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1. FORM AND STRUCTURE_____________________________________________ 1.1 FORMALISM___________________________________________________ 2.1.5 Herbert Weisinger: from The Myth and Ritual Approach to Shakespearean Tragedy ____________________________________________________________ 2.1.6 Eric Gould: from Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature_________________
2.1
2.2.1 Carl Gustav Jung: from Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious __________ 2.2.2 Carl Gustav Jung: from Psychology and Literature ______________________ 2.2.3 Maud Bodkin: from Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination _________________________________________________________ 2.2.4 Albert Gelpi: from Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: the Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America ________________________________________________
3.2
PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICISM________________________
3.2.2 Georges Poulet: from The Self and Other Critical in Consciousness___________ 3.2.3 Roman Ingarden: from Some Epistemological Problems in the Cognition of the Aesthetic Concretization of the Literary Work of Art____________________________ 3.2.5 Geoffrey Hartman: from Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814___________________
3.3
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM__________________________
3.3.1 Hans Robert Jauss: from Literary History As a Challenge to Literary Theory____ 3.3.3 Stanley Fish: from Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics______________ 3.3.4 Stanley Fish: from Interpreting the Variorum __________________________
4. HISTORY, IDEOLOGY__________________________________________
4.1
NEO-MARXIST APPROACHES_________________________
4.1.1 Walter Benjamin: from The Author As Producer ________________________ 4.1.2 Walter Benjamin: from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ________________________________________________________ 4.1.3 Terry Eagleton: from Criticism and Ideology ____________________________
TABLE OF CONTENTS
4.1.5 Terry Eagleton: from Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)__________________ 4.1.6 Terry Eagleton: from The Rise of English_______________________________ 4.1.8 Fredric Jameson: from The politics of theory: Ideological positions in the postmodernism debate___________________________________________________ 4.1.9 Frederic Jameson: from On Interpretation: Literature As a Socially Symbolic Act_ 4.1.10 Raymond Williams: from Dominant, Residual, and Emergent_______________
TRADITIONALIST RESPONSES____________________________________
5.2 Harold Bloom: from The Western Canon_________________________________ 5.3 Harold Bloom: from Bloom and Doom ________________________________ 5.5 E. D. Hirsch Jr.: from Faulty perspectives_______________________________
4.3
4.3.1 Stephen Greenblatt: from Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation Of Social Energy in Renaissance England_____________________________________________ 4.3.2 Hayden White: from Tropics of Discourse_______________________________ 4.3.3 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield: from History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V______________________________________________________________
4.4
4.4.1 Simone De Beauvoir: from The Second Sex_______________________________ 4.4.2 Julia Kristeva: from Womens Time__________________________________ 4.4.3 Hlne Cixous: from The Laugh of the Medusa__________________________ 4.4.4 Elaine Showalter: from Towards a Feminist Poetics_______________________ 4.4.5 Elaine Showalter: from Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism (1985)___________________________________ 4.4.6 Sandra M. Gilbert: from Literary Paternity______________________________ 4.4.8 Lillian S. Robinson: from Treason Our Text Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon_______________________________________________________________
4.5
ETHNO-CRITICISM___________________________________
4.5.1 Edward Said: from Crisis [in orientalism]_______________________________ 4.5.2 Edward W. Said: from The Politics of Knowledge_________________________ 4.5.3 Edward W. Said: from The Problem of Textuality______________________ 4.5.4 Edward W. Said: from Secular Criticism________________________________ 4.5.5 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from The Signifying Monkey (1988)__________________ 4.5.6 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from From the Seen to the Told______________________
5.
ANTI-RELATIVISM,
ANTI-ANTI-FOUNDATIONALISM:
Art is thinking in images. This maxim, which even high-school students parrot, is nevertheless the starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some kind of systematic literary theory. The idea, originated in part by Potebnya, has spread. Without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry, Potebnya writes. And elsewhere, Poetry, as well as prose, is first and foremost a special way of thinking and knowing.1 [...] Potebnyas conclusion, which can be formulated poetry equals imagery, gave rise to the whole theory that imagery equals symbolism, that the image may serve as the invariable predicate of various subjects. [...] The conclusion stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression. I shall clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, Hey, butterfingers! This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, Hey, butterfingers! This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, butterfingers is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric - but this is not what I want to stress.) Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is, depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is neither more nor less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced
1 Alexander Potebnya ([ed.] nineteenth-century Russian philologist and theorist), Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti [Notes on the Theory of Language] (Kharkov, 1905), pp. 83, 97.
structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated sounds). [...] Poetic imagery is but one of the devices of poetic language. If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. [...] y^f04[...] Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, ones wife, and the fear of war. [...] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. [...] After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it - hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who [...] seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them. Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in Shame, Tolstoy defamiliarizes the idea of flogging in this way: to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to wrap on their
Let us first of all attempt to formulate our task. As already stated in the foreword, this work is dedicated to the study of fairy tales. The existence of fairy tales as a special class is assumed as an essential working hypothesis. By 'fairy tales' are meant at present those tales classified by Aarne under numbers 300 to 749. This definition is artificial, but the occasion will subsequently arise to give a more precise determination on the basis of resultant conclusions. We are undertaking a comparison of the themes of these tales. For the sake of comparison we shall separate the component parts of fairy tales by special methods; and then, we shall make a comparison of tales according to their components. The result will be a morphology (i.e., a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole). What method can achieve an accurate description of the tale? Let us
2 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1968), pp. 19-22.
I [...] Five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse may be observed: (1) the authors portions alone in the novel are analyzed, that is, only direct words of the author more or less correctly isolated - an analysis constructed in terms of the usual, direct poetic methods of representation and expression (metaphors, comparisons, lexical register, etc.); (2) instead of a stylistic analysis of the novel as an artistic whole, there is a neutral linguistic description of the novelists language;3 (3) in a given novelists language, elements characteristic of his particular literary tendency are isolated (be it Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, etc.);4 (4) what is sought in the language of the novel is examined as an expression of the individual personality, that is, language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist;5 (5) the novel is viewed as a rhetorical genre, and its devices are analyzed from the point of view of their effectiveness as rhetoric.6 All these types of stylistic analysis to a greater or lesser degree are remote from those peculiarities that define the novel as a genre, and they are also remote from the specifis conditions under which the word lives in the novel. They all take a novelists language and style not as the language and style of a novel but merely as the expression of a specific individual artistic personality, or as the style of a particular literary school
3 Such, for example, is L. Saineans book, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris, vol. 1, 1922; vol. 2, 1923). 4 Such, for example, is G. Loeschs book, Die impressionistische Syntax der Goncourts (Nuremberg, 1919). 5 Of such a type are works of by the Vosslerians devoted to style: we should mention as especially worthwhile the works of Leo Spitzer on the stylistic of Charles-Louis Philippe, Charles Pguy and Marcel Proust, brought together in his book Stilstudien (vol. 2, Stilsprachen, 1928). 6 V. V. Vinogradovs book On Artistic Prose [O xudozestvennoj proze] (Moscow-Leningrad, 1930) assumes this position.
(a development of the final comparison follows). The poetic images (specifically the metaphoric comparisons) representing Lenskys song do not here have any direct poetic significance at all. They cannot be understood as the direct poetic images of Pushkin himself (although formally, of course, the characterization is that of the author). Here Lenskys song is characterizing itself, in its own language, in its own poetic manner. Pushkins direct characterization of Lenskys song - which we find as well in the novel - sounds completely different [6. 23, 1]: Thus he wrote gloomily and languidly [...] . In the four lines cited by us above it is Lenskys song itself, his voice, his poetic style that sounds, but it is permeated with the parodic and ironic accents of the author; that is the reason why it need not be distinguished from authorial speech by compositional or grammatical means. What we have before us is in fact an image of Lenskys song, but not an image in the narrow sense; it is rather a novelistic image: the image of anothers language, in the given instance the image of anothers poetic style (sentimental and romantic). The poetic metaphors in these lines (as an infants dream, as the moon and others) no way function here as the primary means of representation (as they would function in a direct, serious song written by Lensky himself); rather they themselves have here become the object of representation, or more precisely of a representation that is parodied and stylized. This novelistic image of anothers style (with the direct metaphors that it incorporates) must be taken in intonational quotation marks within the system of direct authorial speech (postulated by us here), that is, taken as if the image were parodic and ironic. Were we to discard intonational question marks and take the use of metaphors here as the direct means by which the author represents himself, we would in so doing destroy the novelistic image [obraz] of anothers style, that is, destroy precisely that image that Pushkin, as novelist, constructs here. Lenskys represented poetic speech is very distant from the direct word of the author himself as we have
the true hero of the work. We would have to say the same of Scarrons Virgil travesti9. One could likewise not include the fifteenth-century sermons joyeux10, in the genre of the sermon, or parodic Pater nosters or Ave Marias in the genre of the prayer and so forth. All these parodies on genres and generic styles (languages) enter the great and diverse world of verbal forms that ridicule the straightforward, serious word in all its generic guises. This world is very rich, considerably richer than we are accustomed to believe. The nature and methods available for ridiculing something are highly varied, and not exhausted by parodying and travestying in a strict sense. These methods for making fun of the straightforward word have as yet received little scholarly attention. Our general conceptions of parody and travesty in literature were formed as a scholarly discipline solely by studying very late forms of literary parody, forms of the type represented by Scarrons Enide travestie, or Platens Verhngnisvolle Gabel11, that is, the impoverished and limited conceptions of the nature of the parodying and travestying word were then retroactively applied to the supremely rich and varied world of parody and travesty in previous ages. The importance of parodic-travestying forms in world literature is enormous. Several examples follow that bear witness to their wealth and
9 This work, comprising, comprising seven books (1638-1653), was considered the masterpiece of Paul Scarron (1610-1660) in his day. Scarron is now best remembered for his picaresque novel, Le Roman comique (2 vol., 1651-1657, unfinished, 3rd vol. by other hands, 1659). [Tr.] 10 These were mock sermons originally given in the churches of medieval France as part of the Fte des fous; later they were expelled from the church and became a secular genre in their own right, satires in verse form, often directed against women. The humour consisted in pious passages intermingled with ribaldry.
11 Die verhngnisvolle Gabel' (1826), a parody of Romantic fate tragedies by August, Graf von Platen-Hallermnde (1796-1835), who was concerned to re-establish classical norms in the face of what he saw as the excesses of the Strmer und Drnger (see his Venetian sonnets [1825]). [Tr.]
It is our conviction that there never was a single strictly straightforward genre, no single type of direct discourse - artistic, rhetorical, philosophical, religious, ordinary everyday - that did not have its own parodying and travestying double, its own comic-ironic contre-partie. What is more, these parodic doubles and laughing reflections of the direct word were, in some cases, just as sanctioned by tradition and just as canonized as their elevated models. I will deal only very briefly with the problem of the so-called fourth drama, that is, the satyr play19. In most instances this drama, which follows upon the tragic trilogy, developed the same narrative and mythological motifs as had the trilogy that preceded it. It was, therefore, a peculiar type of parodic-travestying contre-partie to the myth that had just received a tragic treatment on the stage; it showed the myth in a different aspect. These parodic-travestying counter-presentations of lofty national myths were just as sanctioned and canonical as their straightforward tragic manifestations. All the tragedians - Phrynicous20, Sophocles, Euripides - were writers of satyr plays as well, and Aeschylus, the most serious and pious of them all, an initiate into the highest Eleusinian Mysteries, was considered by the Greeks to be the greatest master of the satyr play. From fragments of Aeschylus satyr play The Bone-Gatherers 21 we see that this drama gave a parodic, travestying picture of the events and heroes of the Trojan War, and particularly the episode involving Odysseus quarrel
19 In ancient Greece, the tragic dramas were normally written and performed in groups of three (e.g., Sophocles Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone). The satyr play was a ribald comedy with a chorus of satyrs, performed immediately after the tragic trilogy. 20 Phrynicous, one of the originators of Greek tragedy. He was first to introduce the feminine mask, and was greatly admired by Aristophanes. His first victory was in 511 BC. Some of his titles are Pleuroniae, Aegyptii, Alcestis, Acteon; he wrote several other plays as well. [Tr.] 21 The Ostologoi may have been part of a tetralogy with Penelope, deriving its title from the hungry beggars in the palace at Ithaca who collected bones hurled at them by the suitors. [Tr.]
the Greeks did not view the parodic-travestying reworkings of national myth as any particular profanation or blasphemy. It is characteristic that the Greeks were not at all embarrassed to attribute the authorship of the parodic work War between the Mice and the Frogs to Homer himself. Homer is also credited with a comic work (a long poem) about the fool Margit. For any and every straightforward genre, any and every direct discourse - epic, tragic, lyric, philosophical - may and indeed must itself become the object of representation, the object of a parodic travestying mimicry. It is as if such mimicry rips the word away from its object, disunifies the two, shows that a given straightforward generic word - epic or tragic - is one-sided, bounded, incapable of exhausting the object; the process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object that are not otherwise included in a given genre or a given style. Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fitted into a high and straightforward genre. The high genres are monotonic, while the fourth drama and genres akin to it retain the ancient binary tone of the word. Ancient parody was free of any nihilistic denial. It was not, after all, the heroes who were parodied, nor the Trojan War and its participants; what was parodied was only its epic heroization; not Hercules and its exploits but their tragic heroization. The genre itself, the style, the language are all put in cheerfully irreverent quotation marks, and they are perceived against a backdrop of a contradictory reality that cannot be confined within their narrow frames. The direct and serious word was revealed, in all its limitations and insufficiency, only after it had become the laughing image of that word - but it was by no means discredited in the process. Thus it did not bother the Greeks to think that Homer himself wrote a parody of Homeric style. [...] These parodic-travestying forms prepared the ground for the novel in one very important, in fact decisive, respect. They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they
objectify precisely that side of ones own (and of the other s) language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically accentuated system inherent in it. For the creating literary consciousness, existing in a field illuminated by anothers language, it is not the phonetic system of its own language that stands out, nor is it the distinctive features of its own morphology nor its own abstract lexicon - what stands out is precisely that which makes language concrete and which makes its world view ultimately untranslatable, that is, precisely the style of the languages as a totality. [...] Closely connected with the problem of polyglossia and inseparable from it is the problem of heteroglossia within a language, that is, the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national language. This problem is of primary importance for understanding the style and historical destinies of the modern European novel, that is, the novel since the seventeenth century. This latecomer reflects, in its stylistic structure, the struggle between two tendencies in the languages of European peoples: one a centralizing (unifying) tendency, the other a decentralizing tendency (that is, one that stratifies languages). The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia; the novel either serves to further the centralizing tendencies of a new literary language in the process of taking shape (with its grammatical, stylistic and ideological norms), or - on the contrary the novel fights for the renovation of an antiquated literary language, in the interests of those strata of the national language that have remained (to a greater or lesser degree) outside the centralizing and unifying influence of the artistic and ideological norm established by the dominant literary language. The literary-artistic consciousness of the modern novel, sensing itself on the border between two languages, one literary, the other extraliterary, each of which now knows heteroglossia, also senses itself on the border of time: it is extraordinarily sensitive to time in language, it senses times shifts, the aging and renewing of language, the past and the future - and all in language. [...]
