Murray Krieger
         The Ambiguities of Representation and Illusion: An E._H._Gombrich
            Retrospective
         It is difficult to overestimate the impact, beginning in the 1960s,
            which Gombrich's discussion of visual representation made on
            a good number of theorists in an entire generation of thinking
            about art and even more about literary art. For
            literary theory and criticism were at least as affected by his work
            as were theory and criticism in the plastic arts. Art and
            Illusionradically undermined the terms which had controlled
            discussion of how art represented "reality" or,
            rather, how viewers or members of the audience perceived that
            representation and related it to their versions of
            "reality." And, for those who accompanied or followed
            him from Rosalie Colie to Wolfgang Iser Gombrich helped
            transform for good the meaning of a long revered term like
            "imitation" as it could be applied to both the visual
            and verbal arts. I believe he must, then, be seen as responsible
            for some of the most provocative turns that art theory, literary
            theory, and aesthetics have taken in the last two decades.
            In much of his work since the 1960s, however, Gombrich has appeared
            more and more anxious to dissociate himself from those who have
            treated his earlier books and essays as leading to the theoretical
            innovations which have claimed support from them. In The Image and
            the Eye, the statements which put distance between himself and such
            followers seem utterly unambiguous. And against the charge that his
            work has become more conservative with the passing years, I suspect
            Gombrich would argue that any claim of difference between, say, Art
            and Illusion and The Image and the Eye is a result of an original
            misreading, that the recent work is only more explicitly defending
            a traditional position which was quietly there all along, though
            supposedly friendly theorists wrongly saw him as subverting it in
            the earlier work. Thus Gombrich is now self-consciously committed
            to undoing what he sees as our errors of reading rather than his
            own errors of writing.
             
            Murray Krieger is University Professor of English at the University
            of California, Irvine. He is the author of, among other works, The
            Tragic Vision, The Classic Vision, Theory of Criticism: A Tradition
            and Its System, Poetic Presence and Illusion: Essays in Critical
            History and Theory, and, most recently, Arts on the Level. He is
            presently working on Ekphrasis: Space, Time, and Illusion in
            Literary Theory(forthcoming). His latest contribution to Critical
            Inquiry, "Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory
            and the Duplicity of Metaphor," appeared in the Summer 1979
            issue.
E. H. Gombrich
         Representation and Misrepresentation
         It is a thankless task to have to reply to Professor Murray
            Krieger's "Retrospective." Qui s'excuse,
            s'accuse, and since I cannot ask my readers to embark on
            their own retrospective of my writings and test them for
            consistency, I have little chance of restoring my reputation in
            their eyes. Hence I would have been happier to leave Professor
            Krieger to his agonizing, if he did not present himself the
            "spokesman" for a significant body of theorists who
            appear to have acclaimed my book on Art and Illusion without ever
            having read it. The followers of this school of criticism of
            which Professor Krieger is a prominent member had apparently
            convinced themselves that the book lent support to an aesthetics in
            which the notions of reality and of nature had no place. They
            thought that I had subverted the old idea of mimesis and that all
            that remained were different systems of conventional signs which
            were made to stand for an unknowable reality. True, professor
            Krieger admits that I never endorsed such an interpretation of my
            views, and he even concedes that there are passages in Art and
            Illusion which contradict such an out-and-out relativism, but he
            wants to convince his readers that these contradictions lead
            precisely to the ambiguities he now proposes to analyse.
            If he were right that the book encourages such a misreading, all I
            could do would be to express my regrets for having failed to make
            myself sufficiently clear. Luckily I can draw comfort from the fact
            that unlike these literary critics, the leading archaeologist of
            this country, Professor Stuart Piggott, had no difficulty at all in
            discerning my meaning and profiting from my arguments. In his
            Walter Neurath Memorial Lecture of 1978, entitled Antiquity
            Depicted: Aspects of Archaeological Illustration, the author did me
            the honour of taking a statement from my book as his starting
            point. It is the passage at the end of part I in which I
            recapitulate the content of the first two chapters:
            What matters to us is that the correct portrait, like the useful
            map, is an end product on a long road through schema and
            correction. It is not a faithful record of a visual experience but
            the faithful construction of a relational mode.
            Neither the subjectivity of vision nor the sway of conventions need
            lead us to deny that such a model can be constructed to any
            required degree of accuracy. What is decisive here is clearly the
            word "required." The form of a representation cannot be
            divorced from its purpose and the requirements of the society in
            which the given visual language gains currency.1
             
            1. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of
            Pictorial Representation, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts,
            1956 (New York, 1960), p. 90.
             
