Catharine R. Stimpson
         Nancy Reagan Wears a Hat: Feminism and Its_Cultural_Consensus
         Like every great word, "representation/s " is a stew. A
            scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a
            representation can be an image visual, verbal, or aural.
            Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a
            narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence,
            "Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification
            clinic in Florida." Or, a representation can be the product
            of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth the world and
            justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, "Nancy
            Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman." In the past twenty
            years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart.
            This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a
            feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic.
            That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is
            the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts,
            especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the
            logic of a new cultural consensus.
            In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus
            about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that
            consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians,
            everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier
            and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of
            convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between
            the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere,
            were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete,
            cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or
            less knew that when I exclaimed, "Nancy Reagan wears a
            hat," it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic
            community to understand me than for a stranger to do so.
            Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of
            representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between
            "reality" and its "description"
             or "image."
             
            Catharine R. Stimpsonis professor of English and dean of the
            Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on
            a book about Gertrude Stein.
Yve-Alain Bois
         Piet Mondrian, New York City
         The association between New York City's all-over structure
            and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and
            identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my
            opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian's neoplastic works
            are constituted by an opposition between the variable (position,
            dimension, and color of the plane) and the invariable (right angle,
            the so-called "constant rapport"). On the other hand,
            the type of identity produced in New York City relies on
            repetition,a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole
            range of paintings predating neoplasticism. New York City differs
            from the "classic" neoplastic works, as well as from
            the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good
            deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this
            last point that Masheck doesn't entirely grasp the amplitude
            of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.
            In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go
            backthe 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two
            years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only
            in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie
            paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution
            of Mondrian's work during the years immediately preceding the
            foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der
            Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white
            background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions
            in Color, A and B (1917, Seuphor 290-914). Mondrian, who had not
            yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements
            (which are the result of a cubist disjunction between line and
            color), tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical
            dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate
            consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next
            step was the five Compositions (also in 1917), all entitled
            "With Colored Planes" (Seuphor 285-89). Here all
            superimposition was eliminated, as well as all "line."
            In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided
            without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The
            colored rectangles (less numerous) are on the way to alignment. In
            spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the
            background is hollowed out behind them.
             
            3. See James Johnson Sweeney, "Mondrian, the Dutch and De
            Stijl," Art News 50 (Summer 1951): 63. Meyer Schapiro made a
            similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. (However,
            his article on Mondrian appeared much later. See
            "Mondrian," in Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th
            Centuries: Selected Papers [New York, 1978], p. 256.)
            4. When I refer to a number accompanied by "Seuphor,"
            it refers to the "catalog by group" included in Michel
            Seuphor's book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis
            Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre,2d ed. (Paris,
            1970).
             
            Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns
            Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on
            twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently
            working on Mondrian's neoplastic years and on a history of
            axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the
            University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau's
            "Psychanalyse et marxisme" (Winter 1987).
Robert Scholes
         Deconstruction and Communication
         "Signature Event Context" (which I henceforth,
            following Derrida himself, refer to as "Sec") offers a
            critique of previous theories of communication, a critique of
            previous theories of communication, a critique that seems to open
            the way toward a new and freer notion of reading. My response to
            this view will be to point out that the proffered freedom is quite
            illusory, partly because off certain problems in the theory itself
            but especially because there is no path open from that theory to
            any practice, a point that is merely underscored by Derrida's
            own practice in response to being read by Searle.
            Derrida's argument in "Sec" can be summarized in
            the following way: A written text can survive the absence of its
            author, the absence of its addressee, the absence of its object,
            the absence of its context, the absence of its code and still
            be read. The argument also includes the stipulation that, as argued
            more fully elsewhere but briefly here as well, what is true of
            writing is also true of all other forms of communication: that they
            are all marked, fundamentally, by the differencethat constitutes
            arche-writing and is so palpable in actual written texts.
            My summary is, I hope, at least tolerably fair and accurate. (It is
            impossible to hope for more, since, as Richard Rorty admiringly
            remarks, Derrida "is … so skillful at fishing both sides of
            every stream."2) I believe that this summary of
            "Sec"'s argument also describes, in however
            compressed a form, what many American teachers and critics think
            they have learned from Derrida: namely, that reading can be freed
            from responsibility to anything prior to the act of reading, and,
            specifically, from those things named in the summary. As Derrida
            puts it himself: "writing is read, and &lsquo;in the last
            analysis' does not give rise to a hermeneutic deciphering, to
            the decoding of a meaning or truth" ("SecM," p.
            329).
             
            2. Richard Rorty, "The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A
            Reply to Henry Staten,"  12 (Winter 1986):
            464.
             