1. INTRODUCTORY This idea of a period of a development in time, with its consequent emphasis on influences and schools, happens to be exactly what I am hoping to avoid during our brief survey, and I believe that the author of Gazpacho will be lenient. Time, all the way through, is to be our enemy. We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream which bears all its sons away unless they are careful, but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British Museum reading-room - all writing their novels simultaneously. They do not, as they sit there, think I live under Queen Victoria, I under Anne, I carry on the tradition of Troloppe, I am reacting against Aldous Huxley. The fact that their pens are in their hands is far more vivid to them. They are half mesmerized, their sorrows and joys are pouring out through the ink, they are approximated by the act of creation, and when Professor Oliver Elton says, as he does, that after 1847 the novel of passion was never to be the same again, none of them understands what he means. That is to be our vision of them - an imperfect vision, but it is suited to our powers, it will preserve us from a serious danger, the danger of pseudo - scholarship. Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning. It is when he comes to criticism - to a job like the present - that he can be so pernicious, because he follows the method of a true scholar without having his equipment. He classes books before he has understood or read them.; that is his first crime. Classification by chronology. Books written before 1847, books written after it, books written after or before 1848. The novel in the reign of Queen Anne, the pre-novel, the ur-novel, the novel of the future. Classification by subject matter - sillier still. The literature of Inns, beginning with Tom Jones; the literature of Womens Movement, beginning with Shirley; the literature of Desert Islands, from Robinson Crusoe to The Blue Lagoon; the literature of Rogues - dreariest of all,
though the Open Road runs it pretty close; the literature of Sussex (perhaps the most devoted of the Home Counties); improper books - a serious though dreadful branch of inquiry, only to be pursued by pseudoscholars of riper years; novels relatig to industrialism, aviation, chiropody, the weather. Literature is written by geniuses. Novelists are geniuses. There we are; now let us classify them. Which he does. Everything he says may be accurate but all is useless because he is moving round books instead of through them, he either has not read them or cannot read them properly. If the novel develops, it is not likely to develop on different lines from the British Constitution, or even the Womens Movement? I say even the Womens Movement because there happened to be a close association between fiction in England and that movement during the nineteenth century - a connexion so close that it has misled some critics into thinking it an organic connexion. As women bettered their position the novel, they asserted, became better too. Quite wrong. A mirror does not develop because a historical pageant passes in front of it. It only develops when it gets a fresh coat of quiksilver - in other words, when it acquires new sensitiveness; and the novels success lies in its own sensitiveness, not in the success of its subject matter. They have entered a common state which it is convenient to call inspiration, and, having regard to that state, we may say that History develops, Art stands still.
2. THE STORY Yes - oh dear yes - the novel tells a story. That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavistic form. We are all like Scheherazades husband, in that we want to know what happens next. That is universal and that is why the backbone of a novel has to be a story. Some of us want to know nothing else - there is
Every literary work of any power - whether or not its author composed it with his audience in mind - is in fact an elaborate system of controls over the readers involvement and detachment along various lines of interest. The author is limited only by the range of human interests. [...] The values which interest us, and which are thus available for technical manipulation in fiction, may be roughly divided into three kinds. (1) Intellectual or cognitive: We have, or can be made to have, strong intellectual curiosity about the facts, the true interpretation, the true reasons, the true origins, the true motives, or the true about life itself. (2) Qualitative: We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire to see any pattern or form completed, or to experience a further development of qualities of any kind. We might call this kind aesthetic, if to do so did not suggest that a literary form using this interest was necessarily of more artistic value than one based on other interests. (3) Practical: We have, or can be made to have, a strong desire for the success or failure of those we love or hate, admire or detest; or we can be made to hope for or fear a change in the quality of a character. We might call this kind human, if to do so did not imply that 1 and 2 were somehow less than human. [...]
27 Literature and Belief: English Institute Essay, 1957, ed. M. H. Abrams (New York, 1958), p. x.
makes his reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement. [...] This does not mean, of course, that Catholics cannot enjoy Paradise Lost more than they might a second-rate Catholic epic, or that Protestants cannot enjoy The Habit of Perfection more than they might a secondrate Protestant hymn. It means simply that differences of belief, even in the sense of abstract, speculative systems, are always to some extent relevant, often seriously hampering, and sometimes fatal. Imagine a beautifully written tragedy with a convinced Nazi SS man as hero, his tragic error consisting of a temporary, and fatal, toying with bourgeois democratic ideals. Is there any one of us, regardless of our commitment to objectivity, who could seriously claim that agreement or disagreement with the authors ideas in such a work would have nothing to do with our accepting or rejecting his art? It is true that some great works seem to rise above differences of speculative system and to win readers of all camps. Shakespeare is the pre-eminent example. [...] But this is far from saying that great literature is compatible with all beliefs. Though Shakespeare seems, when looked at superficially, to have no beliefs, though it is indeed impossible to extract from the plays any one coherent philosophical or religious or political formulation that will satisfy all readers, it is not difficult to list innumerable norms which we must accept if we are to comprehend particular plays, and some of these do run throughout his works. It is true that these beliefs are for the most part self-evident, even commonplace but that is precisely because they are acceptable to most of us. [...] We seldom talk in these terms about great literature only because we take them for granted or because they seem old-fashioned. Only a maniac, presumably, would side with Goneril and Regan against Lear. It is only when a work seems explicitly doctrinaire, or when reasonable men can be in serious disagreement about its values, that the question of belief arises for discussion. Even when it does arise, it is often misleading if we think of beliefs in terms of speculative theories. The great Catholic pr Protestant works are not, in their essentials, Catholic or
Here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to: That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object. That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity - the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts with each other in building up this whole. That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic. That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated. That form is meaning. That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic. That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstractions, but got at through the concrete and the particular. That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
28 Reprinted from the Kenyon Review, 13 (1951), pp. 72-81
That, as Allen Tate says, specific moral problems are the subject matter of literature, but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral. That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out literary criticism. Such statements as these would not, even though carefully elaborated, serve any useful purpose here. The interested reader already knows the general nature of the critical position adumbrated - or, if he does not, he can find it set forth in writings of mine or of other critics of like sympathy. Moreover, a condensed restatement of the position here would probably beget as many misunderstandings as have past attempts to set it forth. It seems much more profitable to use the present occasion for dealing with some persistent misunderstandings and objections. In the first place, to make the poem or the novel the central concern of criticism has appeared to mean cutting it loose from its author and from his life as a man, with his own particular hopes, fears, interests, conflicts, etc. A criticism so limited may seem bloodless and hollow... In the second place, to emphasize the work seems to involve severing it from those who actually read it, and this severance may seem drastic and therefore disastrous. After all, literature is written to be read. Wordsworth's poet was a man speaking to men[...] Moreover, if we neglect the audience which reads the work, including that for which it was presumably written, the literary historian is prompt to point out that the kind of audience that Pope had did condition the kind of poetry that he wrote. The poem has its roots in history, past and present. Its place in the historical context simply cannot be ignored. I have stated these objections as sharply as I can because I am sympathetic with the state of mind which is prone to voice them. Man's experience is indeed a seamless garment, no part of which can be separated from the rest. Yet if we urge this fact of inseparability against the drawing of distinctions, then there is no point in talking about criticism at all. I am assuming that distinctions are necessary and useful and indeed inevitable.
''Intention, as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a 29 Published in: W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Methuen, London, 1970), pp.4-5, 17-18).
As the title of this essay invites comparison with that of our first, it may be relevant ot assert at this point that we believe ourselves to be exploring two roads which have seemed to offer convenient detours around the acknowledged and usually feared obstacles to objective criticism, both of which, however, have actually led away from criticism and from poetry. The Intentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the
affective theory, and Aristotles countertheory of catharsis was another (with modern intentionalistic analogues in theories of relief and sublimation). There was also the transport of the audience in the Peri Hypsous (matching the great soul of the poet), and this had echoes of passion or enthusiasm among eighteenth-century Longinians. We have had more recently the infection theory of Tolstoy (with its intentionalistic analogue in the emotive expressionism of Veron), the Einfhlung or empathy of Lipps and related pleasure theories, either more or less tending to the objectification of Santayana: Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing. An affinity for these theories is seen in certain theories of the comic during the same era, the relaxation theory of Penjon, the laughter theory of Max Eastman. In their Foundations of Aesthetics Ogden, Richards, and Woods listed sixteen types of aesthetic theory, of which at least seven may be described as affective. Among these the theory of Synaesthesis (Beauty is what produces an equilibrium of appetencies) was the one they themselves espoused. This was developed at length by Richards in his Principles of Literary Criticism. [...] An even more advanced grade of affective theory, that of hallucination, would seem to have played some part in the neo-classic conviction about the unities of time and place, was given a modified continuation of existence in phrases of Coleridge about a willing suspension of disbelief and a temporary half faith, and may be found today in some textbooks. The hypnotic hypothesis of E. D. Snyder might doubtless be invoked in its support. At this form of affective theory is the least theoretical in detail, has the least content, and makes the least claim on critical intelligence, so, it is in its most concrete instances not a theory but a fiction or a fact - of no critical significance. In the eighteenth century Fielding conveys a right view of the hallucinative power of drama in his comic description of Partridge seeing Garrick act the ghost scene in Hamlet [in Tom Jones]. O la! Sir....If I was frightened, I am not the only person....You may call me coward if you will; but if that little man there
is, part of a definition of poetry.
actually : The conjuction of the qualities of sadness and freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol - the light on the sails of a ship hull down - has been employed to suggest both qualities. The distinction between these formulations may seem slight, and in the first example which we furnished may be practically unimportant. Yet, the difference between translatable emotive formulas and more psychological and psychologically vague ones - cognitively untranslatable - is theoretically of greatest importance. The distinction even when it is a faint one is at the dividing point between paths which led to polar opposites in criticism, to classical objectivity and to romantic reader psychology. The critic whose formulations lean to the emotive and the critic whose formulations lean to the cognitive will in the long run produce a vastly different sort of criticism. The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an account of what the poem is likely to induce in other - sufficiently informed - readers. It will in fact supply the kind of information which will enable readers to respond to the poem. [...] [...] Poetry is characteristically a discorse about both emotions and objects, or about the emotive quality of objects. The emotions correlative to the objects of poetry become a part of the matter dealt with - not communicated to the reader like an infection or disease, not inflicted mechanically like a bullet or knife wound, not administered like a poison, not simply expressed as by expletives or grimaces or rhythms, but presented in their objects and contemplated as a pattern of knowledge. Poetry is a way of fixing emotions or making them more permanently perceptible when objects have undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or when as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value with the loss of immediacy. Though the reasons for emotion in poetry may not be so simple as Ruskins noble grounds for the noble emotions, yet a great deal of constancy for poetic objects of
33 Cf. Pauhlan, The Laws of Feeling, 105, 110. 34 The anthropologist, says Bronislaw Malinovski, has the myth-maker at his elbow, Myth in Primitive Psychology (New York, 1926), 17.