            E. H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor
            of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of
            London from 1959 to 1976. His many influential works include The
            Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, The
            Sense of Order, Ideals and Idols, The Image and the Eye, and, most
            recently, Tributes. His previous contributions to 
            include "The Museum: Past, Present and Future (Spring 1977)
            and "Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving
            Eye" (Winter 1980).
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
         Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted
         Some people have found my distinction between meaning and
            significance useful. In the following revision of that distinction,
            I hope to improve its accuracy and perhaps, therefore, its utility
            as well. My impulse for making the revision has been my
            realization, very gradually achieved, that meaning is not simply an
            affair of consciousness and unconsciousness. In 1967, in Validity
            in Interpretation, I roundly asserted that "there is no magic
            land of meanings outside human consciousness." 1 That
            assertion would be true if, godlike, we could oversee the whole of
            human consciousness, past, present, and future. But we language
            users, being limited creatures, intend our verbal meanings to go
            beyond what we can pay attention to at any moment. We intend our
            meanings to transcend our momentary limitations of attention and
            knowledge. Hence there isa land of meanings beyond past and present
            human consciousness the land of the future. What I should
            have said originally is that there is no magic lance of meanings
            beyond the whole extent of human consciousness, past, present, and
            future. This correction of my original statements leads to a
            deepening of the concept of meaning.
            In 1960 I first proposed the analytical distinction between two
            aspects of textual interpretation. One of them, meaning, was fixed
            and immutable; the other, significance, was open to change.2 I
            acknowledged that significance, changeable or not, is the more
            valuable object of interpretation, because it typically embraces
            the present use of texts, and present use is present value. But I
            argued that, in academic criticism, the significance and use of a
            text ought to be rooted in its fixed meaning, since otherwise
            criticism would lack a stable object of inquiry and would merely
            float on tides of preference. The claim that one reader's
            opinion is as valid as another's would then be right, despite
            any indignant protest to the contrary. I did not wish to dissuade
            people from floating on the tides of preference if that was what
            they wished to do. I intended to provide a firm justification for
            those who wished to pursue historical scholarship. (I was writing
            in a context in which historical interpretation was being denounced
            as "unliterary" and hence illegitimate.)3 I also
            assumed that even those who did not pursue historical scholarship
            might sometimes wish to exploit the possibility of historically
            fixed meaning. In my experience, even antiauthorial theorists
            sometimes with to regard their own texts as having a historically
            fixed meaning and will complain if someone misunderstands that
            meaning.
             
            1. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.,
            1967), p. 4.
            2. See my "Objective Interpretation," PMLA 75 (Sept.
            1960): 463-79.
            3. See, for instance, W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley,
            "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon:
            Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1954), which
            ends:
            We submit that this is the true and objective way of criticism, as
            contrasted to what the very uncertainty of exegesis might tempt a
            second kind of critic to undertake: (2) the way of biographical or
            genetic inquiry …. Our point is that such an answer to such an
            inquiry would have nothing to do with the poem
            "Prufrock"; it would not be a critical inquiry.
            Critical inquiries, unlike bets, are not settled in this way.
            Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. [P.
            18]
             