            Robert Scholesis Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown
            University, where he directs the Center for Modern Culture and
            Media. His last book was Textual Power. His next, with Nancy R.
            Comley and Gregory L. Ulmer, will be a text book called Text Book.
Susan Gillman
         "Dementia Americana": Mark Twain, "Wapping Alice," and the_Harry_K.
            Thaw Trial
         My argument is that faced with such reversal of stereotypical
            female roles, the culture (whether in the discourse of the Thaw
            trial itself, or of the journalistic accounts of the trial, of
            Twain's autobiographical tale) relies on both the institution
            of the law and the custom of storytelling to reassure itself about
            boundary confusions between guilt and innocence, man and
            woman, seductress and seducer, fact and fiction. The Thaw trial,
            however, shows that the law itself could not resolve any of those
            ambiguities, a predicament which, I will argue, Twain entertains
            and creates in his own fictional courtroom but flees from in his
            response to the actual trial.
            My argument thus depends upon establishing particular dialogue
            between these two cases of seduction, for neither Twain's nor
            the journalistic accounts alone tell the story that the two
            together do. Both cases speak in common to two aspects of
            fictionality. One is a mode of social differentiation, the sexual
            and legal categories (passive/aggressive, victim/victimizer,
            innocence/guilt) essential to both cases, but whose actual
            application was, for different reasons in each, momentarily
            suspended. It was impossible to decide, for example, whether Evelyn
            Thaw or Alice or Twain himself, for that matter, should be
            classified as victim or victimizer, as playing the active or
            passive role in their respective narratives. The temporary
            suspension of these categories, I will argue, does not invalidate
            them or brand them as "fictive," but rather reveals
            them as culturally constructed and culturally applied, in
            Twain's words "fictions of law and custom" (a
            phrase applied to racial difference in The Tragedy of
            Pudd'nhead Wilson,published in 1984). In both cases, the
            response to this moment when cultural categories cannot be
            definitively applied is a process of storytelling a second
            aspect of fictionality that attempts to construct coherent
            narratives about those suspended "fictions of law and
            custom." Although Twain's "Alice" case
            opens in 1877, not until it connects with the Thaw trial in 1907
            does the full story, as I have just briefly outlined it, emerge. It
            is precisely that double story that this esay will tell: the story
            of how Twain's personal compulsions met up with his
            culture's in the act of reporting, representing,
            interpreting, and finally making its own events mean.
             
            Susan Gillman is assistant professor of literature and American
            studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This essay is
            part of a forthcoming book, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in
            Mark Twain's America.
Robin Sheets
         Pornography and Art: The Case of "Jenny"
         In contrast to [Susan] Sontag, who used the tools of literary
            criticism to evaluate sexually explicit fiction, I will use the
            conventions of pornography to interpret a dramatic monologue in
            which an expected sexual encounter fails to take place. In
            analyzing Rossetti's "Jenny," I will employ an
            interpretive model based on the work of [Steven] Marcus, [Susan]
            Griffin, and [Andrea] Dworkin. Despite different assumptions about
            sexuality Marcus is a Freudian, Griffin believes in a
            mystical eros residing in the psyche and waiting to be
            rediscovered, Dworkin regards heterosexuality as a construct for
            subjugating women and masking men's homoerotic
            drive they share several ideas applicable to
            "Jenny." (1) Although pornography features, and indeed
            perpetuates, various kinds of masculine power, especially the
            powers of money, class, and culture, it purports to be ahistorical
            in order to obscure its status as ideology. (2) It depicts male
            sexuality as fear-laden aggression resulting in very little
            pleasure; thus it is not liberating on either a political or a
            personal basis. (3) Pornography does not include
            "others." Women are present only to be silenced,
            objectified, treated as screens on which a man projects his
            fantasies. Marcus, Griffin, and Dworkin are all concerned with what
            Suleiman calls "the representational or fantasmatic
            content" of pornography and "the political (in the
            sense of sexual politics) implications of that content." The
            risks of emphasizing the representational most especially,
            the denigration of language and style that result from
            Dworkin's approach can, as Suleiman says, be mitigated
            by careful attention to a particular text (see P,pp. 122-30).
            In Rossetti's poem, a young man attempts to purchase a
            night's pleasure with a London prostitute named Jenny. After
            she thwarts his plans by falling asleep, he spends the night
            meditating about her beauty, speculating about her past, present,
            and future, and thinking about the causes of prostitution. Although
            Rossetti's subject matter is consistent with the etymological
            definition of pornography as "writing about
            prostitutes," he avoids the explicit depiction of sexual
            activity which has been the common element in most modern accounts
            of the genre. Indeed, the only physical contact between the
            narrator and Jenny occurs at daybreak when he places coins in her
            hair and gives her a parting kiss.
             
