Amanda Literary Worlds

Looking (and not looking) at Velazquez' Las Meninas
Literary Worlds
English Extension 1
HORNSBY GIRLS’, 2021
HornsbyNotes on Literary Worlds
Literary Worlds ....................................................................................................................................... 3

The Common Module ......................................................................................................................... 3
Rubric.............................................................................................................................................. 3
Unpacking the Rubric ................................................................................................................. 4
Assessment ...................................................................................................................................... 5
Internal Assessment .................................................................................................................... 5
External Assessment ................................................................................................................... 5
Possible Forms of Assessment .................................................................................................... 6
Critical Response .................................................................................................................... 6
Creative Response and Reflection .......................................................................................... 6
Creative Response ................................................................................................................... 6
Hermeneutics – Mapping Literary Worlds ................................................................................. 7
Critical Reading ...................................................................................................................... 7
Extracts from David H Richter (ed), The Critical Tradition, ‘Introduction’ ...................... 7
Extracts from Dani Cavallaro, Critical and Cultural Theory, Chapter 4 ‘Representation’
.......................................................................................................................................... 15
Knowledge ............................................................................................................................ 20
Skills ..................................................................................................................................... 20
What makes literature work? ........................................................................................................ 21
The text itself?........................................................................................................................... 22
Critical Reading .................................................................................................................... 23
Extract from Terry Eagleton, Literature, ‘Introduction’ ................................................... 23
Extract from Daniel Chandler, An Introduction to Genre Theory .................................... 25
Extract from Roland Barthes, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ 27
Extract from Tzvetan Todorov The Poetics of Prose, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’
.......................................................................................................................................... 29
Knowledge ............................................................................................................................ 32
Skills ..................................................................................................................................... 32
The author? ............................................................................................................................... 33
Extract from M A R Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, ‘The Beautiful, the
Sublime, and the Moral’.................................................................................................... 34
Extract from Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry......................................................... 36
Extract from Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘In Defence of Poetry’ ............................................. 39
Extract from T S Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ .......................................... 42
Extract from W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ ..................... 44
Extract from Susan Sontag, ‘On style’ .............................................................................. 45
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Extract from Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ ................................................ 47

Knowledge ............................................................................................................................ 50
Skills ..................................................................................................................................... 50
The Reader ................................................................................................................................ 51
Extract from Terry Eagleton, Literature, ‘Introduction’ ................................................... 52
Extract from Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’ .... 55
Extract from Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ ................................................. 59
Stanley Fish, ‘How to Recognize a Poem When You See One’ ....................................... 61
Knowledge ............................................................................................................................ 70
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Literary Worlds
The Common Module
Rubric
English Extension 1 Common Module: Literary Worlds
In this module students explore, investigate, experiment with and evaluate the ways texts represent and
illuminate the complexity of individual and collective lives in literary worlds. Students evaluate how
ideas and ways of thinking are shaped by personal, social, historical and cultural contexts. They extend
their understanding of the ways that texts contribute to their awareness of the diversity of ideas, attitudes
and perspectives evident in texts.
Students explore, analyse and critically evaluate textual representations of the experiences of others,
including notions of identity, voice and points of view; and how values are presented and reflected in
texts. They deepen their understanding of how texts construct private, public and imaginary worlds that
can explore new horizons and offer new insights.
Students consider how personal, social, historical and cultural context influence how texts are valued
and how context influences their responses to these diverse literary worlds. They appraise their own
values, assumptions and dispositions as they develop further understanding of how texts make meaning.
In their study of literary worlds students experiment with critical and creative compositions that explore
how language features and forms are crafted to express complex ideas and emotions, motivations,
attitudes, experiences and values. These compositions may be realised in various forms, modes and
media.
Each elective in this module involves the study of three texts from the prescribed list, with at least two
being print texts. Students explore, analyse and critically evaluate a range of other texts that construct
private, public and imaginary worlds.
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Unpacking the Rubric

• In this module students explore, investigate, experiment with and evaluate
o the ways texts represent and illuminate the complexity of individual and collective lives
in literary worlds
o how ideas and ways of thinking are shaped by personal, social, historical and cultural
contexts
o the ways that texts contribute to their awareness of the diversity of ideas, attitudes and
perspectives evident in texts
• Students explore, analyse and critically evaluate
o textual representations of the experiences of others, including notions of
▪ identity
▪ voice
▪ points of view
o how values are presented and reflected in texts
o how texts construct
▪ private worlds that can explore new horizons and offer new insights
▪ public worlds that can explore new horizons and offer new insights
▪ imaginary worlds that can explore new horizons and offer new insights
• Students consider
o how personal, social, historical and cultural context influence how texts are valued
o how context influences their responses to these diverse literary worlds.
• They appraise their own values, assumptions and dispositions as they develop further
understanding of how texts make meaning.
• Students experiment with
o critical and creative compositions in various forms, modes and media that explore
▪ how language features and forms are crafted to express complex ideas and
emotions, motivations, attitudes, experiences and values.
• Each elective in this module involves the study of three texts from the prescribed list, with at
least two being print texts. Students explore, analyse and critically evaluate a range of other
texts that construct private, public and imaginary worlds.
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Assessment
Internal Assessment
The Common Module is assessed internally twice throughout the course.
The first Literary Worlds assessment is in Term 4 - it will take the form of one of the assessment types
described in the ‘Possible Forms of Assessment’ section of this booklet.
The second Literary Worlds assessment is Section 1 of the Extension 1 Trial HSC. Again, the scope of
possible questions is detailed in a later section.
Hornsby Girls’ Extension 1 Assessment Schedule:
English Extension 1 Year 12 Assessment Schedule

Term 4 2020 – Term 3 2021
Task number Task 1 Task 2 Task 3
Common Module Elective Trial HSC
Nature of tasks Writing Task Writing Task Common Module

Elective
Timing Week 9 Term 4 Week 6 Term 2 Weeks 3-5 Term 3
EE12-1, EE12-2, EE12-3, EE12-1, EE12-3, EE12-4, EE12-1, EE12-2, EE12-3

Outcomes assessed EE12-5 EE12-5
EE12-4, EE12-5
Component Weighting %
Knowledge and understanding

of complex texts and of how 17.5 17.5 15 50
and why they are valued
Skills in complex analysis,

sustained composition and 17.5 17.5 15 50
independent investigation
Total % 35 35 30 100
External Assessment
The HSC examination is comprised of two sections. Section 1 assesses the Common Module, Literary
Worlds. Section 2 assesses the elective chosen for study. The examination is two hours in length plus
ten minutes reading time. Each section is of equal weighting.
The Trial HSC replicates the timing and weighting of the HSC examination.
Half of all marks, external and internal, are derived from assessment of the Common Module.
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Possible Forms of Assessment

We will consider the possible forms of examination in detail later in the course. For now, it is sufficient
to know that NESA has given three examples of the types of questions that may be asked in Section 1
(the section that examines the common module) of the HSC examination. These are a critical response
a combination of creative and critical reflection, and a creative response.
Critical Response
Example A. Students may be required to respond to more than one stimulus.
Use Text 1 and Text 2 to answer this question (in the example, Text 1 and Text 2 are by the same author.
Text 1 is a speech by an author about their writing and Text 2 is an extract from that author’s writing).
Evaluate how effectively, in the light of the Text 1, the author invites the reader into the world of the
novel in the opening of Text 2.
Your response should draw on your knowledge and understanding of the module Literary Worlds.
Creative Response and Reflection
Example B. Example B requires both a creative and a critical response. This question consists of two
parts. Students may approach the creative writing component in a variety of ways, including writing an
opening, an extract or a significant fragment of imaginative work.
In the example, students are given an extract and asked to write a creative response to the extract, then
a reflection explaining their creative decisions and conception of literary worlds.
Creative Response
Example C. Students may be asked to write a creative response to a stimulus. In the example, the
stimulus is a nonfiction extract about literary worlds.
Reflect on Text 1 and, in a sustained piece of imaginative writing, create a literary world that attunes
and sensitises your readers to a significant aspect of the world around them.
Your response should draw on your knowledge and understanding of the module Literary Worlds.
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Hermeneutics – Mapping Literary Worlds

Critical Reading
Extracts from David H Richter (ed), The Critical Tradition, ‘Introduction’
“Everybody . . . would be willing to admit, as a general proposition, that the critical faculty is
lower than the inventive. But is it true that criticism is really, in itself, a baneful and injurious
employment?” Mathew Arnold, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864)
“What if criticism is a science as well as an art?” Northrop Frye, The Function of Criticism at
the Present Time (1949)
In the Socratic dialogues of the early fourth
century B.C.E., Plato raised sceptical questions
about the value of art and literature that have
provoked responses from artists and
philosophers from Aristotle's day to our own. In
striving to rescue poetry from the exile to which
Socrates had condemned it, the defenders of
literature have had to recast the questions Plato
answered with such assurance. We are still
asking the same questions today: What is the
nature of the work of art? What are its sources in
the artist, in the literary scene, in the society for
which it is produced? What are its properties,
uses, powers, and value? How is the nature of Plato and Aristotle in Raphael's The School of Athens
literature circumscribed by the properties of
language itself, by the gender of the writer or the reader, by the intrinsic limitations of the human mind?
What are literature's effects on individuals and on communities? Questions like these remain at the heart
of the critical tradition. They have inspired an ongoing conversation that is continually modified by new
voices from different cultural matrices, which join in with other critical languages, other norms, other
views of the world.
The discussion that follows is intended as a guide to the two key problems of theoretical discourse:
synthesis and analysis. The first is aimed at understanding the relationships of the great variety of critical
theories to each other, drawing maps of the critical terrain, elucidating the various ways our ideas about
the nature of literature and the tasks of criticism have been organized. Learning this terrain is the surest
way to take one's own bearings and find one's own voice. The second is aimed at understanding how to
take critical discourse apart, how to unpack the theoretical assumptions that lie underneath the surface
– which, as we shall see, is something one can do best when already provided with a map.
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Mapping Theories about Literary Worlds

M. H. Abrams and the Traditional Classification
In his influential treatise on romantic views of art, The Mirror and the Lamp
(1953), the literary historian M. H. Abrams distinguished among four
different types of literary theories, and the map he drew of these distinctions
is still valuable as a place to start thinking about the history of criticism.
Historically, the first type
In this module students explore,
focused on the
investigate, experiment with and
relationship between the
evaluate the ways texts represent and
outside world and the
illuminate the complexity of individual
work of art. These
M H Abrams theories posited that and collective lives in literary worlds.
poetry could best be
understood as an imitation, a representation, a copy of the physical world.
The second type emphasized the relationship between the (Students) extend their
work of art and its audience – either how the literary work understanding of the ways that
should be formed to please and instruct its audience, or
texts contribute to their awareness
what that audience should be like in order to appreciate
of the diversity of ideas, attitudes
literature correctly. These theories held that to attain its
and perspectives evident in texts.
proper effect, the poem must be shaped by both the poet's
innate talent and the roles of art. Such theories, most
popular during the later classical period, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, began to decline toward
the end of the eighteenth century.
The third type stressed the relationship between the work of art and the artist, particularly the special
faculties of mind and soul that the artist brings to the act of creation. These theories proliferated during
the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries.
The fourth type, which developed around the beginning of the twentieth century, played down the
connections of the work of art with the exterior world, the audience, and the artist. These formal theories
stressed the purely aesthetic relationship between the parts of a work of literature, analysing its "themes"
or "motifs" as if a literary text were a form of classical music or an abstract painting, and strove for a
quasi-scientific objectivity. Such theories probably prevail today, since thousands of teachers and
scholars who might deny allegiance to any theory actually adhere to formalist principles. In their explicit
claims to possessing the highest truth about literature, however, formal theories now face a great deal
of competition.
Figure 1 M H Abrams conception of Literary Worlds
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An Interpretation of Abrams' Map
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Mimesis - Differences within Theoretical Orientations

