Rudolf Arnheim
         Art among the Objects
         With the emergence of man from nature art emerged among the
            objects. There was nothing to distinguish or exalt it in the
            beginning. Art did not separate one kind of thing from the others
            but was rather a quality common to them all. To the extent to which
            things were made by human beings, art did not necessarily call for
            the skill of specialists. All things took skill, and almost
            everybody had it.
            This is the way an essayist in the eighteenth century might have
            begun a treatise on our subject. By now his recourse to a mythical
            past would sound naïve and misleading, mainly because we have come
            to pride ourselves on defining things by what distinguishes them
            from the rest of the world. Thus art is laboriously separated from
            what is supposed not to be art a hopeless endeavor, which has
            more and more disfigured our image of art by extirpating it from
            its context. We have been left with the absurd notion of art as a
            collection of useless artifacts generating an unexplainable kind of
            pleasure.
            Rescue from this impasse of our thinking is not likely to come
            primarily from those of us who, established on the island of
            artistic theory and practice, look around at what else there is in
            the world to see; rather it will come from those who are curious
            about what human beings meet, make, and use, and who in the course
            of their explorations run into objects prominently displaying the
            property we call art. Psychologists, sociologists, and
            anthropologists have been driven to view art in the context of
            nature, ritual, shelter, and the whole furniture of civilization.
            As a characteristic recent example I mention a thorough interview
            study, The Meaning of Things,by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene
            Rochberg-Halton, in which three generations of families from the
            Chicago area were questioned about their favorite
            possessions.1&shy; Pictures, sculptures, and all sorts of craft
            work turned up at a more or less modest place in the inventory of
            the home, and the reasons given for their value make wholesome
            reading for specialists in aesthetics.
             
            1. See Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The
            Meaning of Things: Symbols in the Development of the Self
            (Cambridge, 1981).
             
            Rudolf Arnheim retired from Harvard University as professor
            emeritus of the psychology of art. He then taught as a visiting
            professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 1983.
            His most recently published book is New Essays on the Psychology of
            Art. At present he is preparing a new edition of The Power of the
            Center,a theory of visual composition first published in 1982.
E. H. Gombrich
         "They Were All Human Beings--So Much Is Plain":_Reflections_on
            Cultural Relativism in the Humanities
         In the fourth section of Goethe's Zahme Xenien we find the
            quatrain from which I have taken the theme of such an old and new
            controversy, which, as I hope, concerns both Germanic studies and
            the other humanities:
                        "What was it that kept you from us so
            apart?"
                        I always read Plutarch again and again.
                        "And what was the lesson he did impart?"
                        "They were all human beings so much is
            plain."1
                        In the very years when Goethe wrote these lines, that
            is in the 1820s, Hegel repeatedly gave his lectures on the
            philosophy of history. Right at the beginning he formulated the
            opposite view which I should like briefly to characterize as
            "cultural relativism."
            Every age has such peculiar circumstances, such individual
            conditions that it must be interpreted, and can only be
            interpreted, by reference to itself…. Nothing is shallower in this
            respect than the frequent appeal to Greek and Roman example which
            so often occurred among the French at the time of their Revolution.
            Nothing could be more different than the nature of these peoples
            and the nature of our own times.2
                        What is at issue here is not, of course, Hegel's
            assertion that ages and peoples differ from each other. We all know
            that, and Goethe, the attentive reader and traveler, also knew, for
            instance, that the Roman carnival differed in its character from
            the celebrations of the Feast of Saint Rochus at Bingen, both of
            which he had described so lovingly. What makes the cultural
            historian into a cultural relativist is only the conclusion which
            we saw Hegel draw, that cultures and styles of life are not only
            different but wholly incommensurable, in other words that it is
            absurd to compare the peoples of a region or an age with human
            beings of other zones because there is no common denominator that
            would justify us in doing so.
             
            1.                                 &lsquo;Was hat dich nun von uns
            entfernt?'
                                                Hab immer den Plutarch gelesen.
                                                &lsquo;Was has du den dabei
            gelernt?'
                                                Sind eben alles Menschen
            gewesen.'
             
            Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Såmtlich Werke. Jubilåums-ausgabe in 40
            Bånden(Stuttgart, 1902-7) 4:73; with commentary.
            2. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorselungen über die
            Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke,20 vols. (Frankfurt-am-Main,
            1969-79), 12:17.
             
            E. H. Gombrichwas 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, Tributes,
            Aby Warburg,and New Light on Old Masters.His previous contributions
            to include "The Museum: Past, Present and
            Future" (Spring 1977), "Standards of Truth: The
            Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" (Winter 1980), and
            "Representation and Misrepresentation" (December 1984).
Paul Feyerabend
         Creativity--A Dangerous Myth
         According to one of the rivals, "poets do not create from
            knowledge but on the basis of certain natural talents and guided by
            divine inspiration, just like seers and the singers of
            oracles."1 There is "a form of possession and madness,
            caused by the muses, that seizes a tender and untouched soul and
            inspires and stimulates it so that it educates by praising the
            deeds of ancestors in songs and in every other mode of poetry.
            Whoever knocks on the door of poetry without the madness of the
            muses trusting that technique alone will make him a whole poet does
            not reach his aim; he and his poetry of reason disappear before the
            poetry of the madman."2 Even knowledge cannot arise in a
            purely rational way. In his seventh letter Plato explains how
            "from a long and dedicated pursuit of the subject and from
            close companionship, [understanding] suddenly, like fire being
            kindled by a leaping spark, is born in the soul and straightaway
            finds nourishment in itself."3 Thus understanding or building
            a work of art contains an element that goes beyond skill, technical
            knowledge, and talent. A new force takes hold of the soul and
            directs it, toward theoretical insight in one case, toward artistic
            achievement in the other.
            The view adumbrated in these quotations is very popular today.
            Interestingly enough it seems to receive support form the most
            rigorous and most advanced parts of the sciences. This rigor, it is
            pointed out, is but a transitory stage in a process which has much
            in common with what Plato envisaged. Of course, it is necessary to
            make some changes: Plato's knowledge was stable while
            scientific knowledge progresses. Plato assumed that outside
            forces madness, divine inspiration impinge on the soul
            while the moderns let the appropriate ideas, images, emotions arise
            from the individual soul itself. But there seem to exist many
            reasons to recommend a Platonism that has been modified in this
            way.
            In the following essay I shall try to show that the reasons that
            have been given are invalid and that the view itself the view
            that culture needs individual creativity is not only absurd
            but also dangerous. To make my criticism as concrete as possible I
            shall concentrate on e specific group of arguments in its favor.
            And to make it as clear as possible I shall use arguments trying to
            show the role of individual creativity in the sciences. If these
            clear and detailed arguments fail, then the rhetoric emerging from
            more foggy areas will altogether lose its force.
             
            1. Plato, Apology of Socrates 22c. Translations, unless otherwise
            noted, are my own
            2. Plato, Phaedrus 245a.
            3. Plato, Epistles 341c, d.
             
