Wayne C. Booth
         Pluralism in the Classroom
         At my university we never stop reforming the curriculum, and
            we're now discussing the plurality of ways in which our
            students fulfill our requirement of a full year of "freshman
            humanities." Some of us feel that we now provide too many
            ways: neither students nor faculty members can make a good defense
            of a requirement in itself an expression of power, if you
            will that leads to scant sharing of readings or subject
            matters for the students, and to no goals or methods clearly shared
            by increasingly diverse faculty members. As we attack and defend
            this kind of flabby pluralism, we naturally find ourselves
            discussing other kinds of pluralism, and we begin to discover the
            true depth of a topic that may at first seem "merely
            practical." There may be some nouns that can be joined to the
            phrase "in the classroom" without taking on a total
            theory of education: Shakespeare in the classroom; Romanticism in
            the classroom; perhaps even ironyin the classroom. But when we try
            to discuss "pluralism in the classroom," we throw into
            the discussion every belief we may have about what education should
            be and how it should be conducted. To ask whether or in what sense
            we should be pluralists in the classroom is obviously to ask, in
            the most fundamental way possible, "What should a teacher
            teach? What should we hope that every student would learn,
            regardless of our commitment to this or that doctrine of the
            moment?"
            Most teachers, even in a time like ours when professed relativists
            pluralists abound, answer that question, at least implicitly, like
            this: One should try very hard to teach the truth not a
            "dogma," of course, perhaps not even a set of
            propositions, but at least some single right away of doing things.
            Indeed in some moods any honest teacher might confess to feeling
            lucky if students learn even one truth or one mode of working.
            "They'll meet plenty of plurality just in the nature of
            their lives." "They'll meet plenty of other
            teachers, most of them with absolutely mistaken views, and my chief
            task is to set them straight so that when they encounter nonsense
            they'll know how to deal with it." Still, when you
            press people who talk that way they of course claim that they teach
            no dogmas, only an appropriately open-minded way of dealing with
            error in the world. They may even call themselves pluralists or
            relativists. But it takes no great analytical skill to detect the
            monisms behind their claims. When pushed, they believe that they
            hold=--or might someday find some one way of working, some
            supremely powerful "killer mode" that can dispose of
            all other modes with decisive proofs. They work finally in one way
            only, pursuing, finally, one kind of truth.
             
            Wayne C. Booth is George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor
            of English and of Ideas and Methods at the university of Chicago.
            His previous works on pluralism include Critical Understanding: The
            Powers and Limits of Pluralism (1979) and "Pluralism and Its
            Rivals" in Now Don't Try to Reason with Me (1970). He
            is now completing a book on ethical criticism.
Hayden White
         Historical Pluralism
         It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary
            theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate
            critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the
            consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he
            would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony
            or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending
            circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able
            finally to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that
            he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that
            history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is
            historicism the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe
            in Friedrich Meinecke's great book on this subject, the
            perspective which, in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, is identified
            with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name
            given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is
            thehistorical perspective, contemporary historical theory and
            practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at
            contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that
            there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of
            critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good
            reason: the referent of the term "history" is as
            indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as
            the term "literature" (or for that matter,
            "philosophy" or "science") itself. So that,
            if one wished to "correct" certain critical positions
            by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper
            "sense of history," it would be just as legitimate to
            correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of
            historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the
            "sense of history" that the history of criticism
            displays over the "sense of literature." When Mitchell
            characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment
            of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he
            fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an
            atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally
            agreed upon "sense of history" to which one can appeal
            in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It
            is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of
            fact from which they draw different implications regarding the
            attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against
            ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation
            of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself.
             
            Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the
            University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to
             are "Historical Interpretation"
            (September 1982), "The Narrativization of Real Events"
            (Summer 1981), and "The Value of Narrativity in the
            Representation of Reality" (Autumn 1980).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Pluralism as Dogmatism
         It may seem a bit perverse to argue that pluralism is a kind of
            dogmatism, since pluralists invariably define themselves as
            antidogmatists. Indeed, the world would seem to be so well supplied
            with overt dogmatists religious fanatics, militant
            revolutionaries, political and domestic tyrants that it will
            probably seem unfair to suggest that the proponents of liberal,
            tolerant, civilized open-mindedness are guilty of a covert
            dogmatism. My only excuse for engaging in this exercise is that it
            may help to shake up some rather firmly fixed ideas about dogmatism
            held by those who advocate some version of pluralism. Dogmatism, I
            want to argue, has had a very had press, some of it deserved, some
            of it based in misunderstandings and ignorance. Much of that bad
            press stems, I will suggest, from the dominance of pluralism as an
            intellectual ideology since the Enlightenment. If
            "dogmatism" is a synonym for irrationality,
            infelixibility, and authoritarianism, the fault lies as much with
            pluralism as it does with any actual dogmatism. I'd like to
            begin, therefore, with a definition of dogmatism that comes, not
            from its pluralist foes, but from a historian of religion who
            treats it as a fairly neutral term, describing a complex and
            ancient feature of social institutions. This definition comes from
            E. Royston Pike's Encyclopedia of Religion and Religions:
            DOGMA(Gk., ordinance). A religious doctrine that is to be received
            on authority whether of a Divine revelation, a Church
            Council, Holy Scripture, or a great and honoured religious
            teacher and not, at least in the first instance, because it
            may be proved true in the light of reason. Almost always there is
            associated with dogma the element of Faith. The term comes from the
            Greek word for "to seem," and it meant originally that
            which seems true to anyone, i.e. has been approved or decided
            beyond cavil. In the New Testament it is applied to decisions of
            the Christian church in Jerusalem, enactments of the Jewish law,
            and imperial decrees, all of which were things to be accepted
            without argument. A little later it had come to mean simple
            statements of Christian belief and practice; and it was not until
            the 4th century, when the heretics were showing how far from simple
            the basic Christian beliefs really were, that it acquired the
            meaning of a theological interpretation of a religious fact. Then
            came the division of the Church into a Western and an Eastern
            branch, and never again was it possible to frame a dogma that might
            be universally held. The 39 Articles of the Church of England, the
            principles deduced from Calvin's "Institutes" and
            John Wesley's "Sermons," and the items that
            compose the Mormon creed may all be classed as dogmas.1
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of , is professor of
            English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology.
Ihab Hassan
         Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective
         Postmodernism once more that breach has begun to yawn! I
            return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the
            irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages
            of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism now?
            This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries
            ago "Was heist Aufklårung?" meaning,
            "Who are we now?" The answer was a signal meditation on
            historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.1 But to meditate on
            that topic today and this is my central claim is really
            to inquire &lsquo;Was heist Postmodernismus?"
            Pluralism in our time finds (if not founds) itself in the social,
            aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of
            postmodernism finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I
            submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American
            pluralists M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei
            Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen
            Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our
            moment engage that overweening query, "What is
            postmodernism?," engage and even answer it tacitly. In short,
            like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking
            postmodernism all their lives without knowing it.
            But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of
            it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has
            become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music,
            art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy,
            psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and
            even in the sciences. Indeed, postmodernism has now received the
            bureaucratic accolade of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
            in the form of a Summer Seminar for College Teachers; beyond that,
            it has penetrated the abstractions of "late" Marxist
            critics who, only a decade ago, dismissed postmodernism as another
            instance of the dreck, fads, and folderol of a consumer society.
            Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term, if not
            define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict
            cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept.
             
            1. "Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is
            the problem of the present time, of what we are, in this very
            moment," writes Michel Foucault in "The Subject and
            Power," reprinted as "Afterword" in Michel
            Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,ed. Hubert L.
            Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, 19820, p. 210. The essay also
            appeared in 8 (Summer 1982): 777-96.
             
            Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He is
            the author of, among other books, Radical Innocence (1961), The
            Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971), Paracriticisms (1975), and The
            Right Promethean Fire (1980). His latest work, Out of Egypt, is
            forthcoming in 1986.
Bruce Erlich
         Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of "Pluralism"
         Immanuel Kant might have stated the central and urgent problem
            facing contemporary literary theory as the need to seek a path
            between dogmatism and skepticism. We confront today a multiplicity
            of critical methods, each filling books and journals with no doubt
            convincing arguments for its correctness. If we cling to one,
            denying others possess truth, we are dogmatists; if, however, we
            grant that two or three or all are equally true, we admit that each
            is at the same time false in relation to the others' truth,
            and so we are skeptics. The "dogmatic employment" of
            reason, Kant noted, "lands us in dogmatic assertions to which
            other assertions, equally specious, can always be opposed-that is,
            in scepticism."1
            Into this professional breach steps "pluralism" (a term
            the reader should assume throughout is in quotation marks),
            claiming it can vindicate sharply limited patterns of reading which
            nonetheless allow for diversity in the relation of word to idea
            and, so, of interpreting reader to text. This would make it
            possible to encompass within a single theory the insights which
            both camps (those with one truth, those with many) find in their
            positions. Clearly, this entices.
            But do we really understand what pluralism is, if it is at all? Its
            critical practice already exists this essay grew from a 1984
            conference which sought possible intellectual
            "foundations" of that practice but how are these
            practitioners to understand what they do? Pluralism's
            philosophic pedigree may have been neatly sketched by Nelson
            Goodman (who, however, does not use the term) as the tradition
            That began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the
            structure of the mind, continued when C. I. Lewis exchanged the
            structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now
            proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of
            the several symbols systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts,
            perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique
            truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even
            conflicting versions of world in the making.2
             