Plato's view of art derives from a complicated metaphysics
how ideas and ways of thinking are
and a relatively simple notion of imitation. Imitation, for
Plato, is the creation of an eidolon. The artist makes an shaped by personal, social, historical
"image" – a degraded copy – of the external world, which is and cultural contexts
analogous to the image formed in a mirror (it lasts longer
than a mirror image, but, not being eternal, the difference is not significant). Plato's worldview is
idealist, which means that he takes the material world, the world of the senses, to be a copy of an eternal
world of Ideas. Works of art, in their turn, are copies of material things, and hence copies of copies. For
Plato, art is therefore an activity inferior to artisanship (the making of useful objects), first, because art
copies rather than creates a material object, and second, because an artist needs only to know the
appearances of things, not their real nature. Plato also worried that imitation might weaken the
individual spirit by arousing passion and corrupt the body politic through its distance from the truth.
Six centuries later, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus developed a mimetic theory of art that
generally conformed with that of Plato but drew vastly different conclusions about the value of art. In
the idealism of Plotinus, although imitation is still basically copying, the artist imitates not the material
world but the Ideas themselves. A sculptor carving a statue of Zeus makes not a marble copy of a flesh-
and- blood man but a representation of what Power and Majesty might be like if those concepts could
become visible. The Idea of Beauty resides within the artist, shaping his conceptions as it shapes all
beauty in nature. For Plotinus, the artist is superior to the artisan because Beauty, the Idea informing
the artist's craft, is higher than Utility, which informs that of the artisan.
Whereas Plotinus accepted Plato's metaphysics and his notion of imitation, Plato's pupil Aristotle
fundamentally disagreed with both. A materialist who did not believe in an eternal world of Ideas,
Aristotle saw everything as subject to process, growth, and change. Poets, by imitating the process by
which one state of affairs metamorphoses into another, capture in language the general principles of
human action, which are among the most important things
one can know. Nor is imitation merely copying: The poet, in Students explore, analyse and
imitating human action, purifies it of the dross of the critically evaluate textual
accidental and the incidental, unifies it into a plot, beautifies representations of the experiences
it with expressive language, and moulds it into a concrete of others, including notions of
whole with the capacity to command the emotions. Those
identity, voice and points of view;
feelings, aroused and guided by a complex imitation, can
and how values are presented and
cleanse rather than weaken the individual, and can serve the
reflected in texts.
state rather than harm it, by draining off passions and
frustrations that might lead to political instability.
Just as mimetic thinkers could agree that art was primarily a matter of imitation but differ about what
the world was like, what aspect of that world the artists imitated, and what sort of process imitation
actually was, so rhetorical theorists also had their differences about the ends and means of artistic
production. The main question for them was how to construct a work of art so that it would affect an
audience properly. Horace, one of the earliest and most influential of the rhetorical theorists, thought
that poems should "either delight, or instruct, or if possible accomplish both ends at once," but later
critics subtly redrew his specifications. For moralists like Dante or Samuel Johnson, the more significant
purpose was instruction, delight being merely a means to that didactic end. Sir Philip Sidney and John
Dryden gave delight a more equal role. Although many theorists took "delight" and "instruction" as
general and indivisible qualities to be sought in poetry, others elaborately classified the arts according
to the varieties of pleasure and benefit that should reside in each.
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And for which audience should the poet write? Horace's

