and for the
            peculiar, and certainly not necessary, association of poetic
            minority with a marginal elite.15
            It is the latter point to which I now want to turn. If it has been
            shown that the canon Eliot legislated in his early career was not
            merely an arbitrary set of aesthetic preferences, we have not yet
            fully evinced the ideological sense of Eliot's canonical
            principle. We have only determined that one way to reconstruct
            Eliot's canon would be to list those "minor"
            poets. But the essential quality of their minority, what drives
            them away from the "mainstream" of English literature,
            is what Eliot approved as their fidelity to
            "tradition." Such a concept of tradition must be
            exclusive as well as revisionary, because it implies that the major
            poets of English literary history cannot also be
            "traditional." Eliot finally understood that his
            canonical principle was the literary reflection of a more
            fundamental evaluative norm, extrinsic to literature, which he
            identified as "orthodoxy." So he tells us in After
            Strange Gods that he is rewriting "Tradition and the
            Individual Talent" by substituting "orthodoxy"
            for "tradition," and this is unquestionably an
            ideological correction.16 In the same way, the canon of minor
            writers is established retrospectively as determined by the rule of
            orthodoxy. Neither they nor the young Eliot need be orthodox
            Christians for this rule to have enabled their productions. It is
            precisely Eliot's meaning that these elite, like the
            "elect" before them, may come at some point to a
            conviction of their election, yet they were always the elect. In
            this sense, Eliot's conversion to Christianity was the
            recognition that he already belonged to a marginal elite, whose
            membership had been polemically foreshadowed by the construction of
            an alternative canon.
             
            14. The whole argument of "What Is a Classic?" is
            interesting in this respect. Eliot's standard of classical
            value is "universality," which is opposed to the
            "provincial." The closest English literature comes to a
            classical age is in the eighteenth century, and this too fails
            because its "restriction of religious sensibility itself
            produces a kind of provinciality: the provinciality which indicates
            the disintegration of Christendom, the decay of a common belief and
            a common culture" (OPP, pp. 61-62).
            15. But at least a hint about how to make this connection is given
            in Eliot's "The Classics and the Man of Letters,"
            To Criticize the Critic (New York, 1965): "The continuity of
            literature is essential to its greatness; it is very largely the
            function of secondary writers to preserve this continuity, and to
            provide a body of writings which is not necessarily read by
            posterity, which plays a great part in forming the link between
            those writers who continue to be read" (p. 147).
            16. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York,
            1933), p. 22.
             
            John Guillory, assistant professor of English at Yale University,
            is the author of Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary
            History (1983). He is currently working on a study of canon-
            formation.
Richard Ohmann
         The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction, 1960-1975
         Categorical names such as "The English Novel,"
            "The Modern American Novel," and "American
            Literature" often turn up in catalogs as titles of college
            courses, and we know from them pretty much what to expect. They
            also have standing in critical discourse, along with allied terms
            unlikely to serve as course titles: "good writing,"
            "great literature," "serious fiction,"
            "literature" itself. The awareness has grown in recent
            years that such concepts pose problems, even though we use them
            with easy enough comprehension when we talk or write to others who
            share our cultural matrix.
            Lately, critics like Raymond Williams have been reminding us that
            the categories change over time (just as "literature"
            used to mean all printed books but has come to mean only some
            poems, plays, novels, etc.) and that at any given moment categories
            embody complex social relations and a continuing historical
            process. That process deeply invests all terms with value: since
            not everyone's values are the same, the negotiating of such
            concepts is, among other things, a struggle for
            dominance whether between adults and the young, professors
            and their students, one class and another, or men and women. We
            don't usually notice the power or the conflict, except when
            some previously weak or silent group seeks a share of the power:
            for example, when, in the 1960s, American blacks and their
            supporters insisted that black literature be included in school and
            college curricula, or when they openly challenged the candidacy of
            William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner for inclusion in
            some eventual canon.1 But the gradual firming up of concepts like,
            say, postwar American fiction is always a contest for cultural
            hegemony, even if in our society if is often muted carried on
            behind the scenes or in the seemingly neutral marketplace.
             
            1. See John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron's Nat Turner:
            Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston, 1968).
             
            Richard Ohmannis professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is
            the author of English in America and is presently working on
            studies in mass culture.