            E. D. Hirsch, Jr., professor of English at the University of
            Virginia, is the author of numerous works, including Validity in
            Interpretation and The Aims of Interpretation. His previous
            contributions to  are "Against
            Interpretation?" (June 1983), "The Politics of Theories
            of Interpretation (September 1982), and "Stylistics and
            Synonymity" (March 1975).
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
         Sexualism and the Citizen of the World: Wycherley,_Sterne,_and_Male
            Homosocial Desire
         Surprisingly, when Laurence Sterne's Yorick sets his head
            toward Dover, it is with no developed motive of connoisseurship or
            curiosity: the gentleman dandy ups with his portmanteau at the
            merest glance of "civil triumph" from a male servant.
            Perhaps we are in the world of P. G. Wodehouse, with a
            gentleman's gentleman who happens, like Jeeves, to be the
            embodiment of all the prescriptive and opportunistic shrewdness
            necessary to maintain his master's innocent
            privileges but it is impossible to tell; the servant utters
            his five words, glances his glance, and disappears from the novel.
            The prestige that has lent force to his misprision or is it a
            sneer? seems to belong not to a particular personality but to
            a position, a function (or lack of it), a bond between gentleman
            and gentleman's gentleman that, throughout this novel, makes
            up in affective and class significance what it lacks in utilitarian
            sense. Yorick's bond to another valet is the most sustained
            and one of the fondest in the novel; and, for most of the novel,
            the bond is articulated through various forms of the conquest and
            exchange of women.
            In the discussion ahead, I will be using the "exchange of
            women" paradigm taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss and, for
            example, René Girard and Gayle Rubin, to focus on the changing
            meanings of the bonds between men in a seventeenth-century play and
            an eighteenth-century novel.1 These discussions are part of a book-
            length study of what I am calling "male homosocial
            desire" the whole spectrum of bonds between men,
            including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional
            subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic
            exchange within which the various forms of the traffic in
            women take place.
             
            Eve Kosofsky Sedgwickis associate professor of English at Amherst
            College. She is the author of Between Men: English Literature and
            Male Homosocial Desire (forthcoming, 1985).
Kendall L. Walton
         Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism
         That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the
            commonsense view, but as Edward Steichen reminds us it
            is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a
            photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the
            other. They point to "distortions" engendered by the
            photographic process and to the control which the photographer
            exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys
            for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive
            nature of the medium, observing that photographs are inevitably
            colored by the photographer's personal interests, attitudes,
            and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really
            does collide with photography's claim of extraordinary
            realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.
            Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of
            photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture
            makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a
            continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for
            realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward
            realism include the development of perspective and modeling
            techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details,
            attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very
            beginning, photography mastered perspective (a system of
            perspective that works, anyway, if not the only one). Subtleties of
            shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with
            the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of
            course the most mundane details of the scenes they
            portray stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty
            dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters
            striving for realism have always been after.
             
            2. See André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic
            Image," What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 (Berkeley
            and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 12; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated "OPI," will be included in the text. See
            also Rudolf Arnheim, "Melancholy Unshaped," Toward a
            Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
            1967), p. 186.
             
            Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of
            Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in
            the arts.
             
Barbara Johnson
         Rigorous Unreliability
         As a critique of a certain Western conception of the nature of
            signification, deconstruction focuses on the functioning of claim-
            making and claim-subverting structures within texts. A
            deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the conspicuously
            foregrounded statements in a text are systematically related to
            discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown into its
            shadows or margins; it is an attempt both to recover what is lost
            and to analyze what happens when a text is read solely in function
            of intentionality, meaningfulness, and representativity.
            Deconstruction thus confers a new kind of readability on those
            elements in a text that readers have traditionally been trained to
            disregard, overcome, explain away, or edit
            out contradictions, obscurities, ambiguities, incoherencies,
            discontinuities, ellipses, interruptions, repetitions, and plays of
            the signifier. In this sense it involves a reversal of values, a
            revaluation of the signifying function of everything that, in a
            signified-based theory of meaning, would constitute
            "noise." Jacques Derrida has chosen to speak of the
            values involved in this reversal in terms of "speech"
            and "writing," in which "speech" stands for
            the privilege accorded to meaning as immediacy, unity, identity,
            truth, and presence, while "writing" stands for the
            devalued functions of distance, difference, dissimulation, and
            deferment.
            This transvaluation has a number of consequences for the
            appreciation of literature. By shifting the attention from
            intentional meaning to writing as such, deconstruction has enabled
            readers to become sensitive to a number of recurrent literary topoi
            in a new way. Texts have been seen as commentaries on their own
            production or reception through their pervasive thematizations of
            textuality the myriad letters, books, tombstones, wills,
            inscriptions, road signs, maps, birthmarks, tracks, footprints,
            textiles, tapestries, veils, sheets, brown stockings, and self-
            abolishing laces that serve in one way or another as figures for
            the text to be deciphered or unraveled or embroidered upon. Thus, a
            deconstructor finds new delight in a Shakespearean character named
            Sir Oliver Martext or in Herman Melville's catalog of whales
            as books in Moby Dick, or she makes jokes about the opposition
            between speech and writing by citing the encounter between Little
            Red Riding Hood and the phony granny.
             