Students consider how personal,
audience is apparently limited to the upper classes – the
senatores and equites of the early Roman Empire; what the social, historical and cultural context
middle-class sellers of beans care about is not the concern influence how texts are valued and
of the aristocratic writer. Sidney assumes a universal how context influences their
contemporary audience, but there too the universe may be responses to these diverse literary
implicitly restricted to gentlemen – indeed, perhaps even worlds. They appraise their own
English gentlemen, whom Sidney thinks provincial relative values, assumptions and
to those in Italy, even though they may be models of dispositions as they develop further
cultivation relative to those of Ireland and Scotland. understanding of how texts make
Dryden's debaters in An Essay of Dramatic Poesy posit meaning.
national audiences with specific national characteristics,
not a strange move for a piece written during the
Restoration, when King Charles and his court had arrived from a long exile in France. And in Samuel
Johnson's analysis, Shakespeare's greatness inheres in his ability to affect people of other countries and
much later eras. In the eighteenth century, when the question of taste had become an important one in
literary theory, Horace' s problem, the adaptation of work to audience, had, in effect, been inverted. For
critics like David Hume, the most important issue was not how poems should be shaped to please
audiences but why some members of the audience were better adapted to appreciate the arts than others.
(This is an issue that is not likely to come up until the audience for art has become split between different
classes that have been educated in different ways.)
In similar fashion, expressive theorists concurred that art manifested the artist's sensibility even as they
disputed the source of that sensibility. Many nineteenth century Romantics agreed that the key faculty
was the imagination – although they differed sharply on how that faculty worked. Later expressive
theorists found the source of poetry in the artist's unconscious mind. For one group of psychological
critics, the followers of Sigmund Freud, a poem, like a dream, was the imagined fulfillment of an
individual artist's unconscious wish; for another group, the followers of Carl Gustav Jung, all art
evinced archetypal imagery common to the entire human race. For critics like Northrop Frye, the artist
expresses the "dream of mankind," which is contained not in the collective unconscious but in a literary
tradition that speaks through us all. For sociohistorical critics, followers of Karl Marx or Hippolyte
Taine, artists inadvertently expressed the ideologies of their times, conveying their understanding of the
world in ways determined by their position within the class struggle and their moment in history.
In the twentieth century, formalists have differed about both
what sort of form should be sought and where it could be Students consider how personal,
found. The New Critics discovered form in a dialectical social, historical and cultural context
thrust and counterthrust of themes; neo-Aristotelians in a influence how texts are valued and
complex link- age of plot, language, technique, and purpose; how context influences their
and structuralists and semioticians in repeated patterns of responses to these diverse literary
language. Just as in the eighteenth century, there is a split worlds. They appraise their own
between those critics investigating the various principles of values, assumptions and
form within literature and those exploring the reader's dispositions as they develop further
capacity to discover form or to supply it when it is not to be understanding of how texts make
found. These variations and developments within major meaning.
critical orientations seem to embody the behaviour of
biological organisms that proliferate to fill up a new
ecological niche. Once a mode like expressive criticism had become established, it was almost
inevitable that every aspect of the poet's psyche, conscious and unconscious, would be held up to
scrutiny as a source of the creative spirit. A more difficult question is why changes in critical orientation
occur – why mimetic criticism gave way to rhetorical or rhetorical to expressive.
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Such epochs seem to be analogous to scientific revolutions, described by Thomas Kuhn in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Over one or two generations, the previous "paradigm," a vast
structure of assumptions, principles, and methods, gives way and is replaced by another for a variety of
reasons – new facts that need explaining, new theories that cannot be reconciled with the present
paradigm, a scientific community that has lost intellectual cohesion over its basic principles. The causes
of such "revolutions" in critical tradition, where Kuhn's model is less exact, might include the creation
of new literary works and styles; shifts in the canon (the informal list of the literary works that are held
to be significant); developments in the other arts, in philosophy, and in other humanistic disciplines;
and changes in politics and society.
Changes in Theoretical Paradigms
The revolution from rhetorical to expressive criticism may
. . . have been partly the result of social change. The Students consider how personal,
reading public grew enormously in the eighteenth century social, historical and cultural context
as formerly illiterate classes became avid consumers of influence how texts are valued and
literature. The new cadres of less-educated readers made how context influences their
taste an issue in criticism as it had never been before. As responses to these diverse literary
theorists investigating taste examined the inner experience worlds.
of readers, they found that the faculties behind good taste,
the capacities that made ideal readers – delicate
imagination, good sense, wide experience – were the same as those that made the best poets. Creation
and appreciation were more closely allied than one might have supposed, for the audience passively re-
enacted what the poets had actively created. Poetic creativity was therefore a refined but not a
mysterious process: It could be investigated and understood.
The twentieth-century shift from expressive to formal criticism was not a total revolution: Biographical,
psychological, sociological, and myth criticism continued to develop alongside the several varieties of
formalism. But in a sense, formalism grew out of the exhaustion of expressive criticism. Literature,
once thought to grow organically from the artistic imagination, which, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(p. 319) said, was "coexistent with the conscious will," was increasingly seen as deriving from forces
beyond the artist's control (milieu, class, unconscious drives, the collective unconscious). The poet
appeared to be less an agent and more a catalyst in the act of creation, while at the same time, poetry,
like music, painting, and sculpture, became increasingly abstract. And in the demotic twentieth century,
audience reaction has seemed an even less plausible guide to art than in the eighteenth. The eighteenth-
century split between refined and popular art, which had been partially repaired during the Victorian
era, re-emerged in the r89os to become an ongoing fixture of twentieth-century culture.
As a result, criticism was left with almost nowhere to go. With the principle of imitation stymied by the
vogue of abstraction, the fashion of the impersonal artist nullifying the romantic appeal to expression,
and the fragmented and unreliable audience undermining rhetorical criticism, the only avenue left was
an appeal to pure fo1m. These developments seem to have been felt all over Europe and America after
World War I, and they culminated in a variety of formalist movements: Russian formalism,
structuralism, the New Criticism, neo-Aristotelianism. Another factor, exterior to art and criticism, was
the development of the modern university, within which departments of literature, structured like those
of the natural and social sciences, may have sought for a comparably "objective" and "scientific" mode
of literary study, which the varieties of formalism could supply.
During the most recent revolution, which began in the years since Abrams drew up his map, many
literary theorists have viewed literature as the free play of signifiers. In this view, words – the signifiers
– no longer have an innocent connection to their meanings – the signified; and the relation of language
and meaning is not transparent. Instead of testifying to the truth and beauty of the world, instead of
expressing the personality (or impersonality) of the author, instead of delighting and instructing its
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audience, instead of presenting an abstract aesthetic form, language now expresses the circularity of
meaning, contemplates the paradoxes of its own making. The text is no longer the poem isolated in the
center of the diagram. Rather textuality – the condition of inscription within language – is implicated
in all our knowledge of the world, of reading, of expression. History is no longer the inferior of poetry,
as Aristotle thought, nor its master, as Karl Marx suggested. History cannot even be opposed to poetry,
for both of them are equally texts; they may be seen as discursive practices, modes of power/knowledge
that need to be analysed using the rules of New Historicism and cultural studies. Thus we have returned
full circle to the position of the Sophists, for whom everything was ruled by the art of rhetoric. A key
question for the future of theory is whether the key topics of textuality, language, and discursive practice
will remain at the centre of critical study, or whether some new revolution may not lurk over the horizon.
Other Maps of the Critical Terrain
Abrams' s map of the spectrum of critical theory is useful as far as it goes. But maps have a way of
reducing the number of dimensions, inevitably distorting even as they clarify the actual landscape. The
points of Abrams's compass should not be taken as natural, self-evident, or unquestionable. Like any
other theoretical construct, Abrams's map includes areas of blindness as well as insight, and its
limitations derive from its unstated assumptions. By differentiating between "rhetorical" and
"objective" theories, for example, Abrams seems to presume that the text can have a meaning apart
from what it means to its readers. In practice, however, many formalist critics have relied heavily for
their analysis on what an "ideal" or "potential'' reader would make of the text. Nor can Abrams's map
comfortably accommodate forms of criticism (Marxist and otherwise) that view the text, author, and
reader as determined, collectively or separately, by the processes of history. (Abrams may think that an
author expresses his or her age, but while this will do for some forms of historical criticism, it will not
adequately characterize neo-Marxist criticism, New Historicism, or cultural studies.)
One way of transcending the
limitations of the Abrams map is by
formulating other maps whose
limitations are different. The Abrams
map groups literary theories in terms
of the critical principle on which each
rests. Both R. S. Crane and Norman
Friedman have, at different times,
constructed a different sort of map to
clarify the interrelationships of
critical tasks and the variety of
approaches to a given literary work.
The form of these maps is not a group
of adjacent territories but a series of
concentric circles, with the work
itself in the middle.
This map is one way of visualizing
the relationship of various modes of
literary interpretation to one another.
Its bias is its suggestion that a poem
is determined most intimately by the
requirements of form, both its own
organic shape and the institutional
shapes that culture bequeaths to art.
An Alternative View of Literary Worlds
13
To analyze we need to synthesize, but of course to read the texts that we will later synthesize we need
to have analyzed them. It sounds like a vicious circle, where in order to understand anything we need
first to have understood everything.
There is a name for this vicious circle – "the hermeneutic circle" – but it's actually a virtuous circle, or
perhaps a spiral. We enter it every time we interpret any text, including the words you are reading right
now, words that have countless meanings, individually and in combination – ask any dictionary. But as
we grope for the over – all intention, however crudely, we remove ambiguities, which in tum allows us
to refine our sense of the whole, which eliminates more ambiguities, and so on.
And that power is what is working for us here, as our unpacking not only reveals the sense of criticism
but helps us revise our maps of the terrain. Our prior sense of what Bakhtin is all about allows us to
understand Jay Ladin, but reading Jay Ladin has also expanded and corrected our sense of what Bakhtin
is all about. Unpacking criticism thus gives us a sense of the possible reach of theory that we couldn't
have gotten from reading theory alone.
Literary Metaphor
14
Extracts from Dani Cavallaro, Critical and Cultural Theory, Chapter 4 ‘Representation’
Represent – to exhibit the image of: to use, or serve, as a symbol for: to exhibit, depict,
personate, show an image of, by imitative art: to act: to be a substitute, agent, deputy, member
of parliament, or the like, for: to correspond or be in some way equivalent or analogous to: to
serve as a sample of: to present earnestly to mind: to give out, make to appear, allege (that).
Representation – act, state, or fact of representing or being represented: that which represents:
an image: picture: dramatic performance: a mental image: a presentation of a view of facts or
arguments: a petition, remonstrance, expostulation: assumption of succession by an heir: a
body of representatives. (Chambers Twentieth-Century Dictionary)
These definitions are not intended to supply a prescriptive or exhaustive model of analysis. However,
they seem to provide an appropriate starting point for the present discussion because they highlight the
complexity and multi-accentuality of the issue of representation. Indeed, the main aim of this chapter
is to show that the study of representation must take into account a wide variety of cultural phenomena,
philosophical perspectives and ideological programmes. Why have human beings operating in disparate
cultural and historical contexts felt the need to represent themselves and their environments? Why do
certain cultures openly admit to the constructed and fictional status of their representations and others
seek to pass them off as natural and real? What do different forms of representation tell us about the
societies, communities and individuals that produce them? Who are representations addressed to or
aimed at?
In 1953, M. H. Abrams summed up the development of
Western attitudes to representation by recourse to the
metaphors of the mirror and the lamp. The 'mirror'
encapsulates the notion that the mind reflects the external
world (mimetic approach). The 'lamp' embodies the idea
that the mind radiates its own light on the objects it
perceives (anti-mimetic approach). According to Abrams,
the mirror-model was predominant up to the eighteenth
century when, with the advent of Romanticism, the lamp-
model began to gain momentum (Abrams l 953). The
image of the mind as an essentially passive, or at best
reproductive, apparatus has been gradually replaced by
that of the mind as an active and creative power. Today,
many important developments in critical and cultural
theory are associated with a crisis in representation.
Words, sentences, thoughts and pictures are all
representations suggesting a relation between two things
(e.g. 'x represents y'). But the existence of a relation does
not automatically entail the existence of the thing
represented (for example, a representation of the birth of
Venus does not guarantee that such an event ever really
took place). It would therefore be misleading to conceive
Book Cover
of representations as reflections of a pre-existing reality.
Furthermore, neither pictures nor sentences nor thoughts represent intrinsically: as Wittgenstein has
observed, a picture of a man walking uphill could also be a picture of a man sliding backwards downhill.
There is nothing inherent in the picture which makes the first reading more valid than the second. A
representation only represents by virtue of being interpreted and ultimately represents anything it is
capable of suggesting – that is, it has an indefinite number of potential representational contents. The
concept of representation is also intimately connected with that of repetition: it could be argued that
15
words, for example, are representations which only acquire meaning to the extent that they may be
repeated – namely, used again in different contexts. When we speak or write, we never create anything
from scratch: rather, we reiterate what was already there, we literally re-present. Moreover, no
representation is immediately and unequivocally connected with an underlying reality. The idea that we
may be able to paint faithful pictures of the world is becoming more and more obsolete. This applies to
visual artists and fiction writers, historians and geographers, linguists and anthropologists, sociologists
and psychologists, film-makers and designers. Emphasis is increasingly placed on the sense of
uncertainty that pervades our perception of things and, concomitantly, our articulation of what we
perceive through texts (both verbal and non-verbal). The world cannot be represented accurately and
objectively for the reason that it is not a given but rather an effect of how it is perceived from various
viewpoints. Much recent criticism has claimed that the real as such is unattainable. We only experience
it through the mediation of texts, images and stories. These never mirror reality transparently and
neutrally but actually represent it according to the codes and conventions of specific societies.
Such codes and conventions are not always consciously employed. Indeed, much of the time we resort
to them semi-consciously or even unconsciously. This is because they are so deeply ingrained in our
culture's fabric that we have forgotten their constructed (and largely arbitrary) status. That is, we adopt
them as though they were natural tools rather than the products of cultural decisions. The representations
created through the application of those codes and conventions are accordingly naturalized – i.e. their
status as constructs is effaced. In the case of Western cultures, the process of naturalization has been
assiduously sustained by their dominant mode of representation, namely realism. Realist techniques
conceal the process of production of a text or image so as to encourage us to believe that representations
reflect the world, that they offer a keyhole view on a solid reality shared and recognized by each member
of the same culture. Such techniques do not simply pursue an aesthetic programme. In fact, they serve
eminently ideological purposes. Representations are a vital means of supporting a culture's ideology:
the world view invented by that culture to legitimate itself and to discipline its subjects. When realism
represses the artificiality of representations, its main objective is to assert itself as an objective and
transparent depiction of the world in the name of ideological stability.
The principal message it aims at conveying is that reality is unchanging, for denying that something
was made is to deny that it could be unmade. This is what Norman Bryson terms the 'natural attitude':
a suppression of 'history', of the possibility of change, and of the particular cultural contexts in which
representations are both produced and consumed. This attitude must be challenged, for 'the real ought
to be understood not as a transcendent and immutable given, but as a production brought about by
human activity working within specific cultural constraints'. At the same time, it is necessary to question
the assumption that 'visual experience' is 'universal and transhistorical', for the ways in which we
perceive representations are as historically contingent as the representations themselves. A recognition
of the immanently cultural and social character of all representations simultaneously entails a
recognition of the historical situation of the viewing subject. As soon as we acknowledge that
representations are cultural fabrications, the realist ethos is radically undermined. We gradually realize
that if an image can be constructed, it can also be taken apart into its constituent elements and that each
of these elements can offer precious insights into our culture's ideology and, in particular, into the
connection between the control of representation and political power.
Thus, the central concern of any critical assessment of representations should consist of denaturalizing
both the cultural images and the institutionalized responses to such images that surround us at all times.
This entails questioning many of the concepts and symbols which we are generally invited to take for
granted as timeless, objective and a matter of common sense. Any cultural product can be approached
as a form of representation offering vital clues to a culture's belief systems, its interpretations of reality
and its ways of translating both factual and fictional situations into images. Any representation, in turn,
can be approached as a text, or a system of signs. How such a text signifies is as important as what it
signifies. Moreover, although a specific representational form may seem to be defined by techniques,
16
devices and aims intrinsic to that form alone, we must increasingly be aware of the crucial role played
by interdisciplinarity and cross-fertilization in the production of cultural images and in the
dissemination of their ideological messages.
It is also important to bear in mind that the collusion of representation and ideology is not just a
contemporary phenomenon, for representation has been intertwined with ideology throughout human
history. In the domain of artistic representation, a good example is supplied by the law of perspective.
From a technical point of view, perspective refers to the devices used to create the illusion of three-
dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. However, it is not merely a technical phenomenon, for it
actually carries momentous ideological connotations. Perspectivalism aims at codifying representation
and vision according to strict mathematical rules by establishing the notion of one correct way of seeing
and concurrently promoting the myth of the spectator as the master of vision. The beholder is defined
as a privileged geometrical point in space upon which, as long as s/he occupies an ideal viewing
position, all of an image's lines converge. Thus, perspective centres representation on the eye of the
viewer, metaphorically enabling him or her to play God.
The interplay of representation and ideology described in relation to perspectivalism is further borne
out by the fact that all cultures and traditions of thought have inevitably relied upon symbolic and
mythical constructs which people have (implicitly or explicitly) been required to assimilate and
internalize. Even cultural trends and philosophical movements apparently committed to dismantling
those constructs have themselves depended on imaginary representations for the sake of advancing
particular ideological agendas. This is one of the main arguments pursued by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Here the two critics propose that although the
objective of the Enlightenment was, ostensibly, to liberate people from irrational fears and illusions
nurtured by mythology and its representations, it ultimately proved analogous to myth itself. The
Enlightenment aspired to transcend explanations of life and the universe which it regarded as fictitious,
in order to attain to putatively deeper and higher truths. However, it was itself caught up in a chain of
ideological mystifications. No sooner is an explanation provided than it solidifies into a myth, a
dogmatic belief that people are expected to leave unexamined. Classical mythology claimed superiority
over magic by presenting itself as a coherent and universal representation of the workings of the cosmos
and of the relationship between the human and the divine. Yet, its somewhat dogmatic claims to truth
and universality made it vulnerable to criticism.
Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the supplanting of magic by Classical mythology constitutes an
attempt to suppress the plurality and fluidity of primitive belief systems and rituals, in the pursuit of
unifying representations. The Enlightenment, in turn, claims to supersede mythology by dissolving
illusory superstitions in the name of scientific knowledge. However, the cult of reason turns out to be
yet another myth, yet another totalizing endeavour. All mythologies, whether stemming from religion
or from science, ultimately amount to the repression of human diversity, to the subjugation of variety
to a dominant value: unity (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986). ltalo Calvino's evaluation of myth echoes
the view expounded by Adorno and Horkheimer: 'Myth tends to crystallize instantly, to fall into set
patterns, to pass from the phase of myth-making into that of ritual, and hence out of the hands of the
narrator into those of the tribal institutions responsible for the preservation and celebration of myths'
(Calvino 1987: 23). In contemporary Western cultures, the crystallizing of myth into 'set patterns' is
aided by fashion and the media. The representations they incessantly churn out for mass consumption
are mythological in the sense that they are laden with symbolic connotations. The myths they embody
are not, by and large, allowed to grow or expand in new directions. In fact, they are frozen into signifiers
of identity and status by the 'tribal institutions' of corporational economies which, while promoting
decentralization (most notably through the Internet), simultaneously display an addiction to unity.
The coalescence of representation and ideology results in legion myths that translate identities into
images. Ultimately, therefore, what the study of representation highlights is the mediated character of
17
cultural existence. What might once have been regarded as lived experience is increasingly transferred
to the realm of images. However, as Guy Debord stresses, images should not be dismissed as a flimsy
and superficial spectacle for they actually embody social relations. At the same time, they ask us to
reflect upon the relationship between what we perceive and what we know. The concept of
representation has invariably played an important part in debates concerned with this issue – an issue
that has engaged philosophers, cultural theorists, linguists and critics for as long as language and
interpretation have been under scrutiny. Let us look at some of the problems raised by those debates.
Representation has been traditionally associated with concepts of resemblance and imitation. Objects
are supposed to have two images: their actual images and the mental images of them produced by
various individuals. The latter can be thought of in various ways: e.g. as intellectual abstractions, as
ideals or as fantasies. Various questions arise from this approach. What enables us to differentiate
amongst different representations? How can we account for their reality? Is a conscious representation
somehow more real than a dream or hallucination? If so, why? Is there any reliable way of knowing
what other people's mental representations (both conscious and unconscious) are like? Could we ever
assume that everybody represents the world according to analogous criteria? If so, on what basis? These
and related questions have led to two main positions. On the one hand, there are critics who endeavour
to distinguish reality from illusion, reliable representations from figments of the imagination, in the
belief that a solid and authentic reality lies behind its representations. On the other hand, there are critics
who maintain that no representation is ultimately truer or more dependable than any other and that even
illusions have their own reality. Illusions, indeed, may make reality more real by exhibiting familiar
situations in distorted guises and thus compelling us to reassess their conventional meanings. The
ambivalent status of representations, thrown into relief by these contrasting attitudes, is comparable to
the ambiguity surrounding the concept of 'imagination'. The Greek term for 'imagination', phantasia
(from phos = light), posits the imagination as an enlightening faculty through which we form images of
the world and from which thoughts, opinions and memories proceed. Yet, this same faculty is also
associated with idle musings, fictions and visions and accordingly branded as unreliable.
The empiricist approach to representation proposes a distinction between the ways in which we
interpret nature (i.e. infer the laws of nature from the facts that it presents to our senses and to our
minds) and the ways in which we speculate about nature (i.e. form subjective images of it).
Speculations, according to this model, are misleading: they are fictions, more or less biased and
selective, that misrepresent nature. When speculation comes into play, the mind does not reflect genuine
facts but rather acts as a disfiguring mirror. The idea of the mind as a distorting medium has been
advocated by several disciplines. Not all of them, however, have followed the empiricist line and
dismissed subjective mental representations as practically useless. In fact, what is often emphasized is
not the notion that the mind should be reformed so as not to misrepresent reality but rather the idea that
misrepresentation is integral to human existence. Important developments in the study of subjectivity
carried out in the areas of psychoanalysis and theories of ideology, for instance, have stressed that
misrepresentation plays a central role in the construction of personal and collective identities: what we
think we are is often a product of how our culture misrepresents us and of how we misrepresent
ourselves. (These concepts play an important part in Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories and in
Louis Althusser's writings on ideology.)
Most importantly, misrepresentation is an inevitable component of perception. We always relate to
reality, however mediated it may be, as physical bodies. This entails that our sense impressions are
bound to be affected by our material circumstances. Our individual faculties and our surroundings
impact on what and how we experience, and on how we represent what we experience to our minds and
possibly to others. Given that both our faculties and our environment are subject to contingent variations
(to do with factors as disparate as light and climate, moods and dispositions), it would be preposterous
to assume that we could represent the world uniformly and objectively. Objectivity is a myth designed
to make us believe that there is one proper way of seeing and representing reality – and therefore a
18
means of marginalizing all that is different, other,

alternative. However, since we cannot dodge the fact that
we always perceive and represent the world through our
bodies and other people's bodies, we cannot, as a result,
deny that our perceptions and representations inevitably
entail an element of distortion. This should not, however,
be a cause for panic, since intense and unexpected kinds
of pleasure can be gleaned from the experience of
distortion. Just consider the pleasure yielded by the
utterly imaginary and impermanent, yet tantalizing, Literary Metaphor
forms one can perceive in clouds, in the pattern of a
carpet or in the flickering of candle-flame. Furthermore, the media through which we perceive reality
tend to misrepresent the objects of our perception. Looking through the water of a pool at the tiles at its
bottom, we do not perceive the tiles as they really are but rather as distorted by ripples of sunlight,
reflections and refractions. Likewise, a landscape observed through a stained-glass window will
inevitably be modified by the colours and shapes of the window's pattern. Distortion and
misrepresentation are not secondary or accidental aspects of human experience. We do not perceive the
Literary Metaphor
world as it is but rather as mediated by various filters and channels: forms of language and forms of
interpretation that do not mirror the world but actually construct it, thereby perpetuating or challenging
its ideologies.
19
Knowledge
Define these terms:
1. Mimesis
2. Formalism
3. New Criticism
4. The literary canon
5. Representation
6. Realism
7. Hermeneutics
Briefly explain the contribution of these thinkers to ideas about literary worlds:
1. Aristotle
2. Plato
3. Sigmund Freud
4. Theodor Adorno
Choose two of these thinkers and briefly explain their contribution to ideas about literary worlds:
1. Socrates 7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
2. Sir Philip Sidney 8. Karl Marx
3. John Dryden 9. Michael Bakhtin
4. David Hume 10. Wittgenstein
5. Carl Gustav Jung 11. Guy Debord
6. Thomas Kuhn
Skills
1. In what way are the mirror and the lamp metaphorical representations of what Abrams saw as
opposing approaches to understanding literary worlds? (The passage referring to the mirror has
been underlined for you. You will need to read the excerpts from Richter to find the meaning
of the lamp).
2. Using Abrams’ map of literary worlds and the alternatives provided in this booklet, make your
own map of literary worlds. If your teacher allows, you can do this in groups. Now, think about
the modules you have studied over the last year in English Advanced and Extension. Each of
these modules was designed to explore an aspect of literary worlds – can you place each module
on the map you have made?
3. Dani Cavallaro finishes her chapter on ‘Representation’ with two analogies about the way we
perceive texts and the way we perceive the world through texts. What are these analogies?
4. Imagine you have been given a choice of stimulus and asked to write a creative response that
engaged the reader in a controlled narrative that also explored your understanding of the
construction an interpretation of literary worlds. The stimuli are Figure 6, Figure 8 and Figure
9. Brainstorm some short story ideas – the story needs a protagonist, an antagonist, a setting,
and an orientation, complication and resolution.
5. How is Borges’ The Library of Babel a fictional expression of ideas about literary worlds?
Which types of literary theory do you think he is referring to in his story? Give examples of
these theories and give direct evidence from Borges’ story. Your response to this question
should be about 500 words long.
20
What makes literature work?