I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in its relation to linguistics. Poetics deals primarily with the question , What makes a verbal message a work of art? Because the main subject of poetics is the differentia specifica [specific differences] of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relation to other kinds of verbal behaviour, poetics is entitled to the leading place in literary studies. Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics. [...] Unfortunately the terminological confusion of literary studies with criticism tempts the student of literature to replace the description of the intrinsic values of a literary work by a subjective, censorious verdict. The label literary critic applied to an investigator of literature is as erroneous as grammatical (or lexical) critic would be applied to a linguist. Syntactic and morphologic research cannot be supplanted by a normative grammar, and likewise no manifesto, foisting a critics own tastes and opinions on creative literature, may act as substitute for an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art. This statement is not to be mistaken for the quietist principle of laissez faire; any verbal culture involves programmatic, planning, normative endeavours. Yet what is a clear-cut discrimination made between pure and applied linguistics or between phonetics and orthopy35 but not between literary studies and criticism. [...] Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. Before discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the other functions of language. An outline of these functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication. The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the
35 That part of grammar which deals with pronunciation.
tool utilized by logicians and linguists; it plays also an important role in our everyday language. Like Molires Jourdain who used prose without knowing it, we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the CODE: it performs a METALINGUAL (i.e., glossing) function. I dont follow you - what do you mean? asks the addressee, or in Shakespearean diction, What ist thou sayst? And the addresser in anticipation of such recapturing questions inquires: Do you know what I mean? Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: The sophomore was plucked. But what is plucked? Plucked means the same as flunked. And flunked? To be flunked is to fail in an exam. And what is sophomore? persist the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. A sophomore is (or means) a second year student. All these equational sentences convey information merely about the lexical code of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language learning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations. We have brought up the six factors involved in verbal communication except the message itself. The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language. This function cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language, and, on the other hand, the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function. Any attempt to reduce the sphere of poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. Poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function, by promoting the palpability of sings, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects. Hence, when dealing with poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry. Why do you always say Joan and Margery, yet never Margery and
and is either supplicatory or exhortative, depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the second one or the second to the first. Now that our cursory description of the six basic functions of verbal communication is more or less complete, we may complement our scheme of the fundamental factors by a corresponding scheme of the functions: REFERENTIAL EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE PHATIC METALINGUAL What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function? In particular, what is the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behaviour, selection and combination. If child is the topic of the message, the speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate verbs - sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in speech chain. The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses. [...] Without its two dactylic words the combination innocent bystander would hardly have become a hackneyed phrase. The symmetry of the three disyllabic verbs with an identical initial consonant and identical final vowel added splendor to the laconic victory message
The varieties of aphasia are numerous and diverse, but all of them lie between the two polar types just described. Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, either of the faculty for selection and substitution or for combination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units. The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former, the relation of contiguity in the latter type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the
40 Jakobsons seminal discussion of metaphor and metonymy comes at the end of a highly technical discussion of aphasia (i.e., language disorder). He begins by formulating one of the basic principles of Saussurian linguistics, that language, like all systems of signs, has a twofold character, involving two distinct operations, selection and combination. To produce a sentence like ships crossed the sea (the example is not Jakobson s), I select the words I need from the appropriate sets or paradigms of the English language and combine them according to the rules of that language. If I substitute ploughed for crossed, I create a metaphor based on a similarity between things otherwise different - the movements of a ship through water and the movement of a plough through the earth. If I substitute keels for ships, I have used the figure of synecdoche (part for whole or whole for part). If I substitute deep for sea I have used the figure of metonymy (an attribute or cause or effect of a thing signifies the thing). According to Jakobson, synecdoche is a subspecies of metonymy: both depend on contiguity in space/time (the keel is part of the ship, depth is a property of the sea), and thus correspond to the combination axis of language. Metaphor, in contrast, corresponds to the selection axis of language, and depends on similarity between things not normally contiguous. Aphasics tend to be more affected in one or other of the selection and combination functions. Those who suffer from selection deficiency or similarity disorder are heavily dependent on context or contiguity to speak, and make metonymic mistakes, substituting fork for knife, table for lamp, etc. Conversely, patients suffering from contexture deficiency or contiguity disorder are unable to combine words into a grammatical sentence, and make metaphorical mistakes - spyglass for microscope, or fire for gaslight.
To the stimulus hut one response was burnt out; another, is a poor, little house. Both reactions are predicative; but the first creates a purely narrative context, while in the second there is a double connection with the subject hut: on the one hand, a positional (namely, syntactic) contiguity, and on the other a semantic similarity. The same stimulus produced the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut; the synonyms cabin and hovel; the antonym palace, and the metaphors den and burrow. The capacity of two words to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity, and in addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast). Metonymical responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch, litter, or poverty, combine and contrast the positional similarity with semantic contiguity. In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic) - selecting, combining, and ranking them - an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences.
In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions. This provides an objective criterion or what in the given speech community acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear - and each in either of two aspects, an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant. In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called realistic trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Kareninas suicide Tolstojs artistic attention is focused on the heroines handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches hair on the upper lip and bare shoulders are used by the same writer to stand for the female character to whom these features belong. The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes is by no means confined to verbal art. The oscillation occurs in sign systems other than language41. A salient example from the history of
41 I ventured a few sketchy remarks on the metonymical turn in verbal art (Prosa realizm u mystectvi, Vaplite, Kharkov, 1927, No. 2; Randbemerkungen zur Prosa des Dichters Pasternak, Slavische Rundschau,
To indicate the possibilities of the projected comparative research, we choose an example from a Russian folktale which employs parallelism as a comic device: Thomas is a bachelor; Jeremiah is unmarried (Fom xlost; Erjoma nezenat). Here the predicates in the two parallel clauses are associated by similarity: they are in fact synonymous. The subjects of both clauses are masculine proper names and hence morphologically similar, while on the other hand they denote two contiguous heroes of the same tale, created to perform identical actions and thus to justify the use of synonymous pairs of predicates. A somewhat modified version of the same construction occurs in a familiar wedding song in which each of the wedding guests is addressed in turn by his first name and patronymic: Gleb is a bachelor; Ivanovic is unmarried. While both predicates here are again synonyms, the relationship between the two objects changed: both are proper names denoting the same man and are normally used contiguously as a mode of polite address. In the quotation from the folktale, the two parallel clauses refer to two separate facts, the marital status of Thomas and the similar status of Jeremiah. In the verse from the wedding song, however, the two clauses are synonymous: they redundantly reiterate the celibacy of the same hero, splitting him into two verbal hypostases. The Russian novelist Gleb Ivanovic Uspenskij (1840-1902) in the last year of his life suffered from a mental illness involving a speech disorder. His first name and patronymic, Gleb Ivanovic, traditionally combined in polite intercourse, for him split into two distinct names designating two separate beings: Gleb was endowed with all his virtues, while Ivanovic, the same relating a son to his father, became the incarnation of all Uspenskijs vices. The linguistic aspect of this split personality is the patients inability to use two symbols for the same thing, and it is thus a similarity disorder. Since the similarity disorder is bound up with the metonymical bent, an examination of the literary manner Uspenskij had employed as a young writer takes on particular interest. And the study of Anatolij Kamegulov, who analyzed Uspenskijs style, bears out our
(Glencoe, 1955), pp. 119
part, the question of the two poles is still neglected, despite its wide scope and importance for the study of any symbolic behavior, especially verbal, and of its impairments. What is the main reason for this neglect? Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the symbols of the language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term with the term for which it is substituted. Consequently, when constructing a metalanguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more homogenous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation. Therefore nothing comparable to the rich literature on metaphor48 can be cited for the theory of metonymy. For the same reason, it is generally realized that romanticism is closely linked with metaphor, whereas the equally intimate ties of realism with metonymy usually remain unnoticed. Not only the tool of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the preponderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship. Since poetry is focused upon the sign, and pragmatical prose primarily upon the referent, tropes and figures were studied mainly as poetic devices. The principle of similarity underlies poetry; the metrical parallelism of lines, or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast; there exist, for instance, grammatical and anti-grammatical but never agrammatical rhymes. Prose, on the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaphor, and for prose, metonymy is the line of least resistance and, consequently, the study of poetical tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor. The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder.
After defining the folktale as a display on a temporal line of its thirty-one functions, Propp raises the question about the actants, or the dramatis personae, as he calls them. His conception of the actants is functional: the characters are defined, according to him, by the ''spheres of action in which they participate, these spheres being constituted by the bundles of functions which are attributed to them [...] The result is that if the actors can be established within a tale-occurence, the actants, which are classifications of actors, can be established only from the corpus of all the tales: an articulation of actors constitutes a particular tale; a structure of actants constitutes a genre. The actants therefore possess a metalinguistic status in relation to the actors. They presuppose, by the way, a functional analysis - that is to say, the achieved constitution of the spheres of action. This double procedure - the establishment of the actors by the description of the functions and the reduction of the classifications of actors to actants of the genre - allows Propp to establish a definitive inventory of the actants, which are: 1. The villain; 2. The donor (provider); 3. The helper; 4. The sought-for person (and her father); 5. The dispatcher; 6. The hero; 7. the false hero. This inventory authorizes Propp to give an actantial definition of the Russian folktale as a story with seven characters. [...] The interest in Souriau's thought lies in the fact that he has shown that the actantial interpretation can be applied to a kind of narrative - theatrical works - quite different from the folktale and that his results are comparable to Propp's. We find here, although expressed differently, the same distinction between the events of the story [lhistoire vnementielle] (which is for him only a collection of dramatic subjects) and the level of the semantic description (which is made from the situations, which can be decomposed into the action of actants). Finally, we find here a limited inventory of actants (which he calls, according to traditional syntactic terminology, functions). [...]
49 University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1983. Pp. 200-8.
Souriau's inventory is presented in the following manner: Lion ..............the oriented thematic Force Sun ............... the Representative of the wished-for Good, of the orienting Value Earth ............. virtual Recipient of that Good (that for which the Lion is working) Mars .............. the Opponent Libra .............. the Arbiter, attributer of the Good Moon ............. the Rescue, the doubling of one of the preceding forces We must not be discouraged by the energetic and astrological character of Souriau's terminology: it does not succed in concealing reflections that are not without coherence.[... ] The search for what could correspond, in Propp and Souriau's intentions, to that second actantial category cannot fail to raise some difficulties because of the fraquent syncretic manifestation of actants (already encountered at the level of syntax), the often noticed plurality of two actants present under the form of a single actor. For instance, in a narrative that is only a common love story ending in marriage without the parents' intervention, the subject is also the receiver, while the object is at the same time the sender of love: He = Subject + Receiver She = Object + Sender Four actants are there, symmetrical and inverted, but syncretized under the form of two actors. But we see also - Michel Legrand's couplet sung in the Umbrellas of Cherbourg makes the point in an impressive synopsis: a man, a woman, an apple, a drama - with what ease the disjunction of the object and the sender can produce a model with three actants. In a narrative of the type of The Quest fot the Holy Grail, on the contrary, four actants, quite distinct, are articulated in two categories:
Sender God Receiver Mankind [...] It is much more difficult to be sure of the categorical articulation of the other actants if only because we lack a syntactic model. Two spheres of activity, however, and, inside those, two distinct kinds of functions are recognized without difficulty. 1. The first kinds bring the help by acting in the direction of the desire or by facilitating communication. 2. The others, on the contrary, create obstacles by opposing either the realization of the desire of the desire or the communication of the object. These two bundles of functions can be attributed to two distinct actants that we will designate under the name of Helper vs. Opponent This distinction corresponds rather well to the distinction made by Souriau, from whom we borrow the term opponent: we prefer the term of helper introduced by Guy Michaud, to Souriau's 'rescue.' In Propp's formulation we find that opponent is pejoratively called villain (traitor), while helper takes in two characters, the helper and the donor (provider). At first sight, this elasticity of analysis may be surprising. [...] We can wonder what corresponds, in the mythical universe whose actantial structure we want to make explicit, to this opposition between the helper and the opponent. At first glance everything takes place as if, besides the principal parties in question, there would appear now in the drama projected on an axiological screen actants representing in a schematic faschion the benevolent and malevolent forces in the world, incarnations of the guardian angel and the devil of medieval Christian drama. What it also striking is the secondary character of these two actants. In a little play on words, we could say, thinking of the participial form by which we designated them (for example, the opposing [opposant]: i.e. the opponent), that they are the circumstantial
50 In Grard Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse (Blackwell, Oxford, 1982), pp. 138-143.
In a new chapter of La Pense sauvage, Claude Lvi-Strauss defines mythical thought as a kind of intellectual bricolage.51 The nature of
51 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966), p. 17.
To understand what poetics is, we must start from a general and of course a somewhat simplified image of literary studies. It is unnecessary to describe actual schools and tendencies; it will suffice to recall the
When a speaker of a language hears a phonetic sequence, he is able to give it meaning because he brings to the act of communication an amazing repertoire of conscious and unconscious knowledge. Mastery of the phonological, syntactic and semantic systems of his language enables him to convert the sounds into discrete units, to recognize words, and to assign a structural description and interpretation to the resulting sentence, even though it be quite new to him. Without this implicit knowledge, this internalized grammar, the sequence of sounds does not speak to him. We are nevertheless inclined to say that the phonological and grammatical structure and the meaning are properties of the utterance, and there is no harm in that way of speaking so long as we remember that they are properties of the utterance only with respect to a particular grammar. Another grammar would assign different properties to the sequence (according to the grammar of a different language, for example, it would
54 Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975, pp. 113-38.