            Barbara Johnson is professor of Romance languages and literatures
            at Harvard University. She is the author of Défigurations du
            langage poétique and The Critical Difference, translator of Jacques
            Derrida's Dissemination, and editor of The Pedagogical
            Imperative: Teaching as a literary Genre.
John Fisher
         Entitling
         For the moment, I assume that we have some rough idea of what
            "title" is supposed to mean: the large letters on the
            spine of a book, the words on the center of the first page of a
            musical score, or the little plate on the museum wall to the right
            of the painting (if we ignore the artist's name, the date,
            and the geographical and historical data). Thus examples of titles
            would be The Taming of the Shrew, "Mapleleaf Rag," or
            The Birth of Venus, but that generates a rather complex set of
            answers.
            Let us start with what is undoubtedly the simplest situation: where
            an inscription of the title is physically part of the work. The
            most familiar of the aquatints of Francisco Goya which collectively
            are called Los Caprichos the forty-third is titled The
            Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, or, more precisely, the Spanish
            equivalent of those words, for the Spanish words appear as a large
            and significant element on the plate, indeed occupying more than 10
            percent of its surface. In such cases titles are not given: they
            are elements of works, not by inference or subtle metaphor but in a
            most literal way. No other title fits in that way. That print could
            not be called Bats and Cats and Sleeping Man with the expectation
            that those words should serve as its title. Some works most
            works on the other hand, allow for a range of acceptable
            titles. Guernica could have been titled The Bombing of a Basque
            Village or Luftwaffe Hell. Neither of these would, I suspect, have
            been as good a title as Guernica, but they remain possibilities,
            even though the familiar title is not physically part of the work.
            (And, of course, some expressions could not serve as title of the
            mural: Sylvan Springtime or Saint Francis in Ecstasy. Of course,
            Picasso could have stood up and said, "I hereby name this
            work Marlene Dietrich on the Beach at Deauville," and no one
            could claim that the locution was false but more about this
            later.) Some works, incidentally, contain words, even sentences,
            and are not titled accordingly. Several familiar works of René
            Magritte include a most realistic representation of a tobacco pipe
            and the large words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe."
            (Of course it isn't a pipe; it's a pipe-picture, we
            might say. That's the point.) Examples of the titles given by
            Magritte to paintings in this series are L'Air et la chanson
            and Le Trahison des images. Obviously, not all works of visual art
            which contain linguistic inscriptions have titles which correspond
            to those inscriptions. The simplest situation is hardly much help.
             
            John Fisher is professor of philosophy at Temple University and
            editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He is also
            the editor of Perceiving Artworks (1980) and Essays on Aesthetics
            (1983).
Gerald L. Bruns
         Loose Talk about Religion from William James
         In this paper I want to say some things about the way William James
            talks as, for example, in The Varieties of Religious
            Experience (1902), the famous Gifford Lectures in which (as it
            appears) James attempted to rehabilitate religion as a subject fit
            for philosophical discourse, or as something still worth talking
            about.1 Some familiar background for this matter is provided by the
            epigraph I have just given from "What Pragmatism
            Means," in which James shows himself to be a nominalist as
            against a metaphysical realist (see P,pp. 52-52; WWJ, p. 380). The
            nominalist position, as it applies to James, would be that words
            make sense to us but not for the reasons we give when we say that
            we designate things by them, because these things (whether gods or
            atoms) are never quite there, or at all events never quite things,
            in the way our language makes them out to be. It does not matter
            whether we are speaking of universals or particulars: words mean
            because of the way they hang together in sentences and contexts,
            and they fail to mean when they fail to fit in, not because of a
            failure of reference. It is not necessary (or not enough) to claim
            for our words that they are anchored in reality. The
            intelligibility of a word (or an utterance or a text) is always a
            hermeneutical construction, in the sense that the word depends for
            its meaning upon how it is taken. Whence the meaning of a word is
            always rhetorically contingent as well, because it is determined in
            varying measures by the situation in which it occurs and also,
            therefore, by the audience who is meant to hear it in a certain
            way, and who may take it in this certain way or perhaps in another
            way entirely, depending on the situations. We shall see how James
            exploits this contingency in his own way of speaking. A word can,
            of course, be taken as referring to some really existing entity,
            and in fact most words are taken in this way because (James would
            say) this is how they works for us. Words usually end up being
            about something. A nominalist in this case would be just someone
            who believes that (1) words do not have to refer to really existing
            entities in order to be taken in this realistic way, and (2) most
            words are taken in this realistic way for no good philosophical
            reason. But what might be allowed to stand as a good philosophical
            reason for taking words one way rather than another is exactly what
            our problem is, and it is also (but only in a loose sort of way)
            one of the things this paper is about.
             