In the next three sections we will consider three of Abram’s four categories. That is, we will consider
the extent to which it is the text itself, the composer, or the reader that gives meaning to a text.
When we have finished considering these three categories, we will consider the importance of context
to shaping the form of a text, the ideas of its author, the responses of its readers and meaning within it.
This will allow us to progress to our elective, where we consider texts in context.
The Gutenberg Press
21
The text itself?

To what extent is the meaning of a text determined by the text itself? The idea that meaning resides
within the text is hardly new. For instance, Aristotle held that the structure of a tragedy determined its
meaning, and that a deviation from this structure diminished it. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, Russian Formalists argued that textual form was more important than any specific meaning –
that there were only a few narratives that existed, and that they sustained themselves by adapting to new
contexts and used whatever material was at hand (language, themes, authors and readers) to sustain
themselves. If you have studied the hero’s journey, you will be aware that some narrative structures
persist, no matter the mode of their representation – this was Joseph Campbell’s argument when he
published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949. Scholars such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Northrop
Frye and Roland Barthes have also made influential arguments about the persistence of structure and
archetype in texts. When you ask yourself whether something is a comedy or a melodrama, a romance
or revenge tragedy, you automatically consider the rules that govern texts and the way the text itself
defines its own meaning; this is true even when the genre is mixed, and when the meaning is obscure.
If you consider that text also means ‘language’,
rather than a specific narrative or genre, then it is
logical to conclude that meaning must ultimately
reside in the text that is our language. This was what
Ludwig Wittgenstein was thinking about when he
declared that “The limits of my language are the
limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words
for.” (Actually, he said “Die Grenzen meiner
Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt”, which
complicates things.) Some, such as Jacques Derrida,
have gone so far as to argue that textual meaning is
the only meaning, that “there is no outside-text”.
Derrida is often misquoted as having said that “there
is nothing outside the text”, which is a pity, as this
confuses the central point of an argument that is
already confusing. Derrida was arguing that
language – all semiotics – is a system of signs whose
meanings shift. Derrida was developing the ideas of
Ferdinand de Saussure, an influential Belgian
linguist who had argued that language is arbitrary (as
in, words – signifiers - and signs are made up – they
don’t have a magical relationship with the things –
the signified – they describe) and differential (that is,
you know what something means by seeing how it is
different to other things). Derrida pointed out that
you don’t really get to the end of a chain of
signification – that signs just point other signs that a
sign is never exactly what it seeks to signify.
Linguistics Meme Demanded by the English Booklet Genre
Julia Kristeva, in a body of work that is, arguably,
more technically intricate than Derrida’s, took the work of the formalists and developed it into a post-
structuralist theory of intertextuality that is the foundation of postmodernism.
22
Critical Reading
Extract from Terry Eagleton, Literature, ‘Introduction’
If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called
literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?
There have been various attempts to define literature. You
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a can define it, for example, as 'imaginative' writing in the
British literary theorist, critic, and sense of fiction - writing which is not literally true. But even
public intellectual. He is currently the briefest reflection on what people commonly include
Distinguished Professor of English under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do.
Literature at Lancaster University. Seventeenth-century English literature includes
Eagleton has published over forty Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also
books, but remains best known for stretches to the essays of Francis Bacon, the sermons of John
Literary Theory: An Introduction, Donne, Bunyan's spiritual autobiography and whatever it
which has sold over 750,000 copies. was that Sir Thomas Browne wrote. It might even at a pinch
(Wikipedia) (I reckon that’s where be taken to encompass Hobbes's Leviathan or Clarendon's
you’d have looked, anyway.) History of the Rebellion. French seventeenth-century
literature contains, along with Corneille and Racine, La
Rochefoucauld's maxims, Bossuet's funeral speeches,
Boileau's treatise on poetry, Madame de Sevigne's letters to her daughter and the philosophy of
Descartes and Pascal. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb (though not
Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
A distinction between 'fact' and 'fiction', then, seems unlikely to get us very far, not least because the
distinction itself is often a questionable one. It has been argued, for instance, that our own opposition
between 'historical' and 'artistic' truth does not apply at all to the early Icelandic sagas. In the English
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word 'novel' seems to have been used about both true
and fictional events, and even news reports hardly to be considered factual. Novels and news reports
were neither clearly factual nor clearly fictional: our own sharp discriminations between these
categories simply did not apply. Gibbon no doubt thought that he was writing the historical truth, and
so perhaps did the authors of Genesis, but they are now read as 'fact' by some and 'fiction' by others;
Newman certainly thought his theological meditations were true but they are now for many readers
'literature'. Moreover, if 'literature' includes much 'factual' writing, it also excludes quite a lot of fiction.
Superman comic and Mills and Boon novels are fictional but not generally regarded as literature, and
certainly not as Literature. If literature is 'creative' or 'imaginative' writing, does this imply that history,
philosophy and natural science are uncreative and unimaginative?
Perhaps one needs a different kind of
approach altogether. Perhaps literature is
definable not according to whether it is
fictional or 'imaginative', but because it
uses language in peculiar ways. On this
theory, literature is a kind of writing
which, in the words of the Russian critic
Roman Jakobson, represents an ‘organized violence commited on ordinary speech’. Literature
transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you
approach me at a bus stop and murmur ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' then I am instantly
aware that I am in the presence of the literary. I know this because the texture, rhythm and resonance
of your words are in excess of their abstractable meaning – or, as the linguists might more technically
put it, there is a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds. Your language draws attention
to itself, flaunts its material being, as statements like 'Don't you know the drivers are on strike?' do not.
23
This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the

Russian formalists, who included in their ranks Viktor Shklovsky,
Roman Jakobson, Osip Brik, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eichenbaum and
Boris Tomashevsky. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years
before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and flourished throughout the
1920s, until they were effectively silenced by Stalinism. A militant,
polemical group of critics, they rejected the quasi-mystical symbolist
doctrines which had influenced literary criticism before them, and in a
practical, scientific spirit shifted attention to the material reality of the
literary text itself. Criticism should dissociate art from mystery and
concern itself with how literary texts actually worked: literature was not
pseudo-religion or psychology or sociology but a particular
organization of language. It had its own specific laws, structures and
Roman Jakobson
devices, which were to be studied in themselves rather than reduced to
something else. The literary work was neither a vehicle for ideas, a
reflection of social reality nor the incarnation of some transcendental truth: it was a material fact, whose
functioning could be analysed rather as one could examine a machine. It was made of words, not of
objects or feelings, and it was a mistake to see it as the expression of an author's mind. Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin, Osip Brik once airily remarked, would have been written even if Pushkin had not lived.
Formalism was essentially the application of linguistics to the study of literature; and because the
linguistics in question were of a formal kind, concerned with the structures of language rather than with
what one might actually say, the Formalists passed over the analysis of literary 'content' (where one
might always be tempted into psychology or sociology) for the study of literary form. Far from seeing
form as the expression of content, they stood the relationship on its head: content was merely the
'motivation' of form, an occasion or convenience for a particular kind of formal exercise. Don Quixote
is not 'about' the character of that name: the character is just a device for holding together different kinds
of narrative technique. Animal Farm for the Formalists would not be an allegory of Stalinism; on the
contrary, Stalinism would simply provide a useful opportunity for the construction of an allegory. It
was this perverse insistence which won for the Formalists their derogatory name from their antagonists;
and though they did not deny that art had a relation to social reality indeed some of them were closely
associated with the Bolsheviks - they provocatively claimed that this relation was not the critic's
business.
24
Extract from Daniel Chandler, An Introduction to Genre Theory