            1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,trans. Norman Kemp Smith
            (New York, 1965), p. 57; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated CPR,will be included in the text.
            2. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), p. x.
            Since Lewis is not often classified among pluralists, I support
            Goodman by calling attention to Pepper having been Lewis'
            student and to Lewis' observation that he and Pepper
            "have been, so to say, continuously aware of each other, and
            of a common background of thought…. I should like to think that our
            respective views, both in theory of value and in ethics, are
            mutually supplementary rather than rival theories"
            ("The Philosopher Replies," in The Philosophy of C. I.
            Lewis, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp [La Salle, Ill., 1968], pp. 670-71).
            Numerous essays from this volume (include one by Pepper) are useful
            for situating Lewis.
             
            Bruch Erlichis associate professor of English and modern languages
            at the University of Nebraska Lincoln where he teaches
            comparative literature and literary theory. He has published on
            Shakespeare, Walter Benjamin, and intellectual history and is
            preparing a book on cognitive universals in tension with the
            experience of historical change, Unintelligible Limits: Time,
            meaning, and a Hermeneutic of Suffering.
Ellen Rooney
         Who's Left Out? A Rose by Any Other_Name_Is_Still_Red;_Or,_The
            Politics of Pluralism
         The practical difficulties that trouble any effort to discuss
            "pluralism" in American literary studies can be
            glimpsed in the following exchange. In a 1980 interview in the
            Literary Review of Edinburgh, Ken Newton put this question to
            Derrida:
            It might be argued that deconstruction inevitably leads to
            pluralist interpretation and ultimately to the view that any
            interpretation is as good as any other. Do you believe this and how
            do you select some interpretations as being better than others?
            Derrida replied:
            I am not a pluralist and I would never say that every
            interpretation is equal but Ido not select. The interpretations
            select themselves. I am a Nietzschean in that sense. You know that
            Nietzsche insisted on the fact that the principle of
            differentiation was in itself selective. The eternal return of the
            same was not repetition, it was a selection of the more powerful
            forces. So I would say that some are more powerful than others. The
            hierarchy is between forces and not between true and
            false.1&shy;&shy;
            The irony of Newton's identification of pluralism with the
            very interpretive irresponsibility that it accuses
            others Derrida foremost among them of embracing is
            certainly not lost on those critics who call themselves pluralists;
            it comes as no surprise to them that Derrida declines to join their
            company. Nevertheless, the breezy gloss of pluralism as "the
            view that any interpretation is as good as any other" is
            bound to seem plausible to the large numbers of readers for whom
            the word denotes a generalized tolerance the refusal of dogmatism.
            That Derrida should be called upon to dissociate himself from
            pluralism is in fact symptomatic of the profound confusion
            surrounding the term. At present, the pervasiveness of such loose
            talk compels pluralists to defend themselves regularly against this
            kind of misinterpretation. Thus, the colloquial reading of
            pluralism that construes it as mere relativism, the absence of
            principled constraints, is frequently acknowledged, if only to be
            rejected. Even Bruch Erlich must emphasize that pluralism does not
            want "a totally free critical market, for that involves the
            proliferation of a hundred flowers, what Booth dismissively terms
            &lsquo;chaotic warfare.' "2
             
            1. James Kearn and Ken Newton, "An Interview with Jacques
            Derrida," Literary Review 14 (18 Apr.-1 May 1980), p.21.
            2. Bruce Erlich, "Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-
            Contradictions of &lsquo;Pluralism,' " this volume, p.
            527; all further references to this essay will be included in the
            text.
             