            Robin Sheets is associate professor of English at the University of
            Cincinnati. She has written on Thackeray, George Eliot, and other
            Victorian writers and is coauthor of The Woman Question: Society
            and Literature in Britain and American, 1837-1883.
Oscar Kenshur
         Demystifying the Demystifiers: Metaphysical Snares of Ideological
            Criticism
         An attempt to warrant specific readings and to discredit others
            through appeal to the authority of the "text itself" …
            must be recognized for what it is: a political strategy for reading
            in which the critic's own construction of the "text
            itself" is mobilized in order to bully other interpretations
            off the field.
             
            This passage, from an article by a contemporary English literary
            theorist, is typical of a genre of assertions that may, at first
            glance, seem to have less to do with critical theory than with pop
            psychology. For the writer, like other writers in this genre, may
            appear to be making a psychological observation to the effect  that
            the disposition to claim that one's interpretations of texts
            are "correct" and other interpretations are
            "incorrect" is the function of an arrogant belligerence
            (and perhaps, by implication, that those who eschew such
            objectivist claims are characterized by meekness and humility). But
            such a psychological observation is closely related to a somewhat
            more dignified and elaborate sort of claim, namely, that the
            objectivist notion that there can be a standard of correctness in
            the interpretation of texts can be shown to have specific
             and unsavory political implications. And although
            contemporary polemicists who refer to connections between
            objectivist theory and right-wing tendencies generally omit to
            demonstrate the existence of such a relationship, it is possible to
            suppose that their omission, rather than reflecting a preference
            for invective over analysis, is tied to implicit references to
            analyses that have already been carried out.
             
            An ideal arena for such ideological analysis is the seventeenth
            century, the period during which early modern epistemology and the
            scientific movement laid the foundations for modern notions about
            objective knowledge, and during which philosophers were quite
            willing to discuss both their epistemological principles and their
            political convictions. Provided with such a wealth of raw
            materials, the contemporary scholar with an interest in ideological
            analysis need not attribute political opinions to theorists, but
            need only uncover the deeper ideological connections between views
            that were publicaly expressed. And if the relationship between
            objectivism and politics is one that can be revealed by darwing out
            the implications of the epistemological theory itself, then the
            results of an ideological analysis of early modern objectivism
            should, mutatis mutandis,be applicable to twentieth-century
            varieties. In the light of these considerations, it is quite apt
            that Michael Ryan, in attempting to merge deconstruction with
            ideological analysis in his Marxism and Deconstruction,uses as his
            paradigmatic case an analysis of Hobbes' views on metaphor
            and on sovereignty.
             
            Oscar Kenshur is associate professor of comparative literature at
            Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Open Form and
            the Shape of Ideas: Literary Structures as Representations of
            Philosophical Concepts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
            (1986), and he is currently at work on Dilemmas of Enlightenment,a
            study of tensions between epistemological and ethico-political
            commitments during the early-modern period.
James Elkins
         Art History without Theory
         The theories I have outlined suggest that by displacing but not
            excluding theory, art historical practice at once grounds itself in
            empiricism and implies an acceptance of theory's claim that
            it cannot be so grounded. But beyond descriptions like this, the
            theories are not a helpful way to understand practice because they
            cannot account for its persistence except by pointing to its
            transgressions and entanglements in self-contradiction. Nor does it
            help to say, pace Steven Knapp, Walter Benn Michaels, and Stanley
            Fish, that strong theory can have no consequences, because the
            reason theory has no consequences in this instance is not the
            impossibility of theory's transcendence (practice believes it
            to be transcendent), but a combination of the conventions, desires,
            and beliefs of practicing historians.14 Theoretical approaches must
            bypass the concerns of practice because practice has no position
            which can be argued alongside theory's positions. There are
            two reasons why a "Defense of Empiricism in Art
            History" has not been written. First, art historical practice
            does not incorporate even a local or heuristic theory to explain or
            discuss itself. Second, its "position" is not a latent
            theory, waiting to be eloquently stated, but something which is
            presupposed in a vague and variable manner by the art historical
            texts themselves. (The conventions, desires, and beliefs are not
            positions but inferences, conjectures based on the texts and the
            ways we speak about them.) Art historical practice, for example,
            has an objectivist intention: it takes itself to be (or to
            approach) "a science, with definite principles and
            techniques," which can exclude theory and generate texts by
            appealing only to previous nontheoretical texts and to the facts.15
            This intention is rarely stated, exasperatingly slippery to
            formulate clearly, and even incoherent when it is applied to
            existing texts; but this is so precisely because it works by not
            being included in the texts. If some version of it were stated at
            the outset of a monograph, it would cast doubt on the entire
            enterprise and lead the reader to conclude incorrectly that
            practice is dependent on theory, and uncertain theory at that. In
            its unstated form, the objectivist intention allows narrative
            practice to continue unimpeded.
             