1. The problem of definition
A number of perennial doubts plague genre theory.
Daniel Chandler is a British visual Are genres really 'out there' in the world, or are they
semiotician based since 2001 at the merely the constructions of analysts? Is there a finite
Department of Theatre, Film and Television taxonomy of genres or are they in principle infinite?
Studies at Aberystwyth University, where Are genres timeless Platonic essences or ephemeral,
he has taught since 1989. (Wikipedia) time-bound entities? Are genres culture- bound or
transcultural?... Should genre analysis be descriptive
or proscriptive? (Stam 2000, 14)
The word genre comes from the French (and originally Latin) word for 'kind' or 'class'. The term is
widely used in rhetoric, literary theory, media theory, and more recently linguistics, to refer to a
distinctive type of 'text'. Robert Allen notes that 'for most of its 2,000 years, genre study has been
primarily nominological and typological in function. That is to say, it has taken as its principal task the
division of the world of literature into types and the naming of those types - much as the botanist divides
the realm of flora into varieties of plants' (Allen 1989, 44). As will be seen, however, the analogy with
biological classification into genus and species misleadingly suggests a 'scientific' process.
Since classical times literary works have been
classified as belonging to general types which
were variously defined. In literature the broadest
division is between poetry, prose and drama,
within which there are further divisions, such as
tragedy and comedy within the category of
drama. Shakespeare referred satirically to
classifications such as 'tragedy, comedy, history,
pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-
pastoral...' (Hamlet II ii). In The Anatomy of
Criticism the formalist literary theorist Northrop
Frye (1957) presented certain universal genres Northrop Frye
and modes as the key to organizing the entire
literary corpus. Contemporary media genres tend to relate more to specific forms than to the universals
of tragedy and comedy. Nowadays, films are routinely classified (e.g. in television listings magazines)
as 'thrillers', 'west- erns' and so on - genres with which every adult in modern society is familiar. So too
with television genres such as 'game shows' and 'sitcoms'. While we have names for countless genres
in many media, some theorists have argued that there are also many genres (and sub-genres) for which
we have no names (Fowler 1989, 216; Wales 1989, 206). Carolyn Miller suggests that 'the number of
genres in any society... depends on the complexity and diversity of society' (Miller 1984, in Freedman
& Medway 1994a, 36).
The classification and hierarchical taxonomy of genres is not a neutral and 'objective' procedure. There
are no undisputed 'maps' of the system of genres within any medium (though literature may perhaps
lay some claim to a loose consensus). Furthermore, there is often considerable theoretical disagreement
about the definition of specific genres. 'A genre is ultimately an abstract conception rather than
something that exists empirically in the world,' notes Jane Feuer (1992, 144). One theorist's genre may
be another's sub-genre or even super-genre (and indeed what is technique, style, mode, formula or
thematic grouping to one may be treated as a genre by another). Themes, at least, seem inadequate as a
basis for defining genres since, as David Bordwell notes, 'any theme may appear in any genre'
(Bordwell 1989, 147). He asks: 'Are animation and documentary films genres or modes? Is the filmed
25
play or comedy performance a genre? If tragedy and comedy are genres, perhaps then domestic tragedy
or slapstick is a formula'. In passing, he offers a useful inventory of categories used in film criticism,
many of which have been ac- corded the status of genres by various commentators:
Grouping by period or country (American films of the 1930s), by director or star or producer or writer
or studio, by technical process (Cinemascope films), by cycle (the
'fallen women' films), by series (the 007 movies), by style (German
Expressionism), by structure (narrative), by ideology (Reaganite
cinema), by venue ('drive-in movies'), by purpose (home movies), by
audience ('teenpix'), by subject or theme (family film, paranoid-
politics movies). (Bordwell 1989, 148)
. . . How we define a genre depends on our purposes; the adequacy of
our definition in terms of social science at least must surely be related
to the light that the exploration sheds on the phenomenon. For in-
stance (and this is a key concern of mine), if we are studying the way
in which genre frames the reader's interpretation of a text then we
would do well to focus on how readers identify genres rather than on
theoretical distinctions. Defining genres may be problematic, but even
if theorists were to abandon the concept, in everyday life people would
Spy Fiction - Genre or Subgenre?
continue to categorize texts. John Swales does note that 'a discourse
community's nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight'
(Swales 1990, 54), though like many academic theorists he later adds
that such genre names 'typically need further validation'. Some genre names would be likely to be more
widely-used than others: it would be interesting to investigate the areas of popular consensus and
dissensus in relation to the everyday labeling of mass media genres. For Robert Hodge and Gunther
Kress, 'genres only exist in so far as a social group declares and enforces the rules that constitute them'
(Hodge & Kress 1988, 7), though it is debatable to what extent most of us would be able to formulate
explicit 'rules' for the textual genres we use routinely: much of our genre knowledge is likely to be tacit.
In relation to film, Andrew Tudor argued that genre is 'what we collectively believe it to be' (though
this begs the question about who 'we' are). Robert Allen comments wryly that 'Tudor even hints that in
order to establish what audiences expect a western to be like we might have to ask them' (Allen 1989,
47). Swales also alludes to people having 'reper- toires of genres' (Swales 1990, 58), which I would
argue would also be likely to repay investigation. However, as David Buckingham notes, 'there has
hardly been any empirical research on the ways in which real audiences might understand genre, or use
this understanding in making sense of specific texts' (Buckingham 1993, 137).
26
Extract from Roland Barthes, ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’
THERE ARE COUNTLESS FORMS of narrative in the
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres,
literary theorist, philosopher, critic, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all
and semiotician. Barthes' ideas substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's
explored a diverse range of fields stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated
and he influenced the development language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving,
of many schools of theory, including gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances;
structuralism, semiotics, social narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short
theory, design theory, stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama],
anthropology, and post- comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by
structuralism. (Wikipedia) Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies,
local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety
of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all
societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been
anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often
those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: 1 narrative
remains largely unconcerned with good or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international,
transhistorical, transcultural. Are we to infer from such universality that narrative is insignificant?
Is it so common that we can say nothing about it, except for a modest description of a few highly
particularized species, as literary history sometimes does? Indeed how are we to control such variety,
how are we to justify our right to distinguish or recognize them? How can we tell the novel from the
short story, the tale from the myth, suspense drama from tragedy (it has been done a thousand times)
without reference to a common model? Any critical attempt to describe even the most specific, the most
historically oriented narrative form implies such a model. It is, therefore, understandable that thinkers
as early as Aristotle should have concerned themselves with the study of narrative forms, and not have
abandoned all ambition to talk about them, giving as an excuse the fact that narrative is universal. And
it is normal that structuralism, in the early stages, should have made narrative a primary concern. For is
it not one of structuralism's main preoccupations to control the infinite variety of speech acts by
attempting to describe the language or langue from which they originate, and from which they can be
derived? Faced with an infinite number of narratives and the many standpoints from which they can be
considered (historical, psychological, sociological, ethnological, aesthetic., etc.), the analyst is roughly
in the same situation as Saussure, who was faced with desultory fragments of language, seeking to
extract, from the apparent anarchy of messages, a classifying principle and a central vantage point for
his description. To confine myself to the current period, the Russian formalists, Propp, and Levi-Strauss
have taught us to identify the following dilemma: either narrative is a random assemblage of events, in
which case one can only speak of it in terms of the narrator's (the author's) art, talent, or genius-all
mythical embodiments of chance; or else it shares with other narratives a common structure, open to
analysis, however delicate it is to formulate. There is a world of difference between the fortuitous, in i
most complex forms, and the simplest combinative or obligatory scheme: for no one can produce a
narrative without referring himself to an implicit system of units and rules.
Where then should we look for the structure of narrative? No doubt in the narratives themselves. All
the narratives? Many commentators, who admit the idea of a narrative structure, are nevertheless
reluctant to cut loose literary analysis from the model used in experimental sciences: they boldly insist
that one must apply a purely inductive method to the study of narrative and that the initial step must be
the study of all narratives within a genre, a period, a society, if one is to set up a general model. This
commonsense view is, nonetheless, a naive fallacy. Linguistics, which only has some three thousand
languages to contend with, failed in the attempt; wisely, it turned deductive, and from that day on,
incidentally, it found its proper footing and proceeded with giant steps, even managing to anticipate
facts which had not yet been discovered. What then are we to expect in the case of the analysis of
27
narrative, faced with millions of narrative acts? It is obviously committed to deductive procedures; it is
compelled to conceive, first, a hypothetical model of description (which American linguists call a
"theory"), and then to proceed gradually from that model down, towards the species, which at the same
time partake in and deviate from the model. It is only at the level of such conformities or discrepancies,
and equipped with a single tool of description, that the analyst can turn his attention once more to the
plurality of narrative acts, to their historical, geographical, and cultural diversity.
In order to describe and classify the infinite number of narratives, one needs then a "theory" (in the
pragmatic sense that we are here intending), and we must tum to the task of searching for one and
sketching it out. The working out of such a theory may be made much easier if we proceed from a model
that can provide the initial terms and principles. In the current state of research, it seems reasonable to
elect linguistics itself as a basic model for the structural analysis of narrative.
The Language of Narrative
1. Beyond the sentence
As everyone knows, linguistics stops at the sentence; it is the last unit that falls within its scope; for if
the sentence-being an order and not a sequence-is not reducible to the sum of its words, and constitutes
therefore an original unit, an enunciation, on the other hand, is nothing but the succession of the
sentences it contains. From the point of view of linguistics, there is nothing in discourse that is not
matched in the sentence. "The sentence," writes Martinet, "is the smallest segment that is perfectly and
systematically representative of discourse." 7 It follows that linguistics cannot conceivably adopt for its
object anything superior to the sentence, because beyond the sentence, all there can ever be is more
sentences: having described the flower, the botanist
cannot concern himself with describing the "bouquet.''
And yet it is obvious that discourse itself (as an
arrangement of sentences) is organized, and that,
through this organization, it is perceived as the message
of another "language," functioning at a higher level than
the language of linguistics: discourse has its units, its
rules, its "grammar!' Because it lies beyond the
sentence, and though consisting of nothing but
sentences, discourse must naturally be the object of a
second linguistics.
28
Extract from Tzvetan Todorov The Poetics of Prose, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’
Detective fiction cannot be subdivided into kinds. It merely offers historically
different forms.
– Boileau and Narcejac, Le Roman policier, 1964
The articulation of genres within detective fiction promises
Tzvetan Todorov was a Bulgarian-
to be relatively easy. But we must begin with the description
French historian, philosopher, of "kinds", which also means with their delimitation. We
structuralist literary critic, shall take as our point of departure the classic detective fic
sociologist and essayist and tion which reached its peak between the two world wars and
geologist. He was the author of is often called the whodunit. George Burton, the author of
many books and essays, which have many murder mysteries, explains to the narrator that "all
had a significant influence in detective fiction is based on two murders of which the first,
anthropology, sociology, semiotics, committed by the murderer, is merely the occasion for the
literary theory, intellectual history second, in which he is the victim of the pure and
and culture theory. (Wikipedia) unpunishable murderer, the detective", and that "the
narrative ... superimposes two temporal series: the days of
the investigation which begin with the crime, and the days
of the drama which lead up to it." At the base of the whodunit we find a duality, and it is this duality
which will guide our description. This novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and
the story of the investigation. In their purest form, these two stories have no point in common. Here are
the first lines of a "pure" whodunit:
a small green index-card on which is typed:
Odel, Margaret.
184 W. Seventy-first Street. Murder:
Strangled about
11 P.M'. Apartment robbed. Jewels stolen.
Body found by
Amy Gibson, maid. [S. S. Van Dine, The
"Canary" Murder Case]
The first story, that of the crime, ends before the
second begins. But what happens in the second? Not
much. The characters of this second story, the story of
the investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can
happen to them: a rule of the genre postulates the
detective's immunity. We cannot imagine Hercule
Poirot or Philo Vance threatened by some danger,
attacked, wounded, even killed. The hundred and fifty
pages which separate the discovery of the crime from
the revelation of the killer are devoted to a slow
apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after
lead. The whodunit thus tends toward a purely Figure 2 A Literary World
geometric architecture: Agatha Christie's Murder on
the Orient Express, for example, offers twelve suspects; the book consists of twelve chapters, and again
twelve interrogations, a prologue, and an epilogue (that is, the discovery of the crime and the discovery
of the killer).
29
This second story, the story of the investigation, thereby enjoys a particular status. It is no accident that
it is often told by a friend of the detective, who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book; the
second story consists, in fact, in explaining how this very book came to be written. The first story
ignores the book completely, that is, it never confesses its literary nature (no author of detective fiction
can permit himself to indicate directly the imaginary character of the story, as it happens in "literature").
On the other hand, the second story is not only supposed to take the reality of the book into account,
but it is precisely the story of that very book.
We might further characterize these two stories by saying that the first – the story of the crime – tells
"what really happened", whereas the second-the story of the investigation – explains "how the reader
(or the narrator) has come to know about it." But these definitions concern not only the two stories in
detective fiction, but also two aspects of every literary work which the Russian Formalists isolated forty
years ago. They distinguished, in fact, the fable (story) from the subject (plot) of a narrative: the story
is what has happened in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us. The first notion corresponds
to the reality evoked, to events similar to those which take place in our lives; the second, to the book
itself, to the narrative, to the literary devices the author employs. In the story, there is no in version in
time, actions follow their natural order; in the plot, the author can present results before their causes,
the end before the beginning. These two notions do not characterize two parts of the story or two
different works, but two aspects of one and the same work; they are two points of view about the same
thing. How does it happen then that detective fiction manages to make both of them present, to put them
side by side?
To explain this paradox, we must first recall the special status of the two stories. The first, that of the
crime, is in fact the story of an absence: its most accurate characteristic is that it cannot be immediately
present in the book. In other words, the narrator cannot transmit directly the conversations of the
characters who are implicated, nor describe their actions: to do so, he must necessarily employ the
intermediary of another (or the same) character who will report, in the second story, the words heard or
the actions observed. The status of the second story is, as we have seen, just as excessive; it is a story
which has no importance in itself, which serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of
the crime. Theoreticians of detective fiction have always agreed that style, in this type of literature, must
be perfectly transparent, imperceptible; the only requirement it obeys is to be simple, clear, direct. It
has even been attempted – significantly – to suppress this second story altogether. One publisher put
out real dossiers, consisting of police reports, interrogations, photographs, fingerprints, even locks of
hair; these "authentic" documents were to lead the reader to the discovery of the criminal (in case of
failure, a sealed. envelope, pasted on the last page, gave the answer to the puzzle: for example, the
judge's verdict).
We are concerned then in the whodunit with two stories of which one is absent but real, the other present
but insignificant. This presence and this absence explain the existence of the two in the continuity of
the narrative. The first involves so many conventions and literary devices (which are in fact the "plot"
aspects of the narrative) that the author cannot leave them un explained. These devices are, we may
note, of essentially two types, temporal inversions and individual "points of view": the tenor of each
piece of information is determined by the person who transmits it, no observation exists without an
observer; the author cannot, by definition, be omniscient as he was in the classical novel. The second
story then appears as a place where all these devices are justified and "naturalized": to give them a
"natural" quality, the author must explain that he is writing a book! And to keep this second story from
becoming opaque, from casting a useless shadow on the first, the style is to be kept neutral and plain,
to the point where it is rendered imperceptible.
One particularly dogmatic author of detective fiction, S. S. Van Dine, laid down, in 1928, twenty rules
to which any self-respecting author of detective fiction must conform. These rules have been frequently
reproduced since and frequently contested. Since we are not concerned with prescribing procedures for
30
the writer but with describing the genres of detective fiction, we may profitably consider these rules a
moment. In their original form, they are quite prolix and may be readily summarized by the eight
following points:
1. The novel must have at most one
detective and one criminal, and at
least one victim (a corpse).
2. The culprit must not be a professional
criminal, must not be the detective,
must kill for personal reasons.
3. Love has no place in detective fiction.
4. The culprit must have a certain
importance:
(a) in life: not be a butler or
a chambermaid.
(b) in the book: must be one
of the main characters.
5. Everything must be explained
rationally; the fantastic is not
admitted.
6. There is no place for descriptions nor
for psychological analyses.
7. With regard to information about the story, the following homology must be observed:
"author/reader = criminal/detective."
8. Banal situations and solutions must be avoided (Van Dine lists ten).
31
Knowledge
Define these terms:
1. The hero’s journey
2. Literature
3. Structuralism
4. Genre
5. Generic Conventions
6. Plot
1. Jacques Derrida
1. Roman Jakobson
2. Roland Barhtes
1. Northrop Frye
2. Ferdinand de Saussure
3. Tzvetan Todorov
Skills
1. Find a quotable quote from each of the critical readings, then rate them in order of ‘quotability’
(as in, how useful would they be to you if you were writing about the way text themselves
embody literary worlds?)
Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel
32
The author?
To what extent is the author responsible for the meaning of a text? Logically, it would seem that it is
the author that has the ideas, who synthesises the ideas into a narrative or a poem or a work of art – it
is the artist who chooses the form, surely! For the Romantics, it was the artist who accessed the sublime
and expressed it through their creative genius. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant held that it was
through this artistic genius that we could know the beauty of metaphysical truth. The literary critic
Mathew Arnold insisted that it was this genius that allowed us to have a common set of cultural values
expressed in canonical text that were held in universal esteem – this was the founding principal of
Liberal Humanism.
T S Eliot, although rejecting the Romantic’s celebration of the sublime and the heroic genius,
nevertheless saw literature as an achievement of ‘the individual talent’: the aspiring author had to
contend with, and find a place within, the literary canon. The literary theorist Harold Bloom extended
Eliot’s ideas and concluded that the artist was locked in an Oedipal struggle with his (the argument is
clearly gendered – we will return to this in the next section) artistic forebears.
Modern approaches tended to take texts more and more out of context and away from the author’s
intention. This was the argument of two young scholars who wrote an influential work of New Criticism
which insisted that the authors intention was a falsehood – the ‘intentional fallacy’.
In the 1960s, the outspoken publish intellectual, author and scholar sought to reassert the role of the
artist in an intellectual milieu that was about to proclaim the death of the author. Having insisted in her
essay ‘against interpretation’ that criticism dependent on art, she went on to argue that style counted for
more than the mood of the critic or the fickle taste of the responder.
In France, Helen Cixous sought to wrest writing – and the text – back from the capitalist machinery of
the patriarchy. She argued for in insurgency of écriture feminine, a revolution of women’s writing.
33
Critical Reading
Extract from M A R Habib, Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, ‘The Beautiful, the Sublime, and
the Moral’
(Immanuel) Kant says that the feeling for the sublime in
M. A. Rafey Habib is a scholar in the nature is a mental attunement similar to that which we
areas of literary criticism, theory, experience in moral feeling: reason exerts its dominance
and philosophy. He was born in over sensibility, as it does in the moral sphere. The feeling
India and grew up in England, where of sublimity in nature corresponds with a capacity of the
he received his doctorate from the mind to rise above obstacles of sense via moral principles.
University of Oxford. His is currently In fact, Kant suggests that a judgment about the sublime
Professor of English at Rutgers requires more aesthetic cultivation and moral disposition
than a judgment of beauty. Unlike Edmund’s Burke’s
University in the U.S. (Wikipedia)
empirical exposition of the beautiful and sublime, which can
demand only contingent assent from other people, Kant
urges that such a demand
must be based on an a
priori principle, not
merely in an empirical
fashion “by gathering
votes,” if it is to have
necessity and universal
validity. In judging
something sublime (or as
occasioning a feeling of
sublimity), our demand
that other people agree
with us is based on the
fact that we presuppose
moral feeling or a moral
capacity in them.
It is clear that the feeling
of sublimity has an
intrinsic connection with
moral feeling. As Kant
says, the pleasure we
experience in the
sublime is a pleasure
involved in reasoning
contemplation and has a
moral foundation, hence
this pleasure lays claim
to universal
participation. What of
beauty? Is there any
intrinsic affinity, asks
Kant, between a feeling
for beauty and moral
feeling? Kant insists that
only after a pure
aesthetic judgment of
34
taste has been made can any kind of interest – moral, empirical, intellectual – be attached to it. It is in
the social world that we connect these various interests with beauty. The urge to society is natural, says
Kant, and sociability is a mark of our humanity. He even talks of an “original contract” whereby our
humanity dictates a need for universal communication. When civilization reaches its peak, he says, such
communication becomes our most refined activity and even sensations are valued only insofar as we
can make them universally communicable. It is here, according to Kant, that our capacity for aesthetic
judgment provides a transition from sense enjoyment to moral feeling, showing that judgment is “a
mediating link in the chain of man’s a priori powers”.
Again, these insights of Kant were to prove vastly influential, leaving
their trace not only in the views of Romantic writers but also, however
indirectly, in the work of many literary figures of the late nineteenth
century. To take a direct interest in the beauty of nature, asserts Kant, is
always the “mark of a good soul.” If this interest is habitual, it indicates
a mental attunement favorable to moral feeling. Reason has an interest
that nature should display some harmony with our pleasure; hence we
cannot meditate on the beauty of nature without finding our moral
Immanuel Kant
interest aroused. Nature in its beauty exhibits itself as art, as if it were
intentionally designed according to a lawful arrangement, as
purposiveness without a purpose (CJ, 165–168). Kant even suggests that when we reflect on the form
of sensations we receive from nature, these forms “contain, as it were, a language in which nature speaks
to us and which seems to have a higher meaning” (CJ, 169). Such statements anticipate many comments
made by Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantics concerning the profound significance of nature,
a significance inexpressible by rational thought.
Kant’s views on art and genius also laid the foundation for much Romantic thought. And, for all his
endeavour to secure the realm of aesthetic judgment as an autonomous domain, his views on the
connections between art and society were to reverberate through many subsequent theories about the
social, educational, and moral functions of art. Kant initially defines art as “a production through
freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason” (CJ, 170). Like Aristotle, Kant
sees art as a productive or practical ability, as distinguished from the theoretical ability of science. He
also makes an important distinction between art and mere craft. Genuine art is free art, “it is play . . .
that is agreeable on its own account,” whereas craft is “mercenary” art or labour which attracts us only
through its product. Mechanical or mercenary art merely makes a possible object actual, whereas
aesthetic or free art intends directly to arouse a feeling of pleasure. If aesthetic art is merely agreeable,
it produces pleasure through the presentation of mere sensations; if it is fine art, it yields pleasure by
means of presentations that are ways of knowing
35
Extract from Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our
race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not
shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be question able, not a received tradition
which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the
supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry
the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its
emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its un
conscious poetry.
Let me be permitted to quote these words of my own, as
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) was uttering the thought which should, in my opinion, go with
an English poet and cultural critic us and govern us in all our study of poetry. In the present
who worked as an inspector of work it is the course of one great contributory stream to the
schools. He was the son of Thomas world-river of poetry that we are invited to follow. We are
Arnold, the famed headmaster of here invited to trace the stream of English poetry. But
Rugby School, and brother to both whether we set ourselves, as here, to follow only one of the
Tom Arnold, literary professor, and several streams that make the mighty river of poetry, or
William Delafield Arnold, novelist whether we seek to know them all, our governing thought
and colonial administrator. should be the same. We should conceive of poetry worthily,
(Wikipedia) and more highly than it has been the custom to conceive of
it. We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and
called to higher destinies, than those which in general men
have assigned to it hitherto. More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to
interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete;
and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. Science, I
say, will appear incomplete without it. For finely and truly does Wordsworth call poetry "the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science," and what is a countenance without
its expression? Again, Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry "the breath and finer spirit of all
knowledge": our religion, parading evidences such as those on which the popular mind relies now; our
philosophy, pluming itself on its reasonings about causation and finite and infinite being; what are they
but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge? The day will come when we shall wonder
at: ourselves for having trusted to them, for having taken them seriously; and the more we perceive their
hollowness, the more we shall prize "the breath and finer spirit of knowledge" offered to us by poetry.
But if we conceive thus highly of the destinies of poetry, we must also set our standard for poetry high,
since poetry, to be capable of fulfilling such high destinies, must be poetry of a high order of excellence.
We must accustom ourselves to a high standard and to a strict judgment. Sainte-Beuve relates that
Napoleon one day said, when somebody was spoken of in his presence as a charlatan: "Charlatan as
much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?" - "Yes," answers Sainte-Beuve, "in politics,
in the art of governing mankind, that is perhaps true. But in the order of thought, in art, the glory, the
eternal honour is that charlatanism shall find no entrance; herein lies the inviolableness of that noble
portion of man's being." It is admirably said, and let us hold fast to it. In poetry, which is thought and
art in one, it is the glory, the eternal honour, that charlatanism shall find no entrance; that this noble
sphere be kept inviolate and inviolable. Charlatanism is for confusing or obliterating the distinctions
between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half-true.
It is charlatanism, conscious or unconscious, whenever we confuse or obliterate these. And in poetry,
more than anywhere else, it is unpermissible to confuse or obliterate them. For in poetry the distinction
between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half sound, true and untrue or only half-true,
is of paramount importance. It is of paramount importance because of the high destinies of poetry. In
poetry, as a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth
and poetic beauty, the spirit of our race will find, we have said, as time goes on and as other helps fail,
36
its consolation and stay. But the consolation and