            Paul Feyerabendstudied singing and opera production in Vienna,
            history of theater and theatrical production at the Institute for
            the Methodological Reform of the German Theater in Weimar, and
            physics, astronomy, and philosophy in Vienna. He has lectured on
            aesthetics, the history of science, and philosophy in Austria,
            Germany, England, New Zealand, and the United States. At the moment
            he holds a joint appointment at the University of California,
            Berkeley, and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His
            books include Against Method (1975), Erkenntnis für freie Menschen
            (1981), and Philosophical Papers (1981). Forthcoming works are
            Farewell to Reason and Stereotypes of Reality.
Susan Gubar
         Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism, and Depictions of
            Female Violation
         It is hardly necessary to rent I Spit on Your Graveor Tool Box
            Murders for your VCR in order to find images of sexuality
            contaminated by depersonalization or violence. As far back as
            Rabelais' Gargantua,for example, Panurge proposes to build a
            wall around Paris out of the pleasure-twats of women [which] are
            much cheaper than stones": "the largest … in
            front" would be followed by "the medium-sized, and last
            of all, the least and smallest," all interlaced with
            "many horney joy-dinguses" so that fortification would
            be impregnable, except for the "ordure and excretions"
            of the flies it would doubtlessly attract.1 Two centuries later,
            one of Rabelais' compatriots, the Marquis de Lade, described
            the rage of a sexually initiated daughter against a woman who
            refuses to consider her "pleasure-twat" "cheaper
            than stones." The Sadeian heroine first sodomizes her
            puritanical mother with an artificial penis, then has her infected
            with syphilis, and finally performs infibulations to prevent the
            infected semen from leaking out: "Quickly, quickly, fetch me
            needle and threat! … Spread your thighs, Mama, so I can stitch you
            together."2
            One century later in England, the author of My Secret Life
            explained that, when in a state of sexual excitement, "he is
            ready to fuck anything," from his sister to his grandmother,
            from a ten-year-old, to a woman of sixty, for a standing prick has
            no conscience." To this credo, he adds the admonition,
            "Woe be to the female whom he gets a chance at, if she does
            not want him,for he will have her if he can."3 The sexually
            aroused man in the contemporary American film Looking for Mr.
            Goodbar curses the woman who does not want him as much as she wants
            a room of her own and the freedom to choose a succession of male
            lovers. After he resentfully determines to have her when he gets
            the chance ("All you got to do is lay there. Guy's got
            to do all the work"), he rapes her and finally knifes her to
            death, exclaiming "That's what you want, bitch, right?
            That's what you want."
            However these individual works are labeled, such passages remind us
            of the long history of pornography, a gender-specific genre
            produced primarily by and for men but focused obsessively on the
            female figure. In their depictions of female sexuality, narratives
            from Gargantua to La Philosophie dans le boudoir, My Secret
            Life,and Looking for Mr. Goodbar explain why definitions of the
            pornographic have recently moved away from "obscenity,"
            a term that generally refers to the sexually stimulating effects of
            a picture, a novel, or a film on the male reader/observer, and
            toward "dehumanization," a word that is used to evoke
            the objectification of women. As Irene Diamond has demonstrated,
            during the past decade the generally held assumption that
            pornography is about male sexuality has been qualified by those who
            argue that "the &lsquo;what' of pornography is not sex
            but power and violence, and the &lsquo;who' of concern are no
            longer male consumers and artists but women."4
             
            1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel,trans. Jacques Le
            Clercq (New York, 1936), bk. 2, chap. 15. I have used this
            translation because it is employed in Helene Iswolsky's
            translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World
            (Cambridge, Mass., 1968). With no analysis of gender,
            Bakhtin's exclusive focus on the grotesque wipes out the
            significance of Rabelais' sexual imagery.
            2. Marquis de Sade, quoted in a brilliant reading of this text by
            Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography
            (New York, 1978), p. 127; all further references to this work ,
            abbreviated SW,will be included in the text.
            3. My Secret Life ([1984?]; New York, 1966), p. 361.
            4. Irene Diamond, "Pornography and Repression: A
            Reconsideration," in Women: Sex and Sexuality,ed. Catharine
            Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago, 1980), p. 132.
             