The structural analysis of narrative is at present in the course of full elaboration. All research in this area has a common scientific origin: semiology or the science of signification; but already (and this is a good thing) divergences within that research are appearing, according to the critical stance each piece of work takes with respect to the scientific status of semiology, or in other words, with respect to its own discourse. These divergences (which are constructive) can be brought together under two broad tendencies: in the first, faced with all the narratives in the world, the analysis seeks to establish a narrative model - which is evidently formal - , a structure or grammar of narrative, on the basis of which (once this model, structure or grammar has been discovered) each particular narrative will be analysed in terms of divergences. In the second tendency, the narrative is immediately subsumed (at least when it lends itself to being subsumed) under the notion of text, space, process of meanings at work, in short, signifiance (we shall come back to this word at the end), which is observed not as a finished, closed product, but as a production in progress, plugged in to other texts, other codes (this is the intertextual), and thereby articulated with society and history in ways which are not determinist but citational. We have then to distinguish in a certain way structural analysis and textual analysis, without here wishing to declare them enemies: structural analysis, strictly speaking, is applied above all to oral narrative (to myth); textual analysis, which is what we shall be attempting to practise in the following pages, is applied exclusively to
written narrative.55 Textual analysis does not try to describe the structure of a work; it is not a matter of recording a structure, but rather of producing a mobile structuration of the text (a structuration which is displaced from reader to reader throughout history), of staying in the signifying volume of the work, in its signifiance. Textual analysis does not try to find out what it is that determines the text (gathers it together as the end-term of a causal sequence), but rather how the text explodes and disperses. We are then going to take a narrative text, and were going to read it, as slowly as it is necessary, stopping as often as we have to (being at ease is an essential dimension of our work), and try to locate and classify without rigour, not all the meanings of the text (which would be impossible because the text is open to infinity: no reader, no subject, no science can arrest the text) but the forms and codes according to which meanings are possible. We are going to locate the avenues of meaning. Our aim is not to find the meaning, nor even a meaning of the text, and our work is not akin to literary criticism of the hermeneutic type (which tries to interpret the text in terms of the truth believed to be hidden therein), as are Marxist or psychoanalytical criticism. Our aim is to manage to conceive, to imagine, live the plurality of the text, the opening of its signifiance. It is clear then that what is at stake in our work is not limited to the university treatment of the text (even if that treatment were openly methodological), nor even to literature in general; rather it touches on a theory, a practice, a choice, which are caught up in the struggle of men and signs. In order to carry out the textual analysis of a narrative, we shall follow a certain number of operating procedures (let us call them elementary rules of manipulation rather than methodological principles, which would be too ambitious a word and above all an ideologically questionable one, in so far as method too often postulates a positivistic result). We shall reduce these procedures to four briefly laid out measures, preferring to let the theory run along in the analysis of the text itself. For the moment we
55 I have attempted the textual analysis of a whole narrative (which could not be the case here for reasons of space) in my book S/Z, Seuil, 1970, [trans. Richard Miller, London, Cape, 1975.]
sometimes far apart, (an action begun here can be completed, finished, much further on). Our lexias will be, if I can put it like this, the finest possible sieves, thanks to which we shall cream off meanings, connotations.
3 Our analysis will be progressive: we shall cover the length of the text step by step, at least in theory, since for reasons of space we can only give two fragments of analysis here. This means that we shant be aiming to pick out the large (rhetorical) blocks of the text; we shant construct a plan of the text and we shant be seeking its thematics; in short, we shant be carrying out an explication of the text, unless we give the word explication its etymological sense, in so far as we shall be unfolding the text, the foliation of the text. Our analysis will retain the procedure of reading; only this reading will be, in some measure, filmed in slowmotion. This method of proceeding is theoretically important: it means that we are not aiming to reconstitute the structure of the text, but to follow its structuration, and that we consider the structuration of the reading to be more important than that of composition (a rhetorical, classical notion).
4 Finally, we shant get unduly worried if in our account we forget some meanings. Forgetting meanings is in some sense part of reading: the important thing is to show departures of meaning, not arrivals (and is meaning basically anything other than a departure?). What founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable structure, but the outlet of the text on to other texts, other signs; what makes the text is the intertextual. We are beginning to glimpse (through other sciences) the fact that research must little by little get used to the conjunction of two ideas which for long time were thought incompatible: the idea of structure and the idea of combinational infinity; the conciliation of these two postulations is forced upon us now because language, which we are getting to know better, is at once infinite and structured. I think that these remarks are sufficient for us to begin the analysis of the text (we must always give in to the impatience of the text, and never forget that whatever the imperatives of study, the pleasure of the text is our law). The text which has been chosen is a short narrative by Edgar Poe, in Baudelaires translation: - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - 58. My choice - at least consciously, for in fact it might be
58 Histoires extraordinaires, trans. Charles Baudelaire, Paris, N.R.F.; Livre de poche, 1969, pp. 329-345 [The Collected Works, 3 vols. Ed. T. O. Mabbott,
[...] (1) - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - [ - La Vrit sur le cas de M. Valdemar] The function of the title has not been well studied, at least from a structural point of view. What can be said straight away is that for commercial reasons, society, needing to assimilate the text to a product, a commodity, has need of markers: the function of the title is to mark the beginning of the text, that is, to constitute the text as a commodity. Every title thus has several simultaneous meanings, including at least two: (i) what it says linked to the contingency of what follows it; (ii) the announcement itself that a piece of literature (which means, in fact, a commodity) is going to follow; in other words, the title always has a double function; enunciating and deictic. (a) Announcing a truth involves the stipulation of an enigma. The posing of the enigma is a result (at the level of the signifiers): of the word truth [in the French title]; of the word case (that which is exceptional, therefore marked, therefore signifying, and consequently of which the meaning must be found); of the definite article the [in the French title] (there is only one truth, all the work of the text will, then, be needed to pass through this narrow gate); of all the cataphorical59 form implied by the title: what follows will realise what is announced, the resolution of the enigma is already announced; we should note that the English says: The Facts in the Case [...]-: the signified which Poe is aiming at is of an empirical order, that aimed by the French translator (Baudelaire) is hermeneutic: the truth refers then to the external facts, but also perhaps to their meaning. However, this may be, we shall code this first sense of the lexia: enigma, position (the enigma is the general name of a code, the position is only one term of it). (b) The truth could be spoken without being announced, without there
59 There is no English equivalent to this word, by which Barthes seems to mean, answering or reflecting back on itself.
language, the link of the first person (I) and the attribute dead is precisely the one which is radically impossible: it is the empty point, this blind spot of language which the story comes, very exactly, to occupy. What is said is no other than this impossibility: the sentence is not descriptive, it is not constative, it delivers no message other than its own enunciation. In a sense we can say that we have here a performative, but such, certainly, that neither Austin nor Benveniste had foreseen it in their analyses (let us recall that the performative is the mode of utterance according to which the utterance refers only to its enunciation: I declare war ; performatives are always, by force, in the first person, otherwise they would slip towards the constative: he declares war); here, the unwarranted sentence performs an impossibility63. (iv) From a strictly semantic point of view, the sentence I am dead asserts two contrary elements at once (life, death): it is an enantioseme, but is, once again, unique: the signifier expresses a signified (death) which is contradictory with its enunciation. And yet, we have to go further still: it is not simply a matter of a simple negation, in the psychoanalytical sense, I am dead meaning in that case I am not dead, but rather an affirmation-negation: I am dead and not dead ; this is the paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of category: the true-false, the yes-no, the death-life is thought of as a whole which is indivisible, uncombinable, non-dialectic, for the antithesis implies no third term; it is not a two-faced entity, but a term which is one and new. [...] Other commentaries are possible, notably that of Jacques Derrida64. I have limited myself to those that can be drawn from structural analysis, trying to show that the unheard-of sentence I am dead is in no way the
63 [See J.L.Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961; How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O.Urmson and Marina Sbisa, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1962.] 64 Jacques Derrida, La Voix wt le phnomene, Paris, P.U.F., 1967, pp. 60-1, [Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 54-5.]
1.4
DECONSTRUCTION
1.4.1 Jacques Derrida: from Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences 65
We need to interpret interpretations more than we interpret things. (Montaigne) Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural - or structuralist - thought to reduce or to suspect. Let us speak of an event, nevertheless, and let us use quotations marks to serve as a precaution. What would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a
65 Published in: Hazard Adams, Leroy Searle (eds), Critical Theory since 1965 (University Press of Florida, Tallahassee, 1986), pp. 83-93.
1. FORM AND INTENT IN THE AMERICAN NEW CRITICISM [...] A truly systematic study of the main formalists critics in the English language during the last thirty years would always reveal a more or less deliberate rejection of the principle of intentionality. The result would be a hardening of the text into a sheer surface that prevents the stylistic analysis form penetrating beyond the sensory appearances to perceive this struggle with meaning of which all criticism, including the criticism of form should give an account of. For surfaces also remain concealed when they are being artificially separated from the depth that supports them. The partial failure of American formalism, which has not produced works of major magnitude, is due to its lack of awareness of the intentional structure of the literary form. Yet this criticism has merits that prevail despite the weakness of its theoretical foundations. The French critic, Jean-Pierre Richard, alludes to
66 Published by University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983. Selections from pp. 26-8; 105-6; 139-41.
TO JUDGE from various publications, the spirit of the time is not blowing in the direction of formalist and intrinsic criticism. [...] We speak as if, with the problems of literary form resolved once and forever, and with the techniques of structural analysis refined to near perfection, we could now move beyond formalism towards the questions that really interest us and reap, at last, the fruits of the ascetic concentration on techniques that prepared us for this decisive step. With the internal law and order of literature well policed, we can now confidently devote ourselves to the foreign affairs, the external politics of literature. Not only do we feel able to do so, but we owe it to ourselves to take this step: our moral conscience would not allow us to do otherwise. Behind the assurance that valid interpretation is possible, behind the recent interest in writing and reading as potentially effective public speech acts, stands a highly respectable moral imperative that strives to reconcile the internal, formal, private structures of literary language with their external, referential, and public effects.[...] The attraction of reconciliation is the effective breeding - ground of false models and metaphors; it accounts for the metaphorical model of literature as a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside, and the
reader and critic as the person who opens the lid in order to release in the open what was secreted but inaccessible inside. It matters little whether we call the inside of the box the content or the form, the outside the meaning or the appearance. The recurrent debate opposing intrinsic to extrinsic criticism stands under the aegis of an inside/ outside metaphor that is never being seriously questioned.[...] One of the most striking characteristics of literary semiology as it is practiced today, in France and elsewhere, is the use of grammatical (especially syntactical) structures conjointly with rhetorical structures, without apparent awareness of a possible discrepancy between them. In their literary analyses, Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Greimas, and their disciplines all simplify and regress from Jakobson in letting grammar and rhetoric function in perfect continuity, and in passing from grammatical to rhetorical structures without difficulty or interruption. Indeed, as the study of grammatical structures is refined in contemporary theories of generative, transformational, and distributive grammar, the study of tropes and of figures (which is now the term rhetoric is used here, and not in the derived sense of comment or of eloquence or persuasion) becomes a mere extension of grammatical models, a particular subset of syntactical relations.[...] Without engaging the substance of the question, it can be pointed out, without having to go beyond recent and American examples, and without calling upon the strength of an age - old tradition, that the continuity here assumed between grammar and rhetoric is not borne out by theoretical and philosophical speculation. Kenneth Burke mentions deflection (which he compares structurally to Freudian displacement), defined as any slight bias or even unintended error, as the rhetorical basis of language, and deflection is then conceived as a dialectical subversion of the consistent link between sign and meaning that operates within grammatical patterns; hence Burkes well - known insistence on the distinction between grammar and rhetoric. Charles Sander Peirce, who, with Nietzsche and Saussure, laid the philosophical foundation for modern semiology, stressed the distinction between grammar and rhetoric in his celebrated and so suggestively unfathomable definition of the sign. He insists, as is
[...] A literary text that both analyses and shows that it actually has neither a self nor any neutral metalanguage with which to do the analysing calls out irresistibly for analysis. And when that call is answered by two eminent thinkers whose readings emit an equally paradoxical call to analysis of their own, the resulting triptych, in the context of the question of the act of reading (literature), places its would-be reader in a vertiginously insecure position. The three texts in question are Edgar Allan Poe's short story - The Purloined Letter, Jacques Lacan's - Seminar on The Purloined Letter, and Jacques Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading of Poe - The Purveyor of Truth (Le Facteur de la Vrit). In all three texts, it is the act of analysis that seems to occupy the centre of the discursive stage and the act of analysis of the act of analysis that in some way disrupts that centrality, subverting the very possibility of a position of analytical mastery. In the resulting asymmetrical, abysmal structure, no analysis - including this one - can intervene without transforming and repeating other elements in the sequence, which is thus not a stable sequence, but which nevertheless produces some regular effects. It is the functioning of this regularity, and the structure of these effects, that will provide the basis for the present study. Any attempt to do justice to three such complex texts is obviously out of the question. But it is precisely the nature of such justice that is the question in each of these readings of the act of analysis. The fact that the debate proliferates around a crime story - a robbery and its undoing - can hardly be an accident. Somewhere in each of these texts, the economy of justice cannot be avoided. For in spite of the absence of mastery, there is no lack of effects of power. I shall begin by quoting at some length from Lacan's discussion of The Purloined Letter in order to present both the plot of Poe's story and the thrust of Lacan's analysis. Lacan summarizes as follows:
67 Published in: Robert Young (ed), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1981, pp. 227-43.
There are two scenes, the first of which we shall straightaway designate the primal scene, and by no means inadvertently, since the second may be considered its repetition in the very sense we are considering today. The primal scene is thus performed, we are told, in the royal boudoir, so that we suspect that the person of the highest rank, called the exalted personage, who is alone there when she receives a letter, is the Queen. This feeling is confirmed by the embarrassment into which she is plunged by the entry of the other exalted personage, of whom we have already been told prior to this account that the knowledge he might have of the letter in question would jeopardize for the lady nothing less than her honour and safety. Any doubt that he is in fact the King is promptly dissipated in the course of the scene which begins with the entry of the Minister D[...] At that moment, in fact, the Queen can do no better than to play on the King's inattentiveness by leaving the letter on the table face down, address uppermost. It does not, however, escape the Minister's lynx eye, nor does he fail to notice the Queen's distress and thus to fathom her secret. From then on everything transpires like clockwork. After dealing in his customary manner with the business of the day, the Minister's draws from his pocket a letter similar in appearance to the one in his view, and having pretended to read it, he places it next to the other. A bit more conversation to amuse the royal company, whereupon, without flinching once, he seizes the embarrassing letter, making off with it, as the Queen, on whom none of his manoeuvre has been lost, remains unable to intervene for fear of attracting the attention of her royal spouse, close at her side at that very moment. Everything might then have transpired unseen by a hypothetical spectator of an operation in which nobody falters, and whose quotient is that the Minister has filched from the Queen her letter and that - an even more important result than the first - the Queen knows that he now has it, and by no means innocently. A remainder that no analyst will neglect, trained as he is to retain whatever is significant, without always knowing what to do with it: the letter, abandoned by the Minister, and which the Queen's hand is now
of being (l'tre), as non-being. Truth is woman as veiled/unveiled castration [PT,69 pp. 60-1]. Lacan himself, however, never uses the word castration in the text of the original seminar. That it is suggested is indisputable, but Derrida, by filling in what Lacan left blank, is repeating precisely the gesture of blank-filling for which he is criticising Lacan. (2) What Lacan leaves out of the text: This objection is itself double: on the one hand, Derrida criticises Lacan for neglecting to consider The Purloined Letter in connection with the other two stories in what Derrida calls Poe's Dupin Trilogy. And on the other hand, according to Derrida, at the very moment Lacan is reading the story as an allegory of the signifier, he is being blind to the disseminating power of the signifier in the text of the allegory, in what Derrida calls the scene of writing. To cut out part of a text's frame of reference as though it did not exist and to reduce a complex textual functioning to a single meaning are serious blots indeed in the annals of literary criticism. Therefore it is all the more noticeable that Derrida's own reading of Lacan's text repeats precisely the crimes of which he accuses it: on the one hand, Derrida makes no mention of Lacan's long development on the relation between symbolic determination and random series. And on the other hand, Derrida dismisses Lacan's style as a mere ornament, veiling, for a time, an unequivocal message: Lacan's style, moreover, was such that for a long time it would hinder and delay all access to a unique content or a single unequivocal meaning determined beyond the writing itself (PT, p.40). The fact that Derrida repeats the very gestures he is criticising does not in itself invalidate his criticism of their effects, but it does render problematic his statement condemning their existence. And it also illustrates the transfer of the repetition compulsion from the original text to the scene of its reading. [...] This study of the readings of the The Purloined Letter has thus arrived at the point where the word letter no longer has any literality. But what is a letter that has no literality?
69 Jacques Derrida, The Purveyor of Truth, in Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), pp. 31-113.
Leaving the father's hall at midnight, by a gate that was ironed within and without, and kneeling in prayer in a forest, beneath a huge oak tree, the lady Christabel hears a low sound of moaning. She springs to her feet, listens again, then steals around the tree for a look at the other side: There she sees a damsel bright / Drest in a silken robe of white, / That shadowy in the moonlight shone: / The neck that made that white robe wan, / Her stately neck, and arms were bare; / Her blue-veined feet unsandal'd were, / And widely glittered here and there / The gems entangled in her hair (58-65). What follows is a taking in: Christabel questions this remarkable figure (and who art thou?, 70), and takes in the answer (my sire is of a noble line,/And my name is Geraldine 79-80); takes in as well the tale of forcible kidnapping; and takes in, finally, the person of Geraldine herself, into the safety of her father's hall. Once there, however, she does not take in some absolutely suspicious signs, such as Geraldine's too brief seizure of pain at the threshold (129 ff.), her refusal to join in prayer (141 ff.), the angry moan of the mastiff (145 ff.), or the strange flaring of the brand (156 ff.). Is it Christabel's turn to be taken in by Geraldine? Ignoring these signs, and others like them, she draws closer to her guest, close to the point of lying at her side, naked, and in bed. There it is that a shock occurs, shocking first of all to Geraldine (Ah! What a stricken look was hers! 256): Christabel, reclining on her elbow and watching Geraldine, takes in something she was never meant to see, the sight of Geraldine's horrible bosom and half her side (252). In her closeness, Christabel suffers an irreversible moment of accuracy, confirmed by Geraldine's defiant embrace. [...]
71 Published in: Robert Young, op. cit., pp. 281-316.
2. PROTO -THEMES 2.1 MYTH CRITICISM 2.1.1 Joseph Campbell: from The Hero With A Thousand Faces 1. THE MONOMYTH: THE HERO AND THE GOD The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation-initiation-return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from his mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Prometheus ascended to the heavens, stole fire from the gods, and descended. Jason sailed through the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, circumvented the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece, and returned with the fleece and the power to wrest his rightful throne from a usurper. Aeneas went down into the underworld, crossed the dreadful river of the dead, threw a sop to the three-headed watchdog Cerberus, and conversed, at last, with the shade of his dead father. All things were unfolded to him: the destiny of souls, the destiny of Rome, which he was about to found, and in what wise he might avoid or endure every burden. He returned through the ivory gate to his work in the world. [...] As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return. The whole of the Orient has been blessed by the boon brought back by
2.1.2 Northrop Frye: from The Archetypes of Literature [...] It is clear that criticism cannot be systematic unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so, an order of words corresponding to the order of nature in the natural sciences. An archetype should be not only a unifying category of criticism, but itself a part of a total form, and it leads us at once to the question of what sort of form criticism can see in literature. Our survey of critical techniques has taken us as far as literary history. Total literary history moves from the primitive to the sophisticated, and here we glimpse the possibility of seeing literature as a complication of a relatively restricted and simple group of formulas that can be studied in primitive culture. If so, then the search for archetypes is a kind of literary anthropology, concerned with the way that literature is informed by pre-literary categories such as ritual, myth and folktale. We next realize that the relation between these categories and literature is by no means purely one of descent, as we find them reappearing in the greatest classics - in fact there seems to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to them. This coincides with a feeling that we all have had: that the study of mediocre works of art, however energetic, obstinately remains a random and peripheral form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece seems to draw us to a point at which we can see and enormous number of verging patterns of significance. Here we begin to wonder if we cannot see literature, not only as complicating itself
2.1.4 Leslie A. Fiedler: from Archetype and Signature: The Relationship of Poet and Poem [...] One of the essential functions of a poet is the assertion and creation of a personality, in a profounder sense than any non-artist can attain. We ask of a poet the definition of man, at once particular and abstract, stated and acted out. It is impossible to draw a line between the work the poet writes and the work he lives, between the life he lives and the life he writes. And the agile critic, therefore, must be prepared to move constantly back and forth between life and poem, not in a pointless circle, but in a meaningful spiralling toward the absolute point. To pursue this matter further, we will have to abandon at this point the nominalist notion of the poem as words or only words. We have the best of excuses, that such terminology gets in the way of truth. We will not, however, return to the older notions of the poem as a document or the embodiment of an idea, for these older conceptions are equally inimical to the essential concept of the marvellous ; and they have the further difficulty of raising political and moral criteria of truth as relevant to works of art. To redeem the sense of what words are all the time pointing to and what cannot be adequately explained by syntactic analysis or semantics, I shall speak of the poem as Archetype and Signature, suggesting that the key to analysis is symbolics; and I shall not forget that the poet's life is also capable of being analyzed in those terms. We have been rather ridiculously overemphasizing medium as a differentiating factor; I take it that we can now safely assume no one will confuse a life with a poem and dwell on the elements common to the two, remembering that a pattern of social behavior can be quite as much a symbol as a word, chanted or spoken or printed. In deed as in word, the poet composes himself as maker and mask, in accordance with some contemporaneous mythos of the artist. And as we all know, in our day, it is even possible to be a writer without having written anything. When we talk therefore of the importance of the biography of the poet, we do not mean the importance of
2.1.5 Herbert Weisinger: from The Myth and Ritual Approach to Shakespearean Tragedy [...] It is my contention that while the last plays of Shakespeare do indeed carry forward the tragic pattern established in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, they neither heighten nor deepen it but on the contrary reject and even destroy it. In fact, I would go as far as to argue that the tragic pattern in the tragedies themselves is scarcely maintained equally strongly over each of the plays. For, on the basis of a comparison between the myth and ritual pattern as I have described it in Tragedy and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall and the tragedies, I think that Shakespeare's tragic vision, which he was able to sustain but tentatively in Hamlet, most fully in Othello, barely in King Lear, hardly at all in Macbeth, failed him altogether in the last plays, and that this failure is manifested by the use of the elements of the myth and ritual pattern as mere machinery, virtually in burlesque fashion, and not as their informing and sustaining spirit. [...] I. The myth and ritual pattern of the ancient Near East, which is at least
2.1.6 Eric Gould: from Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature Chapter 1. On the Essential in Myth: Interpreting the Archetype [...] I want to emphasize that the mythic, therefore, does not and cannot disappear in the modern so long as these questions remain. For reasons which should be clear to the reader by the end of this study, I do not believe that we must differentiate sharply between some pristine, original, and sacred myth of origins, which has somehow receded form our grasp, and which we can only pessimistically hope to recover, and, on the other hand, myth as semiotic fact. True myth, it is very often said, even by such opposites as Eliade and Lvy-Strauss, can no longer be a reality for civilized man. My point is that mythicity is alive insofar as we rely on fictions to make sense of our world, and indeed, on the inadequacies of language to explain the inexplicable. Instead of
2.1
2.2.1 Carl Gustav Jung: from Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious The hypothesis of a collective unconscious belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions. This has been the case with the concept of the unconscious in general. After the philosophical idea of the unconscious, in the form presented chiefly by Carus and von Hartmann, had gone down under the overwhelming wave of materialism, leaving hardly a ripple behind it, it gradually reappeared in the scientific domain of medical psychology. At first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious - at least metaphorically - take the stage as the acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thoughtforms. A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term collective
2.2.2 Carl Gustav Jung: from Psychology and Literature The profound difference between the first and second parts of Faust marks the difference between the psychological and the visionary modes of artistic creation. The latter reverses all the conditions of the former. The experience that furnishes the material for the artistic is no longer familiar. It is a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of mans mind - that suggests the abyss of time separating us from pre-human ages, or evokes a super-human world of contrasting light and darkness. It is a primordial experience which surpasses mans understanding, and to which his is in danger of succumbing. [...] The obscurity as to the sources of the material in visionary creation is very strange, and the exact opposite of what we find in the psychological mode of creation. We are even led to suspect that this obscurity is not unintentional. We are naturally inclined to suppose - and Freudian psychology encourages us to do so - that some highly personal experience underlies this grotesque darkness. [...] Although a discussion of the poets personality and psychic disposition belongs strictly to the second part of my essay, I cannot avoid taking up in the present connection this Freudian view of the visionary work of art. For one thing, it has aroused considerable attention. And then it is the only well-known attempt that has been made to give a scientific explanation of the sources of the visionary material or to formulate a theory of the psychic processes that underlie this curious mode of artistic creation. I assume my own view of the question is not well known or generally understood. With this preliminary remark, I will now try to present it briefly. If we insist on deriving the vision from a personal experience, we must
3.1.1 Sigmund Freud: from The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis 3.1.1.1 From On Dreams (1901) [...] A good proportion of what we have learnt about condensation in dreams may be summarized in this formula: each element in the content of a dream is overdetermined by material in the dream-thoughts; it is not derived from a single element in the dream-thoughts, but may be traced back to a whole number. These elements need not necessarily be closely be related to each other in the dream-thoughts themselves; they may belong to the most widely separated regions of the fabric of those thoughts. A dream-element is, in the strictest sense of the word, the representative of all this disparate material in the content of the dream. But analysis reveals yet another side of the complicated relation between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts. Just as connections lead from each element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, so as a rule a single dream-thought is represented by more than one dream-element; the threads of association do not simply converge from the dream-thoughts to the dream-content, they cross and interwave with each other many times over in the course of their journey. Condensation, together with the transformation of thoughts into situations (dramatization), is the most important and peculiar characteristic of the dream-work. So far, however, nothing has transpired as to any motive necessitating this compression of the material. In the case of the complicated and confused dreams with which we are now concerned, condensation and dramatization alone are not enough to account for the whole of the impression that we gain of the dissimilarity between the content of the dream and the dream-thoughts. We have
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3.1.8 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Psychoanalysis 3.1.8.1 From The Whole and Its Parts When the break between Freud and Jung is discussed, the modest and practical point of disagreement that marked the beginning of their differences is too often forgotten: Jung remarked that in the process of transference the psychoanalyst frequently appeared in the guise of a devil, a god, or a sorcerer, and that the roles he assumed in the patients eyes went far beyond any sort of parental images. They eventually came to a total parting of the ways, yet Jungs initial reservation was a telling one. The same remark holds true of childrens games. A child never confines himself to playing house, to playing only at being daddy-and-mommy. He also plays at being a magician, a cowboy, a cop or a robber, a train, a little car. The train is not necessarily daddy, nor is the train station necessarily mommy. The problem has to do not with the sexual nature of desiringmachines, but with the family nature of this sexuality. Admittedly, once the child has grown up, he finds himself deeply involved in social relations that are no longer familial relations. But since these relations supposedly come into being at a later stage in life, there are only two possible ways in which this can be explained: it must be granted either that sexuality is sublimated or neutralized in and through social (and metaphysical) relations, in the form of an analytic afterward ; or else that these relations bring into play a non-sexual energy, for which sexuality has merely served as the symbol of an anagogical beyond. It was their disagreement on this particular point that eventually made the break between Freud and Jung irreconcilable. Yet at the same time the two
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3.2
PHENOMENOLOGICAL CRITICISM
3.2.2 Georges Poulet: from The Self and Other Critical in Consciousness Critical consciousness relies, by definition, on the thinking of another ; it finds its nourishment and its substance only therein. [...] [...] Each literary work, of no matter what kind, implies, for the writer, an act of self-discovery. Writing does not mean simply to allow an unstemed rush of thoughts to flow onto the paper; writing means rather to construe oneself as the subject of these thoughts! I think means first and foremost: I reveal myself as the subject of that which I think. The thought that flows through me, like a rapid stream that rushes past its banks without being soaked in, moistens and refreshes the always vital foundations of my being. I am a spectator of the phenomena that take place in me. My awakened thought, whether frail or powerful, lucid or murky, never fully coincides with that which is thought. My thought is a separateness; it peaches the key. I cannot say exactly when I came to the conviction that literature as a whole depends on this kind of fact. I read the philosophers; above all those who had thought more than others about the significance of the cogito. Nearly all of modern philosophy, from Montaigne to Husserl, seemed to me to begin with a reflection which had its roots in the function of consciousness. [...] Each literary text, whether essay, novel, or poem, had a point of departure; each organized language grew out of an original moment of awareness, adjusted itself then according to the successive points it subsequently touched upon. In this realm there was no basic difference between literary and philosophical texts. All literature was philosophy for me, each philosophy was literature. No matter what sort of text I read, at the instant I began to sense the effect of a concept in it, I
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into the connection. Thus it is not a purely intuitive act, but rather a decidedly intellectual one. It exhibits the necessity of the inner structure of the aesthetic object under consideration or else the lack of such a necessity, hence its greater or lesser contingency. In particular, it can consist in the understanding that the value does not appear but is not sufficiently founded in the aesthetically valuable qualities which are present. The appearance of the value must thus have a basis outside the aesthetic object, which makes its objectivity at least questionable. With regard to the cognition of an aesthetic concretization we must further explain to what extent the aesthetically valuable qualities manifested in the object are founded in the artistic values of the work of art itself or necessarily arise form factors which the reader projects to fill out certain places of indeterminacy in harmony with the work. In this way we gain insight into the necessary or contingent structure of the literary aesthetic object under investigation, even into its foundations in the work of art itself. The demonstration of the necessary ontic interconnections among all the elements under consideration here reveals a new specific value factor in the aesthetic object: the valuable nature of the necessary formal unity founded in the individual character of the material factors. And this is the optimum that can be achieved in the area of aesthetic object. The aesthetic object is then a realization of the content of a particular idea which the artist must somehow have had in mind. But he also had to invent the means for the realization of his content; that is he had to create the corresponding work of art. For note that the idea in question is not the idea of the work of art but only the idea of the peculiar ontic interconnection between the relevant value quality and the set of aesthetically valuable qualities which coexists with it in harmonious unity. [...] The cognition of the aesthetic concretization of a literary work of art does not end with the immediate, intuitive apprehension of the concretization. It also involves fixing the results of the cognition in a set of judgements and corresponding concepts. The possibility of literary scholarship as a discipline which would also set itself the task of studying aesthetic concretizations depends on the extent to which this fixing in
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3.2.5 Geoffrey Hartman: from Wordsworths Poetry 1787-1814 Retrospect 1971 What I did, basically, was to describe Wordsworths consciousness of consciousness. Everything else - psychology, epistemology, religious ideas, politics - was subordinated. If that is phenomennological procedure, so be it. I did not, however, support any special (Hegelian, Jungian, etc.) theory of personal identity of human and historical development. Though sometimes adducing analogies from other writers, I tried to describe things strictly as they appeared to the poet, while raising the question as to why he so carefully respected their modes of appearance. The answer given by Wordsworth was that he had made when young a providential error: then it was already consciousness that was appearing, not simply things; and the blindness which caused the growing spirit to feel not its own burden but that of natural objects (they lay upon his mind like substances and perplexed the bodily sense) initiated a quest-romance in pursuit of the creation, one which gave the boys imagination time to naturalize itself, to direct its great but uncertain powers toward the things of this world.
