Londa Schiebinger
         Feminine Icons: The Face of Early Modern Science
         In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and
            masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed
            parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine
            or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of
            nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From
            ancient to modern times, nature the object of scientific
            study has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the
            same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of
            science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly have been men.
            But what about science? What gender was it as an activity and
            set of ideals to have? In one tradition the answer was clear:
            science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to
            Boethius' sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman,
            was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia,the
            Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed
            each of the sciences as a woman.
            "Scientia" knowledge or skill was portrayed
            as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes (fig. 2).
            "Physica" physical science was a goddess
            with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding
            a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in
            blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of
            her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand
            and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and
            symmetry of the skies.
             
            5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and
            the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980).
            6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a
            dream in his De consolatione philosophiae.See also Cesare Ripa,
            Iconologia (Rome, 1593), first illustrated in 1603.
             
            Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at
            Pennsylvania State University. Her book, "The Mind has no
            Sex": Women in the Origins of Modern Science,will be
            published next spring.
Gérard Genette
         Structure and Functions of the Title in Literature
         Wishing to contribute to the brief history of title science, I
            would argue that the difference in terminology between
            "secondary title" and "subtitle" is too
            weak for the mind to grasp; and since, as Duchet has noted, the
            principal feature of his "subtitle" is to contain a
            more or less explicit generic indication, it would be simpler and
            more vocative to rebaptize it as such, thereby freeing the term
            "subtitle" to resume its usual present meaning. Hence
            these three terms: "title" (Zadig),
            "subtitle" (ou la Destinée), "generic
            indication" (Histoire orientale). This is the most complete
            state of a de facto system in which the only mandatory element, in
            our present culture, is the first one. Nowadays, we find most
            frequently incomplete combinations, such as title plus subtitle
            (Madame Bovary, Moeurs de province) or title plus generic
            indication (La Nausée, roman) without counting the really
            simple titles that are reduced to the single "title"
            element, without subtitle or generic indication, such as Les Mots
            or, a little differently, statements such as the following, clearly
            parodic: Victor Shklovskii, Zoo / Letters not about Love / or The
            Third Heloise.
             
            Gérard Genetteis professor of history and theory of literary forms
            at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His principal
            works in French include Figures (1966), Figures II (1969), Figures
            III (1972), Introduction à l'architexte(1979), Nouveau
            discours du récit (1983), and, most recently, Seuils (1987).
            Bernard Crampé is assistant professor of romance languages and
            literatures at the University of Chicago. His principal work is in
            the history of rhetoric.
David Simpson
         Literary Criticism and the Return to "History"
         If any emergent historical criticism will tend by its own choice
            toward inclusiveness and eclecticism, it is also likely to be
            constrained by more subtle forms of complicity with the theoretical
            subculture within which it seeks its audience. It is not in
            principle impossible that we might choose to set going an
            initiative that is very different indeed from the methods and
            approaches already in place. But is nonetheless clear that we must
            be aware, in some propaedeutic way, of the predispositions for or
            against such change that are latent in the horizons of the field as
            they are presently conceived and transmitted. An account of these
            predispositions will take up most of the following essay. Whether
            or not the particular texts I shall discuss constitute anything as
            firm as an establishment in the absolute sense does not matter
            much: they neither sum up the ongoing careers of their particular
            authors, in the diachronic sense, nor do they represent any simple
            totality in the critical culture of the late 1960s. All we need
            here is the weaker assumption: that these writings by Derrida, Paul
            de Man, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey (with the later case
            of Fredric Jameson) do offer, by virtue of their very notoriety,
            evidence of the priorities within the discipline that have afforded
            them their reputations in the first place. Thus, while they do not
            in themselves prohibit the emergence of alternatives, they do give
            us clues about the residual pressures that might constrain those
            alternatives, and they signal the questions that the historical
            party must respond to if it is to be recognized as making an
            important contribution to a debate. My argument will be that the
            influential critics of the late 1960s have made it very hard indeed
            to find a place for history, so much so that the avowedly Marxist
            alternative set forth by Jameson finds itself making disabling
            concessions to those very influences. I do not claim to describe
            the entire range of options and alternatives, and indeed offer no
            discussion of the most excitingly contested field of all, that
            represented by contemporary feminisms. I mean instead to
            demonstrate, through a reading of those methodologies that have
            become authoritative, that the status of historical inquiry has
            been so eroded that its reactive renaissance, in whatever form,
            threatens to remain merely gestural and generic.
            "History" promises thus to function as legitimating any
            reference to a context beyond literature exclusively conceived,
            whether it be one of discourse, biography, political or material
            circumstance. In particular, given the current popularity of
            discourse analysis, it seems likely that for many practitioners the
            historical method will remain founded in covertly idealist
            reconstructions.
             