            Ellen Rooney teaches English and women's studies at Brown
            University. She is currently at work on a study entitled Seductive
            Reasoning: Pluralism and the Problematic of General Persuasion.
Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin
         Interpretation and Identity: Can the Worl Survive the_World?
         Predictions concerning the end of the world have proven less
            reliable than your broker's recommendations or your fondest
            hopes. Whether you await the end fearfully or eagerly, you may rest
            assured that it will never come not because the world is
            everlasting but because it has already ended, if indeed it ever
            began. But we need not mourn, for the world is indeed well lost,
            and with it the stultifying stereotypes of absolutism: the absurd
            notions of science as the effort to discover a unique, prepackaged,
            but unfortunately undiscoverable reality, and of truth as agreement
            with that inaccessible reality. All notions of pure givenness and
            unconditional necessity and of a single correct perspective and
            system of categories are lost as well.
             
            If there is no such thing as the world, what are we living in? The
            answer might be "A world" or, better, "Several
            worlds." For to deny that there is any such thing as theworld
            is no more to deny that there are worlds than to deny that there is
            any such thing as thenumber between two and sevenis to deny that
            there are numbers between two and seven. The task of describing the
            world is as futile as the task of describing the number between
            twoand seven.
             
            The world is lost once we appreciate a curious feature of certain
            pairs of seemingly contradictory statements: if either is true,
            both are. Although "The earth is in motion" and
            "The earth is at rest" apparently contradict each
            other, both are true. But from a contradiction, every statement
            follows. So unless we are prepared to acknowledge the truth of
            every statement, the appearance of contradiction in cases like
            these must somehow be dispelled.
             
            Nelson Goodman is professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard
            University. He has written Of Mind and Other Matters, Ways of
            Worldmaking, Problems and Projects, Languages of Art, The Structure
            of Appearance,and Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. His most recent
            contribution to  is "How Buildings
            Mean" (June 1985). Catherine Z. Elgin is associate professor
            of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She
            is the author of With Reference to Referenceand is currently
            writing a book entitled Philosophy without Foundations.
Richard McKeon
         Pluralism of interpretations and Pluralism of Objects, Actions,_and
            Statements Interpreted
         We have met in this conference to discuss "critical
            pluralism." It will be a conference or discussion if the
            participants present different conceptions of critical pluralism
            based on different conceptions of criticism. Pluralism will enter
            the discussion in two ways: in the plurality of statements, which
            will be easy to recognize, and in the plurality or identity of what
            the statements are about, which will be problematic. There are
            three possible conclusions to which the discussion may lead. Some
            of the participants may argue that only one of the opposed
            statements is about criticism and that the others may be about the
            work, but do not treat it as a literary work; these participants
            may so deny the possibility of critical pluralism. Some may present
            different modes of critical interpretation of a literary work and
            argue that they are different interpretations of the same work;
            these participants may recognize no need to differentiate different
            aspects in the work to which they interpretations are relevant.
            Finally, some may argue that the different modes of criticism apply
            to different aspects of the work which should be named differently
            and be treated by different methods, and which should be considered
            distinct objects of interpretation.
            The variety of critical methods and the variety of objects to which
            those methods can be applied are apparent when the reflexive
            relations between the pluralism of the interpretation of books and
            the pluralism of the circumstances and the matters that condition
            and constitute books are examined in a paradigm of possible forms
            and matters related to each other paradoxically. Many of the
            recurrent pairs of terms joined and differentiated in the
            literature of criticism (among them art and nature, and poetry and
            philosophy) are related paradoxically.
             