stay will be of power in proportion to the power of
the criticism of life. And the criticism of life will
be of power in proportion as the poetry conveying
it is excellent rather than inferior, sound rather than
unsound or half-sound, true rather than untrue or
half-true.
The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry
will be found to have a power of forming,
sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.
A clearer, deeper sense of the best in poetry, and of
the strength and joy to be drawn from it, is the most
precious benefit which we can gather from a poetical collection such as the present. And yet in the very
nature and conduct of such a collection there is inevitably something which tends to obscure in us the
consciousness of what our benefit should be, and to distract us from the pursuit of it. We should
therefore steadily set it before our minds at the outset, and should compel ourselves to revert constantly
to the thought of it as we proceed.
Yes; constantly, in reading poetry, a sense for the best, the really excellent, and of the strength and joy
to be drawn from it, should be present in our minds and should govern our estimate of what we read.
But this real estimate, the only true one, is liable to be superseded, if we are not watchful, by two other
kinds of estimate, the historic estimate and the personal estimate, both of which are fallacious. A poet
or a poem may count to us historically, they may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves, and they
may count to us really. They may count to us historically. The course of development of a nation's
language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting; and by regarding a poet's work as a stage in
this course of development we may easily bring ourselves to make it of more importance as poetry than
in itself it really is, we may come to use a language of quite exaggerated praise in criticizing it; in short,
to overrate it. So arises in our poetic judgments the fallacy caused by the estimate which we may call
historic. Then, again, a poet or a poem may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves. Our personal
affinities, likings, and circumstances have great power to sway our estimates of this or that poet's work,
and to make us attach more importance to it as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it
is, or has been, of high importance. Here also we overrate the object of our interest, and apply to it a
language of praise which is quite exaggerated. And thus we get the source of a second fallacy in our
poetic judgments - the fallacy caused by an estimate which we may call personal.
Everything depends on the reality of a poet's classic character. If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him;
if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of
the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical), then the great thing
for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference
between it and all work which has not the same high character. This is what is salutary, this is what is
formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry. Everything which interferes with
it, which hinders it, is injurious. True, we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes
blinded with superstition; we must perceive when his work comes short, when it drops out of the class
of the very best, and we must rate it, in such cases, at its proper value. But the use of this negative
criticism is not in itself, it is entirely in its enabling us to have a clearer sense and a deeper enjoyment
of what is truly excellent. To trace the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures of a genuine
classic, to acquaint oneself with his time and his life and his historical relationships, is mere literary
dilettantism unless it has that clear sense and deeper enjoyment for its end. It may be said that the more
we know about a classic the better we shall enjoy him; and, if we lived as long as Methuselah and had
all of us heads of perfect clearness and wills of perfect steadfastness, this might be true in fact as it is
plausible in theory. But the case here is much the same as the case with the Greek and Latin studies of
37
our schooldays. The elaborate philological groundwork which we require them to lay is in theory an
admirable preparation for appreciating the Greek and Latin authors worthily. The more thoroughly we
lay the groundwork, the better we shall be able, it may be said, to enjoy the authors. True, if time were
not so short, and schoolboys' wits not so soon tired and their power of attention exhausted; only, as it
is, the elaborate philological preparation goes on, but the authors are little known and less enjoyed. So
with the investigator of "historic origins" in poetry. He ought to enjoy the true classic all the better for
his investigations; he often is distracted from the enjoyment of the best, and with the less good he
overbusies himself, and is prone to over rate it in proportion to the trouble which it has cost him.
. . . Indeed there can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly
excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions
of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require
this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them,
when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or
absence of high
Only one thing we may add as to the substance
and matter of poetry, guiding ourselves by
Aristotle's profound observation that the
superiority of poetry over history consists in its
possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness
add, therefore, to what we have said, this: that the
substance and matter of the best poetry acquire
their special character from possessing, in an
eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may
add yet further, what is in itself evident, that to
the style and manner of the best poetry their Matthew Arnold - Liberal Humanist
special character, their accent, is given by their
diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we distinguish between the two characters,
the two accents, of superiority, yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The
superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable
from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are
closely related, and are instead fast proportion one to the other. So far as high poetic truth and
seriousness are wanting to a poet's matter and substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic
stamp of diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. In proportion as this high stamp of
diction and movement, again, is absent from a poet's style and manner, we shall find, also, that high
poetic truth and seriousness are absent from his substance and matter.
38
Extract from Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘In Defence of Poetry’