            Susan Gubar is professor of English and women's studies at
            Indiana University, Bloomington. Together with Sandra M. Gilbert,
            she has coauthored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
            the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination and co-edited both
            Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and the
            Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in
            English.This fall they will publish the first volume of a three-
            volume work, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
            the Twentieth Century. Her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry is " &lsquo;The Blank Page' and the Issues of
            Female Creativity" (Winter 1981).
Frank Lentricchia
         Patriarchy Against Itself--The Young Manhood of Wallace Stevens
         In what is advertised as a "controversial coast to coast
            bestseller," most men who were asked "How would you
            feel if something about you were described as feminine or
            womanly?" said (surprise) they'd be angry. Consider
            these voices from The Hite Report on Male Sexuality:
            Enraged. Insulted. Never mind what women are really like I
            know what he's saying: he's saying I should be
            submissive to him.
            To be called "like a woman" by another man is to be
            humiliated by him, because most men consider women to be weak, and
            a man doesn't want to be considered weak.
            Chagrined. I may appear soft, but I carry a big stick. So watch
            out.
            If I was described as having something "like a
            woman's," I would be outraged. I would defend my
            masculinity almost automatically. I wouldn't like being
            compared to a woman's anything.1
            About two seconds of reflection should be enough to convince most
            of us that what is offered in The Hite Report on Male Sexuality as
            the representative testimony of contemporary American men is, in
            fact, representative: our relations with women are problematic,
            those with ourselves something worse. What Shere Hite does not call
            attention to is an intriguing recurrence in many of the responses:
            the question is heard as a charge and it is imagined to be coming
            from another male. The basic point now seems to me inescapable,
            though to say "inescapable" is in no way to say that
            the history of literary theory and criticism has found it so (or
            that I have always found it so). One way of understanding that
            history is to read it as a series of ingenious escapes from the
            basic point which is economic and sexual (in that order: the order
            of repression) and which goes something like this: What we know as
            "femininity" is internally linked to what we know as
            "masculinity" because both designations are highly
            motivated cultural constructions of biological difference that do
            powerful social work at the moment when they are lived, when they
            constitute the barely conscious and barely reflected upon substance
            of belief. The political synonym for "belief" is
            "ideology" in the particular sense of
            "ideology" as a constructed thing which nevertheless
            feels natural and is never (or is only rarely) experienced as a
            thing bearing interested human intention. The basic ideological
            point has to do with social engenderment, and it means, among other
            things, if you're male, that you must police yourself for
            traces of femininity. If you're male it means, among other
            things, that the great dread is not so much that another man might
            call you feminine or womanly (in our culture, a pretty dreadful
            prospect), but that you might have to call yourself feminine or
            womanly. The political issue of gender has recently been the
            special concern of feminist criticism and eventually, after a long
            look at Wallace Stevens, I'll address feminism directly, in
            what may be its institutionally most potent form.
             
            1. Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality (New York, 1982),
            p. 64.
             
            Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. This
            essay is part of a forthcoming book, Ariel and the Police: Michel
            Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens.He has also published
            Criticism and Social Change (1983) and After the new Criticism
            (1980).
Joan DeJean
         Fictions of Sappho
         I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by
            returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking's
            notion of a "poetics of abandonment." Lipking's
            article was included in an issue of  entitled
            Canons,in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist
            perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on
            literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence,
            sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent
            reformulation of the canon. It may be, as Viktor Shklovsky
            suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love,that literary theory is
            the novel's successor, in which case the resurrection of
            Ovid's abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore,
            for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are
            today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom
            have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given
            the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation,
            it is perhaps inevitable that some of today's male literary
            critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers.
            Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign
            women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the
            cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner
            that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has
            provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary
            canons but to critical canons as well.
            In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic
            investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy
            deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of
            recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the
            authors of The Madwoman in the Attic:"Sandra Gilbert and
            Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth
            century as if into a mirror" ("AS," p. 68; my
            emphasis). Thus Gilbert and Gubar Lipking also cites the
            examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers become the most
            recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary
            critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my
            analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier
            centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking's
            article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring.
            "In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right
            issues." Lipking may be calling for "a poetics of
            abandonment" not in response to a perceived maternal
            deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to
            abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female
            theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly
            difficult time proving their legitimacy.
             
            Joan DeJeanis professor of French at Princeton University. Her most
            recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade,and
            she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of
            Sappho: Sappho's Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937.
Joyce Carol Oates
         Soul at the White Heat: The Romance of_Emily_Dickinson's_Poetry
         Emily Dickinson is the most paradoxical of poets: the very poet of
            paradox. By way of voluminous biographical material, not to mention
            the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that we
            know everything about her; yet the common experience of reading her
            work, particularly if the poems are read sequentially, is that we
            come away seeming to know nothing. We could recognize her
            inimitable voice anywhere in the "prose" of her
            letters no less than in her poetry yet it is a voice of the
            most deliberate, the most teasing anonymity. "I'm
            Nobody!" is a proclamation to be interpreted in the most
            literal of ways. Like no other poet before her and like very few
            after her Rilke comes most readily to mind, and, perhaps,
            Yeats and Lawrence Dickinson exposes her heart's most
            subtle secrets; she confesses the very sentiments that, in society,
            would have embarrassed her dog (to paraphrase a remark of
            Dickinson's to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, explaining her
            aversion for the company of most people, whose prattle of
            "Hallowed things" offended her). Yet who is this
            "I" at the center of experience? In her astonishing
            body of 1,775 poems Dickinson records what is surely one of the
            most meticulous examinations of the phenomenon of human
            "consciousness" ever undertaken. The poet's
            persona the tantalizing "I" seems, in
            nearly every poem, to be addressing us directly with perceptions
            that are ours as well as hers. (Or his: these
            "Representations of the Verse," though speaking in
            Dickinson's voice, are not restricted to the female gender.)
            The poems' refusal to be rhetorical, their daunting intimacy,
            suggests the self-evident in the way that certain Zen koans and
            riddles do while being indecipherable. But what is challenged is,
            perhaps, "meaning" itself:
                        Wonder is not precisely Knowing
            And not precisely Knowing not 
            A beautiful but bleak condition
            He has not lived who has not felt 
            Suspense is his maturer Sister 
            Whether Adult Delight is Pain
            Or of itself a new misgiving 
            This is the Gnat that mangles
            men                                         [1331, ca. 1874]1
             