            Richard McKeon was the editor of The Basic Works of
            Aristotle,coeditor of Peter Abailard, Sic et Non: A Critical
            Edition,and author of Thought, Action, and Passion. His previous
            contributions to  are "Arts of Invention and
            Arts of Memory: Creation and Criticism" (June 1975),
            "Canonic Books and Prohibited Books: Orthodoxy and Heresy in
            Religion and Culture" (Summer 1976), and "Pride and
            Prejudice:Thought, Character, Argument, and Plot" (Spring
            1979).
Derek Longhurst
         A Response to Peter Rabinowitz
         Is Rabinowitz seriously suggesting that his "rules" of
            reading are equally applicable to the analysis of British and
            American forms of popular writing and their readerships between
            1920 and the 1960s? Is he seriously suggesting that Gone with the
            Wind, for example, would be "read" in the same way and
            for the same meanings in the southern states, the northern states,
            in Yorkshire and London? In this particular case the issue of
            cultural reproduction is also crucial the complex relations
            between the book and film "texts" and readerships for
            both. Is the book now read "through" the film and the
            mythos of Hollywood? Can the novel's "history" of
            the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction be seen in relation
            to experience of the Depression on the one hand and to dominant
            historical discourses of the period privileged within American
            educational institutions on the other?2
            Or, if we take a British example like A. J. Cronin, whose work was
            regarded as both "serious" and "popular" in
            the late 1930s, what happens to Rabinowitz's distinction?
            Clearly, Cronin's fiction is not "acceptable" in
            the literary canon but his example illustrates the weakness of any
            critical analysis of the popular rooted in "literary"
            assumptions. Very important questions are raised by the commercial
            success of The Citadel, not among "the people" in any
            generalized sense but among specific constituencies of
            professional, middle-class readerships in both New Deal American
            and in Britain during a period of history remarkable for the
            regrouping of the forces of social-democratic consensus
            politics an alliance between "sympathetic"
            fractions of the professional middle class and "the
            people" which culminated eventually in the postwar Labour
            party election victory. Thus readers are not only readers, and the
            processes of reading especially perhaps of popular
            fiction are not reducible to abstract rules which exclude all
            considerations of cultural=political institutions and discourses.
             
            2. This example is partly indebted to discussion with Greg Gaut and
            Jane P. Tompkins during a University of Minnesota Conference,
            "On the Social Edge" (25-27 April 1985).
             
            Derek Longhurst is principal lecturer and course leader in
            communication studies at Sunderland Polytechnic and general editor
            of the forthcoming series Culture and Popular Fiction. His
            publications include chapters in Re-Reading English and An
            Introduction to Contemporary Cultural Studies. He is currently
            working on a book about the political thriller.
Peter J. Rabinowitz
         Assuming the Obvious: A Reply to Derek Longhurst
         Derek Longhurst's rhetorical strategies don't leave me
            much room to maneuver. By constructing my essay in such a way that
            we are opponents, he offers only two choices: I can recant or enter
            into battle. Actually, I would rather do neither; I agree with most
            of what he says and would like a chance to explore those points
            where we differ. But in order to do that, it is first necessary to
            see where our differences really lie; and Longhurst's
            response does not make it easy.
            Granted, some of his criticisms are sound. He is right that I use
            the word "we" too loosely and that I sketched out my
            argument on an extremely abstract level, which resulted in, among
            other things, a blurring of the differences between American and
            British literature. But more often than not, Longhurst attacks me
            for taking positions that I do not in fact hold. For instance, he
            suggests that I believe the categories "popular" and
            "serious" to be fixed, and that my scheme would
            therefore shatter when confronted with a text like The Citadel,
            which was regarded as "both &lsquo;serious' and
            &lsquo;popular.' " Yet my essay was intended precisely
            to offer a way to talk about such cases of which The Glass
            Key is one and while my solution may have its flaws, the
            rigidity of categories that Longhurst attacks it for is surely not
            one of them.
             
            Peter J. Rabinowitz is associate professor of comparative
            literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Before Reading
            (forthcoming), a book about the conventions of reading, and is also
            active as a music critic for such publications as Fanfareand
            Ovation. His previous contributions to  are
            "Truth in Fiction: A Reexamination of Audiences"
            (Autumn 1977), "Who Was That Lady? Pluralism and Critical
            Method" (Spring 1979), and "The Turn of the Glass Key:
            Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy" (March 1985).
James L. Battersby and James Phelan
         Meaning as Concept and Extension: Some Problems
         Hirsch's revision results from his attempt to think through
            the difficult question that underlies the whole essay: How does the
            movement of time and circumstance affect the stability of meaning?
            The first part of his answer is that the relation between original
            meaning and subsequent understanding or applications of that
            meaning is analogous to the relation between a concept and its
            extension. For example, if he reads Shakespeare's sonnet 55
            ("Not marble nor the gilded monuments") and applies it
            to his beloved, and one of us reads it and applies it to his
            beloved, "that does not make the meaning of the sonnet
            different for us, assuming that we both understand (as of course we
            do) that the text's meaning is not limited to any particular
            exemplification but rather embraces many, many
            exemplifications" (p. 210). That is, the sonnet has a status
            analogous to that of the concept "bicycle," and the two
            applications have a status analogous to that of a three-speed and a
            ten-speed bicycle. Whereas Hirsch formerly considered such
            exemplifications (for that is what these, though not all,
            applications are) part of a text's significance, he now
            considers them part of its meaning. This revision indicates that
            for Hirsch meaning is not the product of a consciousness producing
            an intrinsic genre but of a consciousness communicating something
            broader and more general than an intrinsic genre an
            intention-concept that can have numerous extensions or
            exemplifications, including many that the originating consciousness
            could not have anticipated. Formerly, Hirsch used intrinsic genre
            to describe that sense of the whole which governed the horizon of
            developing meaning and which, when the work was
            completed when all the blanks were filled in gave the
            work its specific determinate meaning. That is, determinacy of
            meaning was in large part a function of narrowing the class of
            implications; when the work was completed, the class of
            implications was restricted to those synonymous with expressed
            meaning. In short, in the old theory, meaning-intention is a
            "narrow," not a broad "concept."
             