            David Simpson is professor of English and comparative literature at
            the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of various
            books and essays, most recently The Politics of American English,
            1776-1850 (1986) and Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The
            Poetry of Displacement (1987).
Hazard Adams
         Canons: Literary Criteria/Power Criteria
         W. B. Yeats' poem "Politics" has as its epigraph
            Thomas Mann's remark, "In our time the destiny of man
            presents its meaning in political terms."1 Yeats chose the
            epigraph in 1938, just before World War II, for a poem proclaiming
            that sexuality holds his interest more than politics. This still
            may be true for poets, but by the looks of things, not for many
            contemporary critics, who, if they do not choose one over the
            other, subsume one under the other. For them everything is
            political (no more so than when it is sexual), which is to hold
            that everything is reduced to questions of power. So it is, in
            their eyes, with canons.
            The first canonization of note for western culture seems to have
            been that of the Hebrew Scriptures; and although there is much
            dispute about the whole matter of how that occurred, it is
            interesting to observe that in a 1971 book entitled The Shaping of
            Jewish History: A Radical New InterpretationEllis Rivkin presents
            the development of that canon in political terms, arguing that
            production of the Hebrew Scriptures "was not primarily the
            work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected
            traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling
            to gain power."2 In a very interesting article on this
            subject, Gerald L. Bruns observes that the lesson of this is that
            the concept of canon is not literary but a "category of
            power" ("CP," p. 478). Rivkin himself decides, as
            Bruns remarks, to treat "the promulgation of canonical texts
            of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according
            to power criteria" ("CP," p. 475). Presumably it
            is this program that warrants Rivkin's subtitle Radical New
            Interpretation.But what would the literary criteria that are
            opposed to power criteria here be? Are there any longer believers
            in the more than trivial existence of such criteria? Does the
            destiny of literature now present its meaning political terms? If
            there are no longer thought to be such things as literary criteria,
            is there, can there be, literature? We have heard answers in the
            negative to the last question; and the notion of canon has recently
            been addressed almost always in terms of politics and power, most
            notably, of course, but certainly not exclusively, by feminist and
            minority critics. The destiny of women's writing has
            certainly presented its meaning in political terms.
             