            1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson,ed. Thomas H. Johnson
            (Boston, 1960); subsequent references in the text to the poems will
            cite the Johnson number and the date assigned by Johnson to each
            poem.
             
            Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Lecturer at
            Princeton University and the author most recently of the booklength
            essay On Boxing. "Soul at the White Heat" will be
            included in her book of essays, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and
            Opportunities,to be published in the spring of 1988.
Helen Vendler
         The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
         Bishop was both fully at home in, and fully estranged from, Nova
            Scotia and Brazil. In Nova Scotia, after Bishop's father had
            died, her mother went insane; Bishop lived there with her
            grandparents from the age of three to the age of six. She then left
            to be raised by an aunt in Massachusetts, but spent summers in Nova
            Scotia till she was thirteen. Subsequent adult visits north
            produced poems like "Cape Breton," "At the
            Fishhouses," and "The Moose"; and Bishop
            responded eagerly to other poets, like John Brinnin and Mark
            Strand, who knew that landscape. Nova Scotia represented a harsh
            pastoral to which, though she was rooted in it, she could not
            return. Brazil, on the other hand, was a place of adult choice,
            where she bought and restored a beautiful eighteenth-century house
            in Ouro Prêto. It was yet another pastoral, harsh in a different,
            tropical way a pastoral exotic enough to interest her
            noticing eye but one barred to her by language and culture (though
            she made efforts to learn and translate Portuguese and was
            influenced by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade).
            Foreign abroad, foreign at home, Bishop appointed herself a poet of
            foreignness, which (as Rich justly says) is, far more than
            "travel," her subject. Three of her books have
            geographical names "North and South,"
            "Questions of Travel," and "Geography
            III" and she feels a geographer's compulsions
            precisely because she is a foreigner, not a native. Her early
            metaphor for a poem is a map, and she scrutinized that metaphor, we
            may imagine, because even as a child she had had to become
            acquainted through maps with the different territories she lived in
            and traveled back and forth between. In the poem "Crusoe in
            England," Bishop's Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on his
            island, has nightmares of having to explore more and more new
            islands and of being required to be their geographer:
                                                I'd have
                                    nightmares of other islands
                                    stretching away from min, infinities
                                    of islands, islands spawning islands,
                                    …………………………………………
                                                knowing that I had to live
                                    on each and every one, eventually,
                                    for ages, registering their flora,
                                    their fauna, their geography.
            This recurrent anxiety marks the end of one of Bishop's
            earlier dreams that one could go home, or find a place that
            felt like home. In "A Cold Spring," a book recording
            chiefly some unhappy years preceding her move to Brazil, there had
            yet survived the dream of going home, in a poem using the Prodigal
            Son as surrogate. He deludes himself, by drinking, that he can be
            happy away, but finally his evening horrors in exile determine him
            to return:
                                    Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
                                    he felt the bats' uncertain
            staggering flight,
                                    his shuddering insights, beyond his
            control,
                                    touching him. But it took him a long time
                                    finally to make his mind up to go home.
                                                                       
                        ["The Prodigal Son"]
             
            Helen Vendler is Kenan Professor of English at Harvard University.
            She has written books on Yeats, Stevens, Herbert, and Keats, and is
            now working on a study of Shakespeare's sonnets. She has
            recently edited the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry.