            James L. Battersby,professor of English at Ohio State University,
            is the author of Rational Praise and Natural Lamentation: Johnson,
            Lycidas, and Principles of Criticism and Elder Olson: An Annotated
            Bibliography. He is currently at work on a study of the
            relationship between "thought" and structure in various
            genres. James Phelan is associate professor English at Ohio State
            University and the author of Worlds from Words: A Theory of
            language in Fiction. His work in progress concerns character and
            narrative progression.
Michael Leddy
         Validity and Reinterpretation
         In a recent piece in  E. D. Hirsch devotes himself
            to the reinterpretation of a distinction that he first made in 1960
            between meaning and significance. I suspect that it will be a while
            before we feel comfortable deciding what significance
            "Meaning and Significance Reinterpreted" (Critical
            Inquiry 11 [December 1984]: 202-25) has for us. Indeed, Hirsch
            seems uncertain as to what significance this reinterpretation has
            for him. At first he modestly proposes a "revision of that
            distinction" (p. 202), implying that he will give us
            essentially the same distinction in a somewhat different form, and
            two-thirds into the essay he notes that aside from one change, his
            account of meaning "has stayed what it was" (p. 216).
            Toward the close of the piece, he speaks of his "revised
            account of meaning" (p. 223), but in the next (and final)
            paragraph, he opines that this account is "a new and
            different theory" (p. 223). Yet this is not the last word,
            for Hirsch concludes by talking about "this change in my
            theory" (p. 224), again giving the reader the impression that
            it's still the same old theory, only somewhat different. But
            as Hirsch himself asks, "How far can an existing theory be
            adjusted before it loses its self-identity" (p. 221)? And as
            I will now ask, how well does "Meaning and Significance
            Reinterpreted" cohere with the theory of meaning that Hirsch
            proposes in Validity in Interpretation?The most curious aspect of
            this reinterpretation of meaning and significance is that Hirsch
            remains silent about more fundamental changes in his theory of
            meaning that his revision brings with it. I want to note three such
            changes, which involve key terms in Hirsch's thought either
            dropping out of the argument or finding notably different
            replacements.
             
            Michael Leddyis assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois
            University. He has published on William Burroughs and Geoffrey Hill
            and is currently working on a study of authors, readers, and
            meaning.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
         Coming with Terms to Meaning
         Professors Battersby and Phelan have presented a lively challenge.
            They urge readers to reject the later, fuzzy Hirsch, in favor of an
            earlier, truer Hirsch.
            Their first objection is that Hirsch 2 has mistaken the nature of
            literary meaning. Battersby and Phelan reject the view that a
            literary work carries a general meaning analogous to the concept of
            "bicycle" that can be exemplified by all bicycles. They
            propose that a literary work is "more appropriately conceived
            as … a Schwinn or even a red Schwinn three-speed with a blue seat
            and two flat tires" (p. 612). They object to my adoption of
            Sir Philip Sidney's claim that literature provides both the
            general concept and the particular example simultaneously. By
            saying that literature does both things at once I conflate and
            confuse, they say, two different intentions, because, as they aver,
            an exemplified concept cannot be further exemplified" (p.
            613).This claim reinstates the familiar New Critical doctrine that
            a literary concept is unique among concepts in that it can never be
            dissevered from its particular embodiment.
             
            E. D. Hirsch, Jr.,professor of English at the University of
            Virginia, is the author of numerous works including Validity in
            Interpretationand The Aims of Interpretation. His previous
            contributions to include "Against
            Interpretation?" (June 1983) and "The Politics of
            Theories of Interpretation" (September 1982). His most recent
            contributions is "Meaning and Significance
            Reinterpreted" (December 1984).