            Hazard Adams is professor of English and comparative literature at
            the University of Washington. He has recently completed The Book of
            Yeats' Poems and a collection of critical essays.
Daniel Cottom
         On the Dignity of Tables
         Soon after modern spiritualism announced itself with the
            "Rochester knockings" of 1848, tables took on a new and
            controversial life. No longer were they content to live out their
            days impassively upholding dishes and glasses and silverware,
            vases, papers and books, bibelots, elbows, or weary heads. They
            were changed: they began to move. Tables all over the United States
            and then in England, France, and other countries commenced rapping,
            knocking, tilting, turning, tapping, dancing, levitating, and even
            "thrilling" though this last was uncommon. So
            Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan said in her discussion of Daniel
            Dunglas Home, probably the most famous nineteenth-century medium:
            It is only in Mr. Home's presence that I have witnessed that
            very curious appearance, or process, the thrilling of the table.
            This takes place for some seconds, perhaps more, before it rises
            from the floor. The last time I witnessed this phenomenon, an acute
            surgeon present said that this thrilling,the genuineness of which
            was unmistakable, was exactly like what takes place in that
            affection of the muscles called subsultus tendinum.2
            And the tables did still more. Their actions were a language; and
            so they came to symbolize "the &lsquo;movement,' as it
            has been called,"3 of modern spiritualism. Spirits had chosen
            the table as an organ of speech.
            Tables were customarily viewed as objects of economics, aesthetics,
            utility, diversion, tradition, even theology (in the case of church
            artifacts). Now, though, as Professor De Morgan jokes,
            "London and Paris were running after tables in a new
            sense."4 Tables had become a different kind of thing.
            Whatever one might think about reports of spiritual communications,
            the conception of tables had changed. They had become moral
            objects.
             
            2. C. D. [Mrs. Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan], From Matter to Spirit.
            The Result of Ten Years' Experience in Spirit
            Manifestations,with a preface by A. B. [Augustus De Morgan]
            (London, 1863), p. 27.
             
            Daniel Cottom is an associate professor of English at the
            University of Florida. His most recent books are Social Figures:
            George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation (1987)
            and Text and Culture: The Politics of Interpretation(forthcoming).
            This essay is adapted from a work in progress on spiritualism and
            surrealism.
Daniel A. Herwitz
         The Security of the Obvious: On John Cage's_Musical_Radicalism
         That [John] Cage's challenge to our musical beliefs,
            attitudes, and practices is posed from the difficult perspective of
            a Zen master has often been discussed. What has been neglected both
            by Cage himself and by others is another equally potent challenge
            to the ordinary which Cage formulates in a related but distinct
            voice: that of the philosopher. Through his relentless inquiry into
            new music, Cage had defined certain radical possibilities for
            musical change. What is in effect his skepticism about music as we
            know it contains a cogent analysis of our musical concepts and
            practices: of what it is for us ordinarily to believe that
            something is music as opposed to not music, and of how those
            beliefs about music connect with styles of feeling and treating
            what we hear when we hear it as music. Indeed it is Cage's
            genius to have established the topic of skepticism about music as
            an issue for philosophy and cultural criticism. Cage's
            radical perspective on our musical beliefs allows us to consider
            both what those beliefs are and whether and how they might be
            justified. This invitation to philosophical response is an
            important feature of the avant-garde which Cage shares with Duchamp
            in plastic art, Gordon Matta-Clarke in architecture, and others. I
            wish to give it its due by outlining and addressing Cage's
            skepticism about music.
             
            Daniel A. Herwitz is an assistant professor of philosophy at
            California State University, Los Angeles. He is currently at work
            on a book exploring philosophical tendencies in twentieth-century
            music, art, and architecture.
Charles Altieri
         John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in_the_Visual_Arts
         It is an irony perhaps worthy of John Ashbery that the critics who
            made his reputation as our premier contemporary poet have virtually
            ignored the innovations which in fact make his work distinctively
            of our time. The received terms show us how Ashbery revitalizes the
            old wisdom of Keats or the virile fantasies of Emersonian strength
            but they do so at the cost of almost everything about the work
            deeply responsive to irreducibly contemporary demands on the
            psyche. Such omissions not only distance Ashbery from the urgencies
            of the present, they also make it far more difficult to appreciate
            just how the best contemporary art actually defines the challenges
            and possibilities created by that present. By banishing writers
            like Ashbery to literary tradition, we leave the domain of the
            postmodern to two dominant discourses. One is driven by post-
            structural theory's idealization of the nomadic, the
            undecidable, and the profusion of simulacra. The other champions
            Marxist values which cast as the most significant contemporary art
            the rather slight oppositional devices of artists like Sherrie
            Levine, Hans Haacke, and Barbara Kruger. These critical
            idealizations then ignore what might be the central historical
            problem facing contemporary art. Can it continue to elaborate new
            dimensions of that late fifties postmodernism which set the values
            of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg against the
            increasingly formalist versions of modernism that then dominated
            the art world and the poetry workshops? Or does the age demand the
            emergence of a new sensibility, strands of which are being woven in
            post-structuralist mills?
             