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Strange fits of passion have I And now we reached the known: orchard-plot; And I will dare to tell, And, as we climbed the hill, But in the Lovers ear alone, The sinking moon to Lucys cot What once to me befel. Came near, and nearer still. When she I loved looked every In one of those sweet dreams I day slept, Fresh as a rose in June, Kind Natures gentlest boon! I to her cottage bent my way, And all the while my eyes I kept Beneath an evening moon. On the descending moon. Upon the moon I fixed my eye, My horse moved on; hoof after All over the wide lea; hoof With quickening pace my horse He raised, and never stopped: drew nigh When down behind the cottage Those paths so dear to me. roof, At once, the bright moon dropped. What fond and wayward thoughts will slide Into a Lovers head! O mercy! to myself I cried, If Lucy should be dead! The lyric has more error (anticlimax, illusion, mismatching of event and meaning) than center. The action is now too slow and now too fast, now overstated (first stanza) and understated (last stanza). A wayward comment on wayfaring, it opens on a ballad note of high adventure yet from that perspective that almost plotless story is an anticlimax. A word like fits is equally unsettled, not quite at home in its vernacular sense, nor
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3.3
READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM
3.3.1 Hans Robert Jauss: from Literary History As a Challenge to Literary Theory Thesis 1. A renewal of literary history demands the removal of the prejudices of historical objectivism and the grounding of the traditional aesthetics of production and representation in an aesthetics of reception and influence. The historicity of literature rests not on an organization of literary facts that is established post festum, but rather on the preceding experience of the literary work by its readers. R. G. Collingwoods postulate, posed in his critique of the prevailing ideology of objectivity in history - History is nothing but the reenactment of past thought in the historians mind - is even more valid for literary history. For the positivistic view of history as the objective description of a series of events in an isolated past neglects the artistic character as well as the specific historicity of literature. A literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. It is not a monument that monologically reveals its timeless essence. It is much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to a contemporary existence: words that must,
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3.3.3 Stanley Fish: from Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics [...] Underlying these two analyses is a method, rather simple in concept, but complex (or at least complicated) in execution. The concept is simply the rigorous and disinterested asking of the question, what does this word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, chapter, novel, play, poem, do?; and the execution involves an analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time. Every word in this statement bears a special emphasis. The analysis must be of the developing responses to distinguish it from the atomism of much stylistic criticism. A reader's response to the fifth word in a line or sentence is to a large extent the product of his responses to words one, two three, and four. And by response, I intend more than the range of feelings (what Wimsatt
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3.3.4 Stanley Fish: from Interpreting the Variorum The Case for Reader-Response Analysis [...] Milton's twentieth sonnet - Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son - has been the subject of relatively little commentary. In it the poet invites a friend to join him in some distinctly Horatian pleasures - a neat repast intermixed with conversation, wine, and song; a respite from labour all the more enjoyable because outside the earth is frozen and the day sullen. The only controversy the sonnet has inspired concerns its final two lines: [...] He who of those delights can judge, and spare / To interpose them oft, is not unwise. The focus of the controversy is the word spare, for which two readings
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4.1.1 Walter Benjamin: from The Author As Producer 73 You will remember how Plato, in his project for a Republic, deals with writers. In the interests of the community, he denies them the right to dwell therein. Plato had a high opinion of the power of literature. But he thought it harmful and superfluous - in a perfect community, be it understood. Since Plato, the question of the writers right to exist gas not often been raised with the same emphasis; today, however, it arises once more. Of course it only seldom arises in this form. But all of you are more or less conversant with it in a different form, that of the question of the writers autonomy: his freedom to write just what he pleases. You are not inclined to grant him this autonomy. You believe that the present social situation forces him to decide in whose service he wishes to place his activity. The bourgeois of entertainment literature does not acknowledge this choice. You prove to him that, without admitting it, he is working in the service of certain class interests. A progressive type of writer does not acknowledge this choice. His decision is made upon the basis of the class struggle: he places himself on the side of the proletariat. And thats the end of his autonomy. He directs his activity towards what will be useful to the proletariat in the class struggle. This is usually called pursuing a tendency, or commitment. [...] I hope to be able to show you that the concept of commitment, in the perfunctory form in which it generally occurs in the debate I have just mentioned, is a totally inadequate instrument of political literary criticism.
73 Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, on 27 April 1934
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dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can only say, How beautiful. [...] It has succeeded in turning abject poverty itself, by handling it in a modish, technically perfect way, into an object of enjoyment. For it is an economic function of photography to supply the masses, by modish processing, with matter which previously eluded mass consumption Spring, famous people, foreign countries - then one of its political functions is to renovate the world as it is from the inside, i.e. by modish techniques. Here we have an extreme example of what it means to supply a production apparatus without changing it. Changing it would have meant bringing down one of the barriers, surmounting one of the contradictions which inhibit the productive capacity of the intelligentsia. What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value. [...] Turning to the New Objectivity as a literary movement, I must go a step further and say that it has turned the struggle against misery into an object of consumption. In many cases, indeed, its political significance has been limited to converting revolutionary reflexes, in so far as these occurred within the bourgeoisie, into themes of entertainment and amusement which can be fitted without much difficulty into the cabaret life of a large city. The characteristic feature of this literature is the way it transforms political struggle so that it ceases to be a compelling motive for decision and becomes an object of comfortable contemplation; it ceases to be a means of production and becomes an article of consumption[...]. [...] Commitment is a necessary, but never a sufficient, condition for a writers work acquiring an organizing function. For this to happen it is also necessary for the writer to have a teachers attitude. And today this is more than ever an essential demand. A writer who does not teach other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point, therefore, is that a writers production must have the character of a model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their production, and, secondly, it must be able to place
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4.1.3 Terry Eagleton: from Criticism and Ideology [...] In what sense is it correct to maintain that ideology, rather than history, is the object of the text? Or, to pose the question slightly differently: In what sense, if any, do elements of the historically real enter the text ? Georg Lukcs, in his Studies in European Realism, argues that Balzacs greatness lies in the fact that the inexorable veracity of his art drives him to transcend his reactionary ideology and perceive the real historical issues at stake. Ideology, here, clearly signifies a false consciousness which blocks true historical perception, a screen interposed between men and their history. As such, it is a simplistic notion: it fails to grasp ideology as an inherently complex formation which, by inserting individuals into history in a variety of ways, allows of multiple kinds and degrees of access to that history. It
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4.1.5 Terry Eagleton: from Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) Marxist criticism is not merely a sociology of literature, concerned with how novels get published and whether they mention the working class. Its aim is to explain the literary work more fully; and this means a sensitive attention to its forms, styles and meanings. But it also means grasping those forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular
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4.1.6 Terry Eagleton: from The Rise of English TO SPEAK OF LITERATURE AND IDEOLOGY as two separate phenomena which can be interrelated is, as I hope to have shown, in one sense quite unnecessary. Literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology. It has the most intimate relations to questions of social power. But if the reader is still unconvinced, the narrative of what happened to literature in the later nineteenth century might prove a little more persuasive. If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse than reply: the failure of religion. By the mid-Victorian period, this traditionally reliable, immensely powerful ideological form was in deep trouble. It was no longer winning the hearts and minds of the masses, and under the twin impacts of scientific discovery and social change its previous unquestioned dominance was in danger of evaporating. This was particularly worrying for the Victorian ruling class, because religion is for all kinds of reasons an extremely effective form of ideological
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4.1.8 Fredric Jameson: from The politics of theory: Ideological positions in the postmodernism debate The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is at one and the same time a aesthetic and a political one. The various positions which can logically be taken on it, whatever terms they are couched in, can always be shown to articulate visions of history, in
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prophetic stance, whose analyses turn on the anti-representational thrust of modernism and postmodernism; Lyotards aesthetic positions, however, cannot be adequately evaluated in aesthetic terms, since what informs them is an essentially social and political conception of a new social system beyond classical capitalism (our old friend, postindustrial society): the vision of a regenerated modernism is in that sense inseparable from a certain prophetic faith in the possibilities and the promise of the new society itself in full emergence. The negative inversion of this position will then clearly involve an ideological repudiation of modernism of a type which might conceivably range from Lukcs older analysis of modernist forms as the replication of the reification of capitalist social life all the way to some of the more articulated critiques of high modernisms of the present day. What distinguished this final position from the antimodernisms outlined above is, however, that it does not speak from the security of an affirmation of some new postmodernist culture, but rather sees even the latter itself as a mere degeneration of the already stigmatized impulses in high modernism proper. This particular position, perhaps the bleakest of all and the most implacably negative, can be vividly confronted in the works of the Venetian architecture historian Manfredo Tafuri, whose extensive analyses constitute a powerful indictment of what we have termed the protopolitical impulses in high modernism (the Utopian substitution of cultural politics for politics proper, the vocation to transform the world by transforming its forms, space or language). [] But a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena particularly when it is a matter of a present of time and of history in which we ourselves exist and struggle - cannot afford the impoverished luxury of such absolute moralizing judgements: the dialectic is beyond good and evil in the sense of some easy taking of sides, whence the glacial and inhuman spirit of its historical vision (something that already disturbed contemporaries about Hegels original system). The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it is complacent and corrupt. Ideological judgement on postmodernism today
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4.1.9 Frederic Jameson: from On Interpretation: Literature As a Socially Symbolic Act This book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optional auxiliary to other interpretive methods, current today - the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural - but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading andall interpretation. This is evidently a much more extreme position than the modest claim, surely acceptable to everyone, that certain texts have social and historicalsometimes even political-resonance. Traditional literary history has, of course, never prohibited the investigation of such topics as the Florentine political background in Dante, Miltons relationship to the schismatics, or Irish historical allusions in Joyce. I would argue, however, that such information - even where it is not recontained, as it is in most instances, by an idealistic conception of the history of ideas - does not yield interpretation as such, but rather at best its (indispensable) preconditions. Today this properly antiquarian relationship to the cultural past has a dialectical counterpart which is ultimately no more satisfactory; I mean the tendency of much contemporary theory to rewrite selected texts from the past in terms of its own aesthetic and, in particular, in terms of a modernist (or more properly postmodernist) conception of language. This unacceptable option, or ideological double bind, between antiquarianism and modernizing relevance or projection demonstrates that the old dilemmas of historicism - and in particular, the question of the claims of monuments from distant and even archaic moments of the cultural past on a culturally different present - do not go away just because we choose to ignore them. Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow,
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4.1.10 Raymond Williams: from Dominant, Residual, and Emergent The complexity of a culture is to be found not only in its variable processes and their social definitions - traditions, institutions, and formations - but also in the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process, of historically varied and variable elements. In what I have called epochal analysis, a cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments and features is important and often, in practice, effective. But it often happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is
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4.2 MICHEL FOUCAULT: POWER AND DISCOURSE 4.2.1 Friedrich Nietzsche: from The Will to Power 481 (1883-1888) Against positivism, which halts at phenomena - There are only facts I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact in itself : perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing. Everything is subjective, you say; but even this is interpretation. The subject is not something given, it is something added and invented and projected behind what there is. - Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis.