            Gerald L. Bruns is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of
            Language (1974) and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and
            Understanding in Literary History (1982). He is currently at work
            on a new book, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. His most recent
            contribution to , "Canon and Power in the
            Hebrew Scriptures," appeared in the March 1984 issue.
George Rochberg
         Can the Arts Survive Modernism? (A Discussion of_the
            Characteristics, History, and Legacy of Modernism)
         In trying to say what modernism is (or was), we must remind
            ourselves that it cannot and must not to be properly
            described and understood be confined only to the arts of
            music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture,
            those arts with which we normally associate the term
            "culture." Modernism can be said to embrace, in the
            broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also
            science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics,
            the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the
            politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as
            philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology
            (among others). Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive.
            No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound
            alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized
            all levels of human existence.
            What, then, is modernism?
            Some have described it as a state of "chronic
            revolution," that is, revolution against the past, against
            tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its
            voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the
            "new," for the hunger to be
            "original" to be the first and last with
            something unique and difference, whatever that something might be
            or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.
            Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all
            realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that
            is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing
            regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away
            the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is,
            morality and ethics those areas that lie outside the purely
            rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of
            freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and
            uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a
            separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the
            form of individuals or society as a whole.
            Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism
            as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point
            of the interface between the present and the future, always ready
            to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of
            constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation.
             
            George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works
            and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The
            Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer's View of Twentieth-
            Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a
            commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired
            from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor
            of the Humanities.
Jonathan D. Kramer
         Can Modernism Survive George Rochberg?
         Modernism has been a celebration of the present. Why does it need a
            legacy (beyond its rejection of the past)? Why should that which
            was born (in Europe, at least) in the spirit of rebellion
            perpetuate itself as tomorrow's past? Modernism has been
            profoundly reflective of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century
            cultural values. Is that not enough? It is not that modernism has
            forgotten the past an art that rebels against its past must
            understand its adversary but rather that it asks us not to
            forget the present. The revolt of modernism was made possible, if
            not inevitable, by the rediscovery of the past. In earlier, eras,
            when the past was less readily accessible, artists worked for their
            present with little thought about their heritage. Renaissance
            composers, for example, generally knew little of music even two
            generations old; much medieval music theory and composition were
            based on misconceptions of Greek models. Yet by the nineteenth
            century, works from the past were available and understood.
            Virtually all composers agreed with Johannes Brahms, who reputedly
            said of Ludwig van Beethoven, "You have no idea how the likes
            of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind
            us." Historical consciousness had entered the arts, and
            artists were both threatened by competition with the past and
            seduced by the powerful idea that their works might outlive them.
            The Romantic artist became a genius speaking to posterity. Gustav
            Mahler was not the only Romanticist to pin his hopes on the future:
            "My time will yet come." Small wonder that, once the
            future came to be, its artists rebelled against pronouncements from
            their past the time rightfully belonged to them and no longer
            to Mahler's generation. While many twentieth-century artists
            continued to create for their future, the most extreme modernists
            (in music, Erik Satie and Charles Ives and, a generation later,
            John Cage) rejected not only their past but also the quest for
            immortality. They have written of their day and for their day. The
            real legacy of modernism is that it has no legacy.
             
            Jonathan D. Kramer is professor of music theory and composition at
            the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati
            and also program annotator and new music advisor of the Cincinnati
            Symphony Orchestra. He is currently working on Time and the
            Meanings of Music (forthcoming). His previous contribution to
            , "New Temporalities in Music,"
            appeared in Spring 1981.