            James Elkins is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago.
            This article is from a work in progress concerned with the
            influence of writing conventions on the history of art.
Donald E. Pease
         Patriarchy, Lentricchia, and Male Feminization
         So Lentricchia has fulfilled one of his purposes in this essay. He
            has subverted the patriarchy from within: that is, he has subverted
            Bloom's literary history as well as the essentialist feminism
            associated with it. But he has not fulfilled his affiliated purpose
            of establishing a dialogue between feminists and feminized males.
            The "feminization" of literary studies by patriarchal
            figures like Bloom does not account for the feminization of
            Stoddard, Gilder, Van Dyke, Woodberry, or Stedman. Their
            feminization, like that of the Stevens who felt positivelylady-
            like, was not the result of patriarchal oppression. And it will not
            disappear as the result of the subversion of the patriarchy by a
            feminized male. Mistaking the work of feminization with the work of
            the patriarch eradicates the feminine. By identifying the
            difference between a feminization produced by the patriarchy and a
            feminine cultural sphere, Lentricchia has made room for the
            different cultural conversation he wants to develop. But this
            conversation can take place only after the backdrop of an
            oppressive patriarch can drop away.
            This conversation might begin with an account of that cultural
            sphere in which women are the agency to which Lentricchia alludes.
            It might begin when we recall that the model for the
            culture's "Emmeline Grangerfords" was Harriet
            Beecher Stowe's Little Eva. The social change Little Eva
            helped effect was the emancipation of both slaves and slaveholders.
             
            Donald E. Pease is professor of English and American literature at
            Dartmouth College. His articles on nineteenth-century authors and
            literature have appeared in a number of journals. He is the
            coeditor, with Walter Benn Michaels, of American Renaissance
            Reconsidered,and is the author of Visionary Compacts: American
            Renaissance Writings in Cultural Contexts,which won the Mark H.
            Ingraham Prize in 1987.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
         The Man on the Dump versus the United_Dames_of_America;_or,_What
            Does Frank Lentricchia Want?
         That the pattern into which Lentricchia seeks to assimilate Stevens
            is politically charged becomes clearest when we turn to the
            following oddly incomprehensible statement: "In the literary
            culture that Stevens would create, the &lsquo;phallic' would
            not have been the curse word of some recent feminist criticism but
            the name of a limited, because male, respect for literature"
            (p. 767). At the point where he makes this assertion, Lentricchia
            has been persuasively demonstrating that Stevens was
            "encouraged … to fantasize the potential social authority of
            the literary as phallic authority" (p. 767). But suddenly the
            critic's measured discourse is disrupted by obviously
            personal feelings about the "curse word of some recent
            feminist criticism" and by a dazzlingly illogical definition
            of "respect for literature." (If male respect for
            literature is limited, does that mean that female respect for
            literature is unlimited? If respect for literature is limited and
            male, do women unlimitedly disrespect literature?) Such a
            disruption suggests that, in making his apparently objective
            argument about Stevens, Lentricchia has some other not so hidden
            agenda and, of course, his peculiar decision to link his
            discussion of Stevens with an attack on The Madwoman in the Attic
            further supports this conclusion. What most strikingly reinforces
            the point, however, is the hysterical or perhaps, with some
            recent feminist linguists, we should say
            "testerical" rhetoric in which he couches his
            assault on our work.14
             
            14. The term "testeria," for male
            "hysteria," is proposed by Juli Loesch in
            "Testeria and Penisolence A Scourge to
            Humankind," Aphra: The Feminist Literary Magazine,4, 1
            (Winter 1972-73): 43-45; quoted in Casey Miller and Kate Swift,
            Words and Women: New Language in New Times(New York, 1977), pp. 60-
            61.
             
            Sandra M. Gilbert,professor of English at Princeton University, and
            Susan Gubar,professor of English at Indiana University, are
            coauthors of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in
            the Twentieth Century, Volume I: The War of the Words(1987), the
            first installment of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the
            Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
            Imagination(1979). They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of
            Literature by Women: The Tradition in English.
Frank Lentricchia
         Andiamo!
         fl: Dad, what's testeria?
            Dad: Figlio! What happened to your Italian? It's TesaREEa!
            Capisce?
            fl: Yes.
            Dad: Tell me.
            fl: A store where they sell that stuff.
            Dad: In big jars!
            fl: Let's go there!
             
            Frank Lentricchia is professor of English at Duke University. His
            latest book, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James,
            Wallace Stevens,has just been published. He is also general editor
            of the Wisconsin Project on American Writers.