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4.2.2 M. Foucault: from Why Study Power? The Question of the Subject [...] I would like to say, first of all, what has been the goal of my work during the last twenty years. It has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. My objective, instead, has been to create a history of different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects. The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the status of sciences; for example, the objectivizing of the speaking subject in grammaire generale, philology, and linguistics. Or again, in this first mode, the objectivizing of the productive subject, the subject who labours, in the analysis of wealth and of economics. Or, a third example, the objectivizing of the sheer fact of being alive in natural history or biology. In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizing of the subject in what I shall call dividing practices. The subject is either divided inside himself or divided from others. This process objectivizes him. Examples are the mad and the sane, the sick and the healthy, the criminals and the good boys. Finally, I have sought to study - it is my current work - the way a human being turns himself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the domain of sexuality - how men have learned to recognize themselves as subjects of sexuality. Thus, it is not power but the subject which is the general theme of my research. It is true that I became quite involved with the question of power. It
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4.2.3 M. Foucault: from How Is Power Exercized? What constitutes the specific nature of power? The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between partners, individual or collective; it is a way in which certain actions modify others. Which is to say, of course, that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist. Power exists only when it is put into action, even if, of course, it is integrated into a disparate field of possibilities brought to bear upon permanent structures. This also means that power is not a function of consent. In itself it is not a renunciation of freedom, a transference of rights, the power of each and all delegated to a few ( which does not prevent the possibility that consent may be a condition for the existence or the maintenance of power); the relationship of power can be the result of a prior or permanent consent, but it is not by nature the manifestation of a consensus. Is this to say that one must seek the character proper to power relations in the violence which must have been its primitive form, its permanent secret, and its last resource, that which in the final analysis appears as its real nature when it is forced to throw aside its mask and to show itself as it really is? In effect, what defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others.
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henceforth ask ourselves what language must be in order to structure in this way what is nevertheless not in itself either word or discourse, and in order to articulate itself on the pure forms of knowledge. By a much longer and much more unexpected path, we are led back to the place that Nietzsche and Mallarm signposted when the first asked: Who speaks?, and the second saw his glittering answer in the Word itself. The question to what language is in its being is once more of the greatest urgency. At this point, where the question of language arises again with such heavy over-determination, and where it seems to lay siege on every side to the figure of man (that figure which had once taken the place of Classical Discourse), contemporary culture is struggling to create an important part of its present, and perhaps of its future. On the one hand, suddenly very near to all this empirical domains, questions arise which before had seemed very distant from them: these questions concern a general formalization of thought and knowledge; and at a time when they were still thought to be dedicated solely to the relation between logic and mathematics, they suddenly open up the possibility, and the task, of purifying the old empirical reason by constituting formal languages, and of applying a second critique of pure reason on the basis of new forms of the mathematical a priori. However, at the other extremity of our culture, the question of language is entrusted to that form of speech which has no doubt never ceased to pose it, but which is now, for the first time, posing it to itself. That literature in our day is fascinated by the being of language is neither the sign of an imminent end nor proof of a radicalization: it is a phenomenon whose necessity has its roots in a vast configuration in which the whole structure of our thought and our knowledge is traced. But if the question of formal languages gives prominence to the possibility or impossibility of structuring positive contents, a literature dedicated to language gives prominence, in all their empirical vivacity, to the fundamental forms of finitude. From within language experienced and traversed as language, in the play of its possibilities extended to their furthest point, what emerges is that man has come to an end, and that, by reaching the summit of all possible speech, he arrives not at the very heart of himself but at the brink of that which
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4.2.5 Michel Foucault: from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [...] Rusche and Kirchheimers great work, Punishment and Social Structures, provides a great number of essential reference points. We must first rid ourselves of the illusion that penalty is above all (if not exclusively) a means of reducing crime and that, in this role, according to the social forms, the political system or beliefs, it may be severe or lenient, tend towards expiation of obtaining redress, towards the pursuit of individuals or the attribution of collective responsibility. We must analyze rather the concrete systems of punishment, study them as social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by the juridical structure of the society alone, nor by its fundamental ethical choices; we must situate them in their field of operation, in which the punishment of crime is not the sole element; we must show that punitive measures are not simply negative mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which is their task to support (and, in this sense, although legal punishment is carried out in order to punish offences, one might say that the definition of offences and their prosecution are carried out in turn in order to maintain the punitive mechanisms and their functions). From this point of view, Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force and to constitute a body of civil slaves in
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4.3
4.3.1 Stephen Greenblatt: from Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation Of Social Energy in Renaissance England THE CIRCULATION OF SOCIAL ENERGY I began with the desire to speak with the dead. This desire is a familiar, if unvoiced, motive in literary studies, a motive organized, professionalized, buried beneath thick layers of bureaucratic decorum: literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans. If I never believed that the dead could hear me, and if I knew that the dead could not speak, I was nonetheless certain that I could recreate a conversation with them. Even when I came to understand that in my most intense moments of straining to listen all I could hear was my own voice, even then I did not abandon my desire. It was true that I could hear only my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make
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4.3.2 Hayden White: from Tropics of Discourse The Historical Text as Literary Artifact There is one problem that neither philosophers nor historians have looked at very seriously and to which literary theorists have given only passing attention. This question has to do with the status of the historical narrative considered purely as a verbal artifact purporting to be a model
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4.3.3 Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield: from History and Ideology: The Instance of Henry V [...] Perhaps the most fundamental error in [the] accounts of the role of ideology is falsely to unify history and/or the individual human subject. In
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4.4.2 Julia Kristeva: from Womens Time The terror of power or the power of terrorism First in socialist countries (such as the USSR and China) and increasingly in Western democracies, under pressure from feminist
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4.4.3 Hlne Cixous: from The Laugh of the Medusa I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say woman, Im speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history. But first it must said that in spite of the enormity of the repression that has kept them in the dark - that dark which people have been trying to make them accept as their attribute there is, at this time, no general woman, no one typical woman. What they have in common I will say. But what strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you cant talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes - any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Womens imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible. I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concern masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rupture inscribing a resonant vision, a
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4.4.4 Elaine Showalter: from Towards a Feminist Poetics Feminist criticism can be divided into two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader - with woman as the consumer of male-produced literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its sexual codes. I shall call this kind of analysis the feminist critique, and like other kinds of critique it is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. Its subjects include the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history. It is also concerned with the exploitation and manipulation of the female audience, especially in popular culture and film; and with the analysis of woman-as-sign in semiotic systems. The second type of feminist criticism is concerned with woman as writer - with woman as the producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women. Its
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Ironically, the existence of a new criticism practised by women has made it even more possible for structuralism and Marxism to strive, Henchardlike, for systems of formal obligation and determination. Feminist writings in these modes, such as Hlne Cixous and the women contributors to Diacritics, risk being alloted the symbolic ghettoes of the special issue or the back of the book for their essays. It is not because the exchange between feminism, Marxism and structuralism has hitherto been so one-sided, however, that I think attempts at syntheses have so far been unsuccessful. While scientific criticism struggles to purge itself of the subjective, feminist criticism is willing to assert (in the title of a recent anthology) The Authority of Experience.81 The experience of woman can easily disappear, become mute, invalid and invisible, lost in the diagrams of the structuralist or the class conflict of the Marxists. Experience is not emotion; we must protest now as in the nineteenth century against the equation of the feminine with the irrational. But we must also recognise that the questions we most need to ask go beyond those that science can answer. We must seek the repressed message of women in history, in anthropology, in psychology, and in ourselves, before we can locate the feminine not-said, in the manner of Pierre Macherey, by probing the fissures of the female text. Thus the current theoretical impasse in feminist criticism, I believe, is more than a problem of finding exacting definitions and a suitable terminology, or theorizing in the midst of a struggle. It comes from our own divided consciousness, the split in each of us. We are both the daughters of the male tradition, of our teachers, our professors, our disertation advisers and our publishers - a tradition which asks us to be rational, marginal and grateful; and sisters in a new womens movement which engenders another kind of awareness and commitment, which demands that we renounce the pseudo-success of token womanhood, and the ironic masks of academic debate. How much easier, how less lonely it is, not to awaken - to continue to be critics and teachers of male literature,
81 Lee Edwards and Arlyn Diamond (eds.), The Authority of Experience (Amherst, Mass., 1977).
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4.4.5 Elaine Showalter: from Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism (1985) AS A SORT of a come - on, I announced that I would speak today about that piece of bait named Ophelia, and Ill be as good as my word. These are the words which begin the psychoanalytic seminar on Hamlet presented in Paris in 1959 by Jacques Lacan. But despite his promising come - on, Lacan was not as good as his word. He goes on for some 41 pages to speak about Hamlet, and when he does mention Ophelia, she is merely what Lacan calls the object Ophelia - that is, the object of Hamlets male desire. The etymology of Ophelia, Lacan asserts, is O phallus, and her role in the drama can only be to function as the exteriorized figuration of what Lacan predictably and, in view of his own early work with psychotic women, disappointingly suggests is the phallus as transcendental signifier.1 To play such a part obviously makes Ophelia essential, as Lacan admits; but only because, in his words, she is linked forever, for centuries, to the figure of Hamlet. [...] Yet when feminist criticism allows Ophelia to upstage hamlet, it also brings to the foreground the issues in an ongoing theoretical debate about the cultural links between femininity, female sexuality, insanity, and
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4.4.6 Sandra M. Gilbert: from Literary Paternity Though many of these writers use the metaphor of literary paternity in different ways and for different purposes, all seem overwhelmingly to agree that a literary text is not only speech quite literally embodied, but
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4.4.8 Lillian S. Robinson: from Treason Our Text Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon The lofty seat of canonized bards (Pollok, 1827) AS WITH MANY OTHER restrictive institutions, we are hardly aware of it until we come into conflict with it; the elements of the literary canon are simply absorbed by the apprentice scholar and critic in the normal course of graduate education, without anyones ever seeming to inculcate or defend them. Appeal, were any necessary, would be to the other meaning of canon, that is to established standards of judgement and of taste. Not that either definition is presented as rigid and immutable - far from it, for lectures in literary history are full of wry references to a benighted though hardly distant past when, say, the metaphysical poets
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4.5
ETHNO-CRITICISM
4.5.1 Edward Said: from Crisis [in orientalism] It may appear strange to speak about something or someone as holding a textual attitude, but a student of literature will understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be understood on the basis of what books - texts -
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had more affinities with each other than with the Semitic, Chinese, American or African languages. Moreover, the Indo-European family was artistically simple and satisfactory in a way the Semitic, for one, was not. Such abstractions as this did not trouble Schlegel, for whom nations, races, minds and peoples as things one could talk about passionately - in the ever-narrowing perspective of populism first adumbrated by Herder held a lifelong fascination. Yet nowhere does Schlegel talk about the living, contemporary Orient. When he said in 1800, It is in the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism, he meant the Orient of the Sakuntala, the Zend-Avesta, and the Upanishads87. As for the Semites, whose language was agglutinative, unaesthetic and mechanical, they were different, inferior, backward. Schlegels lectures on language and on life, history, and literature are full of these discriminations, which he made without the slightest qualification. Hebrew, he said, was made for prophetic utterance and divination; the Muslims, however, espoused a dad empty Theism, a merely negative Unitarian faith.88 Much of the racism in Schlegels strictures upon the Semites and other low Orientals was widely diffused in European culture. But nowhere else, unless it be later in the nineteenth century among Darwinian anthropologists and phrenologists, was it made the basis of a scientific subject matter as it was in comparative linguistics or philology. Language and race seemed inextricably tied, and the good Orient was invariably a classical period somewhere in a long-gone India, whereas the bad Orient lingered in present-day Asia, parts of North Africa, and Islam everywhere. Aryans were confined to Europe and the ancient Orient, as
87 Sakuntala is a Sanskrit verse drama by the Indian fifth century poet Kalidasa. The Zend-Avesta is the scripture of Zoroastrianism. The Upanishads belong to Hindu scripture. 88 Friedrich Schlegel, ber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begrundung der Altertumstunde (Heidelberg: Mohr & Zimmer, 1808), pp. 44-59; Schlegel, Philosophie der Geschichte: In achtzen Vorlesungen gehalten zu Wien im Jahre 1828, ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett, vol 9 of Kritische Friedrich Schlegel - Ausgabe, ed. Ernest Behler (Munich: Ferdinand Schningh, 1971), p. 275.