            Charles Altieri is professor of English and comparative literature
            at the University of Washington. Author of books on contemporary
            poetry and literary theory, he has just completed a book on
            abstraction in modern poetry and painting. This essay lays some
            groundwork for a book, Bourgeois Utopians,attempt to keep the arts
            central to our discussion of postmodernism.
Lauren Berlant
         Race, Gender, and Nation in The Color Purple
         The Color Purple problematizes tradition-bound origin myths and
            political discourse in the hope of creating and addressing an Afro-
            American nation constituted by a rich, complex, and ambiguous
            culture. But rather than using patriarchal language and logics of
            power to describe the emergence of a postpatriarchal Afro-American
            national consciousness, Celie's narrative radically
            resituates the subject's national identity within a mode of
            aesthetic, not political, representation. These discursive modes
            are not "naturally" separate, but The Color Purple
            deliberately fashions such a separation in its attempt to represent
            a national culture that operates according to
            "womanist" values rather than patriarchal forms.5 While
            political language is laden with the historical values and
            associations of patriarchal power, aesthetic discourse here carries
            with it a utopian force that comes to be associated with the spirit
            of everyday life relations among women.
             
            5. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (San Diego,
            1983), p. xi. "Womanist" is a neologism of
            Walker's invention. Much more than an idiosyncratic
            translation of "feminist" into a black/third-world
            female tradition, the term describes the "woman" in a
            range of personal and social identities: "Usually referring
            to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior. Wanting
            to know more and in greater depth than is considered
            &lsquo;good' for one…. Also: A woman who loves other women,
            sexually and/or nonsexually…. Sometimes loves individual men,
            sexually and/or nonsexually…. Traditionally universalist, as in …
            &lsquo;the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every
            color flower represented.' " In calling the new
            nationalist epistemology imaged and advocated in The Color Purple
            an "aesthetic/symbolic" logic, I mean to honor the
            careful historical and categorical distinctions that operate in the
            novel and in Walker's critical work around it. Central to her
            practice is a delegitimation of traditionally patriarchal-racist
            political practices, institutions, and language.
             
            Lauren Berlant is assistant professor of English at the University
            of Chicago. She is currently working on Nathaniel Hawthorne's
            readings of the cultural/sexual politics of national identity.
Richard Stern
         Some Members of the Congress
         In most groups, there's a sort of commedia del l'arte
            distribution of roles. In families, factories, universities,
            corporations, people are known not only for their work, their
            looks, their social and economic status, but also for the
            characters they assume in the organization. So there are clowns and
            those who laugh at them, there are leaders and there are followers;
            some followers are worshipful, some resentful. Most people put on
            their organization-character as they put on their uniforms. It
            doesn't mean that the character isn't related to their
            temperament they have, after all, chosen it as they have
            chosen what they wear but it never represents all of what
            they are and often represents very little. It is a convenience, a
            way of smoothing the roughness of interaction.
            At a congress of writers, things are somewhat different. At the PEN
            Congress there were the clowns writers, say, like Salman
            Rushdie, the young Anglo-Indian novelist; there were dour, dynical
            observers from the periphery I think of Sven Delblanc, the
            Swedish novelist; there were writers who's pulled themselves
            out of Pleistocene social pockets which they'd barely
            survived and which they record: here I think of Kenji Nakagami, the
            Japanese novelist, screenwriter, and critic.
             
            Richard Stern's Noble Rot, Stories 1949-88,will be published
            in the fall of 1988.