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Here, for example, is Flaubert describing the spectacle of the Orient: To amuse the crowd, Mohammed Alis jester took a woman in a Cairo bazaar one day, set her on the counter of a shop, and coupled with her publicly while the shopkeeper calmly smoked his pipe. On the road from Cairo to Shubra some time ago a young fellow had himself publicly buggered by a large monkey - as in the story above, to create a good opinion about himself and make people laugh. A marabout died a while ago - an idiot - who had no longer passed as a saint marked by God; all the Moslem women came to see him and masturbated him - in the end he died of exhaustion - from morning to night it was a perpetual jacking-off. Quid dicis [what say you?] of the following fact: some time ago a santon (ascetic priest) used to walk through the streets of Cairo completely naked except for a cap on his head and another on his prick. To piss he would doff the prick-cap, and sterile women who wanted children would run up, put themselves under the parabola of his urine and rub themselves with it.90 Flaubert frankly acknowledges that this is a grotesquerie of a special kind. All the old comic business - by which Flaubert meant the wellknown conventions of the cudgeled slave the coarse trafficker in women the thieving merchant - acquire a new, fresh genuine and charming meaning in the Orient. This meaning cannot be reproduced; it can only be enjoyed on the spot and brought back very approximately. The Orient is watched, since its almost (but never quite) offensive behaviour issues out a reservoir of infinite peculiarity; the European, whose sensibility tours the Orient, is a watcher, never involved, always detached, always ready for new examples of what the Description de l Egypte called bizarre jouissamce. The Orient becomes a living tableau of queerness. []
90 Flaubert i Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, trans. and ed. Francis Steegmuller (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973), pp. 44-5. See Gustave Flaubert, Correspondence, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), I:542.
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aware of the time-lag, not only between orientalist science and the material under study, but also - and this was determining - between the conceptions, the methods and the instruments of work in the human and social sciences and those of orientalism.92The Orientalists - from Renan to Goldziher to Macdonald to von Grunebaum, Gibb and Bernard Lewis -saw Islam, for example, as a cultural synthesis (the phrase is P. M. Holt s) that could be studied apart from economics, sociology, and politics of the Islamic peoples. For Orientalism, Islam had a meaning which, if one were to look for its most succinct formulation, could be found in Renans first treatise: in order best to be understood Islam had to be reduced to tent and tribe. The impact of colonialism, of worldly circumstances, of historical development: all these were to Orientalists as flies to wanton boys, killed - or disregarded - for their sport, never taken seriously enough to complicate the essential Islam. [] The present crisis dramatizes the disparity between texts and reality. Yet in this study of Orientalism I wish not only to expose the sources of Orientalisms views but also to reflect on its importance, for the contemporary intellectual rightly feels that to ignore a part of the world now demonstrably encroaching upon him is to avoid reality. Humanists have too often confined their attention to departmentalized topics of research. They have neither watched nor learned from disciplines like Orientalism whose unremitting ambition was to master all of the world, not some easily delimited part of it such as an author or a collection of texts. However, along with such academic security-blankets as history, literature or the humanities, and despite its overarching aspirations, Orientalism is involved in worldly, historical circumstances which it has tried to conceal behind an often pompous scientism and appeals to rationalism. The contemporary intellectual can learn from Orientalism how, on the one hand, either to limit or to enlarge realistically the scope of his disciplines claims, and on the other, to see the human ground (the foul-rag-and-bone shop of the heart, Yeats called it) in which texts, visions, methods, and disciplines begin, grow, thrive, and degenerate. To
92 Abdel Malek, Orientalism in Crisis, p. 112.
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4.5.2 Edward W. Said: from The Politics of Knowledge [...] At the heart of the imperial cultural entreprise I analyzed in Orientalism and also in my new book, was a politics of identity. That politics has needed to assume, indeed needed firmly to believe, that what was true for Orientals or Africans was not however true about or for Europeans. When a French or German scholar tried to identify the main characteristics of, for instance, the Chinese mind, the work was only partly intended to do that; it was also intended to show how different the Chinese mind was from the Western mind. Such constructed things - they have only an elusive reality - as the Chinese mind or the Greek spirit have always been with us; they are at the source of a great deal that goes into the making of individual cultures, nations, traditions, and peoples. But in the modern world considerably greater attention has generally been given to such identities than was ever given in early historical periods, when the world was larger, more amorphous, less globalized. Today a fantastic emphasis is placed upon a politics of national identity, and to a very great degree, this emphasis is the result of the imperial experience. For when the great modern Western imperial expansion took place all across the world, beginning in the late eigtheenth century, it accentuated the interaction between the identity of the French or the English and that of the colonized native peoples. And this mostly antagonistic interaction gave rise to a separation between people as members of homogenous races and exclusive nations that was and still is one of the characteristics of what can be called the epistemology of imperialism. At its core is the supremely stubborn thesis
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4.5.4 Edward W. Said: from Secular Criticism Literary criticism is practiced today in four major forms. One is the practical criticism to be found in book reviewing and literary journalism. Second is academic literary history, which is a descendant of such nineteenth-century specialties as classical scholarship, philology, and cultural history. Third is literary appreciation and interpretation, principally academic but, unlike the other two, not confined to professionals and regularly appearing authors. Appreciation is what is taught and performed by teachers of literature in the university and its beneficiaries in a literal sense are all those millions of people who have learned in a classroom how to read a poem, how to enjoy the complexity of a metaphysical conceit, how to think of literature and figurative language as having characteristics that are unique and not reducible to a simple moral or political message. And the fourth form is literary theory, a relatively new subject. It appeared as an eye-catching topic for academic and popular discussion in the United States later than it did in Europe: people like Walter Benjamin and the young Georg Lukacs, for instance, did their theoretical work in the early years of this century, and they wrote in a known, if not universally uncontested, idiom. American literary theory, despite the pioneering studies of Kenneth Burke well before World War Two, came of age only in the 1970s, and that because of an observably deliberate attention to prior European models (structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction).... Now the prevailing situation of criticism is such that the four forms represent in each instance specialization (although literary theory is a bit eccentric) and a very precise division of intellectual labour. Moreover, it is supposed that literature and the humanities exist generally within the culture (our culture, as it is sometimes known), that the culture is
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4.5.5 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from The Signifying Monkey (1988) The Trope of the Talking Book I THE LITERATURE of the slave, published in English between 1760 and 1865, is the most obvious site to excavate the origins of the AfroAmerican literary tradition. Whether our definition of tradition is based on the rather narrow lines of race or nationality of authors, upon shared themes and narrated stances, or upon repeated and revised tropes, it is to
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4.5.6 Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: from From the Seen to the Told Canon-Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition THE WESTERN CRITICAL TRADITION has a canon, as the Western literary tradition does, I once thought it our most important geature to master the canon of criticism, to imitate and apply it, but I now believe
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5.3 Harold Bloom: from Bloom and Doom Harold Bloom writes in The Western Canon that he hopes his book does not turn out to be an elegy. Yet Bloom, 64, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York University, now doubts that literary studies will survive. The elegiac tone creeps into both his book and his conversation - only to chased off by his indignation. [...] Does literature have a social function? I am very unhappy with current attempts throughout the universities of the Western world by a group I have called the school of resentment to put arts, and literature in particular, in the service of social change. The utility of literature is to teach us not how to talk to others, but how to talk to ourselves.And the function of the critic is to make one aware both of the sorrows and of the very occasional and rather perilous glories of what it means to be condemned to talk to oneself. A proper use of Shakespeare
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5.5 E. D. Hirsch Jr.: from Faulty perspectives The main intellectual (and emotional) sanction for dogmatic skepticism in present-day literary theory is its assumption that all knowledge is relative. This cognitive atheism, as I call it, is based mainly on the idea that everybody sees literature from his own angle of vision, and responds emotionally to literature through his own system of values and associations. Individualized in this way, cognitive atheism is straightforward subjectivism. But other closely related forms in literary theory and practice are cultural relativism, historical relativism, and methodological relativism. All exhibit the same structure; all of them make truth and reality relative to a spiritual perspective. That this doctrine of critical relativity should itself be the single doctrine exempt from an otherwise universal skepticism rarely strikes its adherents as a damaging inconsistency, or even a curious paradox. Tough-minded cognitive atheism usually tends to be an emotional given rather than a developed system. But if mere inconsistency is no bar to dogmatic skepticism in literary theory, one might hope nonetheless for a conversion to agnosticism if it could be shown that the doctrine of cognitive relativity is based on premises that are empirically wrong. I. The metaphor of perspective
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would be empty if it assumed that human nature remained everywhere the same. Uncritical dogma in either direction deserves to be called a fallacy. It is not, of course, a logical fallacy, only an offence against experience and common sense. The first historical fallacy on my list of three I call the fallacy of the inscrutable past, since under it, one regards persons of the past in the way Englishmen in novels used to regard inscrutable Orientals. Literary historians of this style infer from the past a state of mind so different from our own that its texts can be understood only by an initiated few, from whom an act of historical sympathy is required to understand a distant era that seems to be populated by beings who might have come from Mars. [] Theorists like Gadamer97, for instance, or like Barthes, rightly object to the cultural narcosis induced by such reconstructions of the past.98 But as an antidote they recommend that we vitalize the inscrutable texts of the past by distorting them to our own perspective. In other words, they accept the fallacy of the inscrutable past as the premise on which they base their skeptical counterproposal. It is far better to distort the past in an interesting and relevant way than to distort and deaden it under the pretense of historical reconstruction. [] My second fallacy of historicism is the fallacy of the homogeneous past. Obviously, it is often accompanied by the fallacy of the inscrutable past, as in the case of Snell, who seems to assert that all the Greeks of Homers day lacked a concept of a unified human self. Under this fallacy, everybody who composed texts in the Elizabethan age, or the Romantic Age, or the Periclean Age shared in each case a common perspective imposed by their shared culture. Literary historians who write on this premise are content to apply it in the following sort of syllogism: Medieval Man believed in alchemy. Chaucer was a Medieval Man. Chaucer believed in alchemy. []
97 Hans-Georg Gadamer, German philosopher, author of Truth and Method (1960). 98 H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tbingen, 1960), esp. p. 290-324, and Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris 1960).
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been attacking, forgets that the distance between one historical period and another is a very small step in comparison to the huge metaphysical gap we must leap to understand the perspective of another person in any time or place. III. What is an approach? Diltheys psychological model for our potential ability to understand the past is persuasive and balanced. But Dilthey himself did not always manage to preserve this balance in his writings. It is mainly to him that we owe the word Weltanschauung, that is, the spiritual perspective of a person or a culture. In the domain of literary criticism, the critics Weltanschauung is sometimes called his approach, a term first used in this perspectival sense in the twentieth century. The critics interpretation of literature depends on his approach. What the scholar discovers depends on his approach. The term implies a methodological prspectivism. Dilthey tells the story of a nightmare that visited him sometime after he had begun to use the term Weltanschauung. As a guest in a friends house, he had seen assigned a bed near a reproduction of Raphaels School of Athens, and as he slept he dreamt that the picture had come to life. All the famous thinkers of antiquity began to rearrange themselves in group according to their Weltanschauungen. Slowly into the dream composition came later thinkers: Kant, Schiller, Carlyle, Ranke, Guizot each of whom was drawn to one of the groups that had formed around Plato or Heraclitus or Archimedes. Wandering back and forth among the groups were other thinkers who tried to mediate between them, but without success. In fact, the groups only moved farther and farther apart, until they could communicate only among themselves. The thinkers had become isolated in their separate approaches to reality. Then Dilthey awoke from his dream, which he interpreted as follows: No man can see any reality steadily and see it whole. Each approach is partial and incommensurate with other approaches. To contemplate all the aspects
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of science and mathematics into their richer, more complex domains of cultural experience. Conscious of his debt to Kant, Dilthey conceived his theoretical work on interpretation as part of a larger program which he called the Critique of Historical Reason. [] Kant postulated a universal structure in human subjectivity which constitutes experience, and which thereby guarantees the possibility of scientific knowledge. Dilthey and others postulated that, beyond this universal subjectivity, there exists a cultural subjectivity, structured by further categories which are analogously constitutive of all cultural experience. Since Dilthey and his fellow theorists were intimately aware that, under this conception, verbal meaning is entirely relative to cultural subjectivity, it may be instructive to ask more particularly how they managed to eschew the skeptical conclusions of Diltheys nightmare. The problem is certainly a grave one. If all interpretation is constituted by the interpreters own cultural categories, how can he possibly understand meanings that are constituted by different cultural categories? Diltheys answer was straightforward and perfectly within the sponsoring Kantian tradition. We can understand culturally alien meanings because we are able to adopt culturally alien categories. Admittedly, we can understand Racine only through those alien categories that are constitutive of his meaning - only through his perspective. Yet we can adopt his categories; for cultural subjectivity is not an epistemological ultimate, comparable to Kants universal system of categories. Cultural subjectivity is not innate, but acquired; it derives from a potential, present in every man, that is capable of sponsoring an indefinite number of culturally conditioned categorial systems. It is within the capacity of every individual to imagine himself other than he is, to realize in himself another human or cultural possibility. [] The skeptical perspectivist does better, therefore, if he retreats to the more adequate premises of the Kantian argument. This is his most powerful line of defense, and from it he can argue quite correctly that my building can be quite different from my friends even if we trade places and view it from a an identical physical perspective. My building is not a mere physical given but an object constituted by my own special
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104 Ch. Balley, Linguistique gnrale at liguistique franaise (Bern, 1944), p. 37. See also P. F. Strawson, Intention and Convention in Speech Acts, Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 439-60.
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