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the
was one of the major English former may be considered as mind contemplating the
Romantic poets, who is regarded by relations borne by one thought to another, however
some as among the finest lyric and produced, and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts
philosophical poets in the English so as to color them with its own light, and composing from
language, and one of the most them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing
influential. (Wikipedia) within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the
το ποιειν, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects
those forms which are common to universal nature and
existence itself; the other is the το λογιςειν, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations
of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical
representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already
known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole.
Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as
the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance.
Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be “the expression of the imagination”: and poetry is
connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal
impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Æolian lyre, which move
it by their motion to ever-changing melody. But there is a principle within the human being, and perhaps
within all sentient beings, which acts otherwise than in the lyre, and produces not melody alone, but
harmony, by an internal adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which
excite them.
. . . Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that
from which this highest delight results: but the diversity is not sufficiently marked, as that its gradations
should be sensible, except in those instances where the predominance of this faculty of approximation
to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its
cause) is very great. Those in whom it exists in excess are poets, in the most universal sense of the
word; and the pleasure resulting from the manner in which they express the influence of society or
nature upon their own minds, communicates itself to others, and gathers a sort of reduplication from
that community. Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended
relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become,
through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then
if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized,
language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations
are finely said by Lord Bacon to be “the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects
of the world” [“De Augment. Scient.,” cap. i, lib. iii—Shelley]—and he considers the faculty which
perceives them as the store-house of axioms common to all knowledge. In the infancy of society every
author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true
and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence
and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its
source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of
grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of
poetry.
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of
language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors
of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who
draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies
39
of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible
of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances
of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators,
or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds
intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be
ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the
fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can
foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition,
which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place
and number are not. The grammatical forms which express the moods of time, and the difference of
persons, and the distinction of place, are convertible with respect to the highest poetry without injuring
it as poetry; and the choruses of Aeschylus, and the book of Job, and Dante’s “Paradise” would afford,
more than any other writings, examples of this fact, if the limits of this essay did not forbid citation.
The creations of sculpture, painting, and music are illustrations still more decisive.
Language, color, form, and religious and civil habits of action, are all the instruments and materials of
poetry; they may be called poetry by that figure of speech which considers the effect as a synonym of
the cause. But poetry in a more restricted sense expresses those arrangements of language, and
especially metrical language, which are created by that imperial faculty, whose throne is curtained
within the invisible nature of man. And this springs from the nature itself of language, which is a more
direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various
and delicate combinations, than color, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control
of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the imagination, and
has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments, and conditions of art have relations
among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a
mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of
communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of
the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as
the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term;
as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of
legislators and founders of religions, so long as their institutions last, alone seems to exceed that of
poets in the restricted sense; but it can scarcely be a question, whether, if we deduct the celebrity which
their flattery of the gross opinions of the vulgar usually conciliates, together with that which belonged
to them in their higher character of poets, any excess will remain.
We have thus circumscribed the word poetry within the limits of that art which is the most familiar and
the most perfect expression of the faculty itself. It is necessary, however, to make the circle still
narrower, and to determine the distinction between measured and unmeasured language; for the popular
division into prose and verse is inadmissible in accurate philosophy.
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent,
and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of
the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets has ever affected a certain uniform
and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less
indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to
that peculiar order. Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that
you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language
into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—
and this is the burden of the curse of Babel.
40
. . . A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There is this difference between a
story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than
time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the
unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image
of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain
combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the
germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature.
Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which
should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of
the eternal truth which it contains. Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat
out the poetry of it. A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which
should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls open themselves to receive the
wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their
auditors are fully aware of the excellence of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner,
beyond and above consciousness; and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure
the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendor of their union. Even in modern times, no
living poet ever arrived at the fulness of his fame; the jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging
as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest
of the wise of many generations. A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own
solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician,
who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. The poems of Homer and his
contemporaries were the delight of infant Greece; they were the elements of that social system which
is the column upon which all succeeding civilization has reposed. Homer embodied the ideal perfection
of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an
ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship,
patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal
creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such
great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified
themselves with the objects of their admiration. Nor let it be objected that these characters are remote
from moral perfection, and that they can by no means be considered as edifying patterns for general
imitation. Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors; Revenge is
the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age: and Self-deceit is the veiled image of unknown
evil, before which luxury and satiety lie prostrate. But a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries
as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the
eternal proportions of their beauty. An epic or dramatic personage is understood to wear them around
his soul, as he may the ancient armor or the modern uniform around his body; whilst it is easy to
conceive a dress more graceful than either. The beauty of the internal nature cannot be so far concealed
by its accidental vesture, but that the spirit of its form shall communicate itself to the very disguise, and
indicate the shape it hides from the manner in which it is worn. A majestic form and graceful motions
will express themselves through the most barbarous and tasteless costume. Few poets of the highest
class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendor; and it is
doubtful whether the alloy of costume, habit, etc., be not necessary to temper this planetary music for
mortal ears.
41
Extract from T S Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

. . . No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning
Thomas Stearns Eliot OM, "one of alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation
the twentieth century's major of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value
poets", was also an essayist, him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison,
among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not
publisher, playwright, and literary
merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall
and social critic. Born in St. Louis,
conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens
Missouri to a prominent Boston
when a new work of art is created is something that happens
Brahmin family, he moved to simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The
England in 1914 at the age of 25 and existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves,
would settle, work, and marry which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really
there. (Wikipedia) new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist
after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order
must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward
the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved
this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the
past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is
aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.
I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead;
and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two
things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform
at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the
new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can
only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it
appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and many conform; but we are
hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take
the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private
admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible,
the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable
supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably
through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never
improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of
Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than
his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons
nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of
the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is
not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the
point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based
upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past
is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s
awareness of itself cannot show.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.”
Precisely, and they are that which we know.
42
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The
objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be
rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning
deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know
as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable
to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or
the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat
for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole
British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness
of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more
valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
. . . Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we
attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows,
we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the
enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. I have tried to point out the importance
of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as
a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of
poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature
poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being
necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected
medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
. . . It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the
poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of
people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry
is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it
discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary
ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.
Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is
neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration,
and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the
practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not
happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite
in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this
is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and
deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious
where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning
loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want
to escape from these things.
43
Extract from W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's
William Kurtz Wimsatt Jr. was an judgment has been challenged in a number of recent
American professor of English, discussions . . . But it seems doubtful if this claim and most
literary theorist, and critic. Wimsatt of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any
is often associated with the concept widespread questioning. . . There is hardly a problem of
of the intentional fallacy, which he literary criticism in which the critic's approach will not be
developed with Monroe Beardsley qualified by his view of "intention."
"Intention," as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he
intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. "In order to judge the
poet's performance, we must know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the author's mind.
Intention has obvious affinities for the author's attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made
him write.
We begin our discussion with a series of propositions summarized and abstracted to a degree where
they seem to us axiomatic, if not truistic.
1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has
remarked, come out of a head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a
poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard.
2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about in ten tion. H ow is he
to find out what the poet tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what
he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the
critic must go outside the poem-for evidence of an intention that did not be come effective in the poem.
"Only one caveat must be borne in mind," says an eminent intentionalist" in a moment when his theory
repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the mo ment of the creative act, that is to say, by the
art of the poem itself."
3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only
because an artifact works that we infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not mean but be."
A poem can be only through its meaning-since its medium is words-yet it is, simply is, in the sense that
we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant.' Poetry is a feat of style by which a
complex of meaning is handled all at once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or
implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and "bugs" from
machinery. In this respect poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if and only if
we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract than poetry.
4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a
personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is
dramatic the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how
universalzed). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic
speaker, and if to the author at all, only by a biographical act of inference.
5. If there is any sense in which an author, by revision, has better achieved his original intention,
it is only the very abstract, tautological, sense that he intended to write a better work and now has done
it. (In this sense every author's intention is the same.) His former specific intention was not his intention.
"He's the man we were in search of, that's true"; says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man
we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.""
44
Extract from Susan Sontag, ‘On style’

IT WOULD be hard to find any reputable literary critic
Susan Sontag was an American today who would care to be caught defending as an idea the
writer, filmmaker, philosopher, old antithesis of style versus content. On this issue a pious
teacher, and political activist. She consensus prevails. Everyone is quick to avow that style
mostly wrote essays, but also and content are indissoluble, that the strongly individual
published novels; she published her style of each important writer is an organic aspect of his
first major work, the essay "Notes work and never something merely “decorative.”
on 'Camp'", in 1964. (Wikipedia)
In the practice of criticism, though, the old antithesis lives
on, virtually unassailed. Most of the same critics who
disclaim, in passing, the notion that style is an accessory to content maintain the duality whenever they
apply themselves to particular works of literature. It is not so easy, after all, to get unstuck from a
distinction that practically holds together the fabric of critical discourse, and serves to perpetuate certain
intellectual aims and vested interests which themselves remain unchallenged and would be difficult to
surrender without a fully articulated working replacement at hand.
In fact, to talk about the style of a particular novel or poem at all as a “style,” without implying, whether
one wishes to or not, that style is merely decorative, accessory, is extremely hard. Merely by employing
the notion, one is almost bound to invoke, albeit implicitly, an antithesis between style and something
else. Many critics appear not to realize this. They think themselves sufficiently protected by a theoretical
disclaimer on the vulgar filtering-off of style from content, all the while their judgments continue to
reinforce precisely what they are, in theory, eager to deny.
One way in which the old duality lives on in the practice of criticism, in
concrete judgments, is the frequency with which quite admirable works of
art are defended as good although what is miscalled their style is
acknowledged to be crude or careless. Another is the frequency with which
a very complex style is regarded with a barely concealed ambivalence.
Contemporary writers and other artists with a style that is intricate,
hermetic, demanding—not to speak of “beautiful”—get their ration of
unstinting praise. Still, it is clear that such a style is often felt to be a form
of insincerity: evidence of the artist’s intrusion upon his materials, which
should be allowed to deliver themselves in a pure state. Susan Sontag
. . . What haunts all contemporary use of the notion of style is the putative opposition between form and
content. How is one to exorcise the feeling that “style,” which functions like the notion of form, subverts
content? One thing seems certain. No affirmation of the organic relation between style and content will
really carry conviction—or guide critics who make this affirmation to the recasting of their specific
discourse—until the notion of content is put in its place.
Most critics would agree that a work of art does not “contain” a certain amount of content (or function—
as in the case of architecture) embellished by “style.” But few address themselves to the positive
consequences of what they seem to have agreed to. What is “content”? Or, more precisely, what is left
of the notion of content when we have transcended the antithesis of style (or form) and content? Part of
the answer lies in the fact that for a work of art to have “content” is, in itself, a rather special stylistic
convention. The great task which remains to critical theory is to examine in detail the formal function
of subject-matter.
. . . I am not saying that a work of art creates a world which is entirely self-referring. Of course, works
of art (with the important exception of music) refer to the real world—to our knowledge, to our
experience, to our values. They present information and evaluations. But their distinctive feature is that
they give rise not to conceptual knowledge (which is the distinctive feature of discursive or scientific
45
knowledge—e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a

phenomenon of commitment, judgment in a state of thralldom or captivation. Which is to say that the
knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than
a knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgment) in itself.
This explains the preeminence of the value of expressiveness in works of art; and how the value of
expressiveness—that is, of style—rightly takes precedence over content (when content is, falsely,
isolated from style). The satisfactions of Paradise Lost for us do not lie in its views on God and man,
but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem.
Hence, too, the peculiar dependence of a work of art, however expressive, upon the cooperation of the
person having the experience, for one may see what is “said” but remain unmoved, either through
dullness or distraction. Art is seduction . . . But art cannot seduce without the complicity of the
experiencing subject.
In art, “content” is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially
formal processes of transformation.
This is how we can, in good conscience, cherish works of art which,
considered in terms of “content,” are morally objectionable to us. (The
difficulty is of the same order as that involved in appreciating works of
art, such as The Divine Comedy, whose premises are intellectually alien.)
To call Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will and The Olympiad
masterpieces is not to gloss over Nazi propaganda with aesthetic lenience.
The Nazi propaganda is there. But something else is there, too, which we
reject at our loss. Because they project the complex movements of
intelligence and grace and sensuousness, these two films of Riefenstahl
(unique among works of Nazi artists) transcend the categories of
propaganda or even reportage. And we find ourselves—to be sure, rather
uncomfortably—seeing “Hitler” and not Hitler, the “1936 Olympics” and
Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia not the 1936 Olympics. Through Riefenstahl’s genius as a film-maker,
the “content” has—let us even assume, against her intentions—come to
play a purely formal role.
A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot—whatever the artist’s personal intentions— advocate
anything at all. The greatest artists attain a sublime neutrality. Think of Homer and Shakespeare, from
whom generations of scholars and critics have vainly labored to extract particular “views” about human
nature, morality, and society.
. . . Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the
will. From the point of view of the artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of
the spectator, it is the creation of an imaginary décor for the will.
. . . Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will. And as the human
will is capable of an indefinite number of stances, there are an indefinite number of possible styles for
works of art.
46
Extract from Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it
Hélène Cixous is a professor, French will do. Woman must write her self: must write about
feminist writer, poet, playwright, women and bring women to writing, from which they
philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. have been driven away as violently as from their
Cixous is best known for her article "The bodies-for the same reasons, by the same law, with
Laugh of the Medusa", which established the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the
her as one of the early thinkers in text-as into the world and into history-by her own
poststructuralist feminist theory. movement.
(Wikipedia) The future must no longer be determined by the past.
I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with
us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the
equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative.
Since these reflections are taking shape in an area just on the point of being discovered, they necessarily
bear the mark of our time-a time during which the new breaks away from the old, and, more precisely,
the (feminine) new from the old (la nmwelle de l'ancien). Thus, as there are no grounds for establishing
a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims:
to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.
I write this as a woman, toward women. When I say "woman," I'm 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 be 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
can't talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogeneous, classifiable into codes-any more than you
can talk about one unconscious resembling another. Women's 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 concerns masturba- tion, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic
activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. Beauty
will no longer be forbidden. I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so
that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have
invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of
luminous torrents that I could burst-burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up
in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn't open my
mouth, I didn't repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame
and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the meaning of these waves, these floods, these
outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naivete, kept in the
dark about herself, led into self-disdain by the great arm of parental-conjugal phallocentrism, hasn't
been ashamed of her strength? Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives (for
she was made to believe that a well-adjusted normal woman has a ... divine composure), hasn't accused
herself of being a monster? Who, feeling a funny desire stirring inside her (to sing, to write, to dare to
speak, in short, to bring out something new), hasn't thought she was sick? Well, her shameful sickness
is that she resists death, that she makes
trouble.
47
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know
why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at
once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great-that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly."
Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because
you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly,
as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit,just enough
to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be
forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic
capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers
of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our
backs; and not ymtrself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses
don't like the true texts of women-female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. So only an oblique
consideration will be found here of man; it's up to him to say where his masculinity and femininity are
at: this will concern us once men have opened their eyes and seen themselves clea rly.1
Now women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept
alive; from below, from beyond "culture"; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately
to make them forget, condemning it to "eternal rest." The little girls and their "ill-mannered" bodies
immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror. Frigidified. But are they ever seething
underneath! What an effort it takes-there's no end to it-for the sex cops to bar their threatening return.
Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the
trembling equilibrium of a deadlock.
Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have
wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they've been given a deadly
brainwashing. You can incarcerate them, slow them down, get away with the old Apartheid routine, but
for a time only. As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they're taught their name, they can
be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark.
Dark is dangerous. You can't see anything in the dark, you're afraid. Don't move, you might fall. Most
of all, don't go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.
Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to
hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the
executants of their virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which
loves itself only to be loved for what women haven't got! They have constructed the infamous logic of
antilove.
We the precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen, our wind
knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled spaces, the bevies-we are black and we
are beautiful.
We're stormy, and that which is ours breaks loose from us without our fearing any debilitation. Our
glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend
ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and
we're not afraid of lacking.
What happiness for us who are omitted, brushed aside at the scene of inheritances; we inspire ourselves
and we expire without running out of breath, we are everywhere!
From now on, who, if we say so, can say no to us? We've come back from always.
48
It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming

to know her – by loving her for getting by, for getting beyond
the Old without delay, by going out ahead of what the New
Woman will be, as an arrow quits the bow with a movement
that gathers and separates the vibrations musically, in order to
be more than her self.
I say that we must, for, with a few rare exceptions, there has not
yet been any writing that inscribes femininity; exceptions so
rare, in fact, that, after plowing through literature across
languages, cultures, and ages, one can only be startled at this
vain scouting mission. It is well known that the number of
women writers (while having increased very slightly from the
nineteenth century on) has always been ridiculously small. This
is a useless and deceptive fact unless from their species of
female writers we do not first deduct the immense majority
whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing,
and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic
representations of women (as sensitive-intuitive-dreamy, etc.)
49
Knowledge
Define these terms:
1. The sublime
2. Genius
3. Liberal Humanism
4. The literary canon
1. Immanuel Kant
2. Matthew Arnold
1. Percy Bysshe Shelley 3. Wimsatt and Beardlsley
2. T S Eliot
Skills
1. Find a quotable quote from each of the critical readings, then rate them in order of ‘quotability’
(as in, how useful would they be to you if you were writing about the way authors are
responsible for the construction of literary worlds?)
Jan van Eycke's Arnolfini Portrait
50
The Reader
Is it the reader who brings meaning
to the text? A text doesn’t do much
until someone reads it, views it,
listens to it. For Sartre, this was an
existential problem – a problem of
phenomenology. In ‘What is
Literature?’, Jean Paul Sartre argued
that an artist created art because they
wanted to be an essential part of the
world they perceived, but that the art
they produced was essentially inert
until another person took it up and
responded to it – you cannot read
your own writing as a reader does, all you do is proofread. A book is just the latest draft until someone
picks it up and reads it.
For Abrams, the role of the reader was a consideration of rhetorical theories. At the very least, an author
needs to consider their reader’s understanding of the text, and they can engage their reader by strategies
that draw them into a story, an argument, a poem. The German literary theorist, Wolfgang Iser (1926-
2007), made a career of studying the reading process, establishing the idea that an ‘implied reader’ was
essential to the meaning of a text. By this, he meant that the reader was implicated in a text, that the
reader was part of the process that gave the text meaning; for a text to function, there needed to be gaps
and silences in the writing and in the text itself that gave the reader space to project their ideas, speculate
about meaning and imagine possibilities.
Iser became influential in the field of ‘reader response theory’. Reader response theory countered the
ideas of New Criticism, which insisted that a text should be read on its own merits, putting the focus on
the way the reader’s subjectivity brought meaning to the text. The role of the reader’s subjectivity was
famously explored by Professor Stanley Fish, who theorised that all readers bring their own subjectivity
to a text but that their subjectivity is the product of their context rather than an exercise in free will.
51
Critical Reading
Extract from Terry Eagleton, Literature, ‘Introduction’
The Formalists started out by seeing the literary work as a more or less arbitrary assemblage of 'devices',
and only later came to see these devices as interrelated elements or 'functions' within a total textual
system. 'Devices' included sound, imagery, rhythm, syntax, metre, rhyme, narrative techniques, in fact
the stock of formal literary elements; and what all of these elements had in common was their
'estranging' or 'defamiliarizing' effect. What was specific to literary language, what distinguished it from
other forms of discourse, was that it 'deformed' ordinary language in various ways. Under the pressure
of literary devices, ordinary language was intensified, condensed, twisted, telescoped, drawn out, turned
on its head. It was language 'made strange'; and because of this estrangement, the everyday world was
also suddenly made unfamiliar. In the routines of everyday speech, our perceptions of and responses to
reality become stale, blunted, or, as the Formalists would say, 'automatized'. Literature, by forcing us
into a dramatic awareness of language, refreshes these habitual responses and renders objects more
'perceptible'. By having to grapple with language in a more strenuous, self-conscious way than usual,
the world which that language contains is vividly renewed. The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins might
provide a particularly graphic example of this. Literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech,
but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience. Most of
the time we breathe in air without being conscious of it: like language, it is the very medium in which
we move. But if the air is suddenly thickened or infected we are forced to attend to our breathing with
new vigilance, and the effect of this may be a heightened experience of our bodily life. We read a
scribbled note from a friend without paying much attention to its narrative structure; but if a story breaks
off and begins again, switches constantly from one narrative level to another and delays its climax to
keep us in suspense, we become freshly conscious of how it is constructed at the same time as our
engagement with it may be intensified. The story, as the Formalists would argue, uses 'impeding' or
'retarding' devices to hold our attention; and in literary language, these devices are 'laid. bare'. It was
this which moved Viktor Shklovsky to remark mischievously of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, a
novel which impedes its own story-line so much that it hardly gets off the ground, that it was 'the most
typical novel in world literature'.
The Formalists, then, saw literary language as a set of deviations from a norm, a kind of linguistic
violence: literature is a 'special' kind of language, in contrast to 'ordinary' language we commonly use.
But to spot a deviation implies being able to identify the norm from which it swerves. Though 'ordinary
language' is a concept beloved of some Oxford philosophers, the ordinary language of Oxford
philosophers has little in common with the ordinary language of Glaswegian dockers. The language
both social groups use to write love letters usually differs from the way they talk to the local vicar. The
idea that there is a single 'normal' language, a common currency shared equally by all members of
society, is an illusion. Any actual language consists of a highly complex range of discourses,
differentiated according to class, region, gender, status and so on, which can by no means be neatly
unified into a single homogeneous linguistic community. One person's norm may be another's deviation:
'ginnel' for 'alleyway' may be poetic in Brighton but ordinary language in Barnsley. Even the most
'prosaic' text of the fifteenth century may sound 'poetic' to us today because of its archaism. If we were
to stumble across an isolated scrap of writing from some long-vanished civilization, we could not tell
whether it was 'poetry' or not merely by inspecting it, since we might have no access to that society's
'ordinary' discourses; and even if further research were to reveal that it was 'deviatory', this would still
not prove that it was poetry as not all linguistic deviations are poetic. Slang, for example. We would
not be able to tell just by looking at it that it was not a piece of 'realist' literature, without much more
information about the way it actually functioned as a piece of writing within the society in question.
It is not that the Russian Formalists did not realize all this. They recognized that norms and deviations
shifted around from one social or historical context to another - that 'poetry' in this sense depends on
52
where you happen to be standing at the time. The fact that a piece of language was 'estranging' did not
guarantee that it was always and everywhere so: it was estranging only against a certain normative
linguistic background, and if this altered then the writing might cease to be perceptible as literary. If
everyone used phrases like 'unravished bride of quietness' in ordinary pub conversation, this kind of
language might cease to be poetic. For the Formalists, in other words, 'literariness' was a function of the
differential relations between one sort of discourse and another; it was not an eternally given property.
They were not out to define 'literature', but 'literariness' - special uses of language, which could be found
in 'literary' texts but also in many places outside them. Anyone who believes that 'literature' can be
defined by such special uses of language has to face the fact that there is more metaphor in Manchester
than there is in Marvell. There is no 'literary' device metonymy, synecdoche, litotes, chiasmus and so
on which is not quite intensively used in daily discourse.
Nevertheless, the Formalists still presumed that 'making strange' was the essence of the literary. It was
just that they relativized this use of language, saw it as a matter of contrast between one type of speech
and another. But what if I were to hear someone at the next pub table remark 'This is awfully squiggly
handwriting!' Is this 'literary' or 'non-literary' language? As a matter of fact it is 'literary' language,
because it comes from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger. But how do I know that it is literary? It doesn't,
after all, focus any particular attention on itself as a verbal performance. One answer to the question of
how I know that this is literary is that it comes from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger. It is part of a text
which I read as 'fictional', which announces itself as a 'novel', which may be put on university literature
syllabuses and so on. The context tells me that it is literary; but the language itself has no inherent
properties or qualities which might distinguish it from other kinds of discourse, and someone might
well say this in a pub without being admired for their literary dexterity. To think of literature as the
Formalists do is really to think of all literature as poetry. Significantly, when the Formalists came to
consider prose writing, they often simply extended to it the kinds of technique they had used with poetry.
But literature is usually judged to contain much besides poetry to include, for example, realist or
naturalistic writing which is not linguistically self-conscious or self-exhibiting in any striking way.
People sometimes call writing 'fine' precisely because it doesn't draw undue attention to itself: they
admire its laconic plainness or low-keyed sobriety. And what about jokes, football chants and slogans,
newspaper headlines, advertisements, which are often verbally flamboyant but not generally classified
as literature?
Another problem with the 'estrangement' case is that there
is no kind of writing which cannot, given sufficient
ingenuity, be read as estranging. Consider a prosaic, quite
unambiguous statement like the one sometimes seen in the
London Underground system: 'Dogs must be carried on the
escalator.' This is not perhaps quite as unambiguous as it
seems at first sight: does it mean that you must carry a dog
on the escalator? Are you likely to be banned from the
escalator unless you can find some stray mongrel to clutch
in your arms on the way up? Many apparently
straightforward notices contain such ambiguities: 'Refuse to be put in this basket,' for instance, or the
British road-sign 'Way Out' as read by a Californian. But even leaving such troubling ambiguities aside,
it is surely obvious that the underground notice could be read as literature. One could let oneself be
arrested by the abrupt, minatory staccato of the first ponderous monosyllables; find one's mind drifting,
by the time it had reached the rich allusiveness of 'carried', to suggestive resonances of helping lame
dogs through life; and perhaps even detect in the very lilt and inflection of the word 'escalator' a miming
of the rolling, up-and-down motion of the thing itself. This may well be a fruitless sort of pursuit, but it
is not significantly more fruitless than claiming to hear the cut and thrust of the rapiers in some poetic
description of a duel, and it at least has the advantage of suggesting that 'literature' may be at least as
much a question of what people do to writing as of what writing does to them.
53
But even if someone were to read the notice in this way, it would still be a matter of reading it as poetry,
which is only part of what is usually included in literature. Let us therefore consider another way of
'misreading' the sign which might move us a little beyond this. Imagine a late-night drunk doubled over
the escalator handrail who reads the notice with laborious attentiveness for several minutes and then
mutters to himself 'How true!' What kind of mistake is occurring here? What the drunk is doing, in fact,
is taking the sign as some statement of general, even cosmic significance. By applying certain
conventions of reading to its words, he prises them loose from their immediate context and generalizes
them beyond their pragmatic purpose to something of wider and probably deeper import. This would
certainly seem to be one operation involved in what people call literature. When the poet tells us that
his love is like a red rose, we know by the very fact that he puts this statement in metre that we are not
supposed to ask whether he actually had a lover who for some bizarre reason seemed to him to resemble
a rose. He is telling us something about women and love in general. Literature, then, we might say, is
'non-pragmatic' discourse: unlike biology textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate
practical purpose, but is to be taken as referring to a
general state of affairs. Sometimes, though not always,
it may employ peculiar language as though to make this
fact obvious - to signal that what is at stake is a way of
talking about a woman, rather than any particular real-
life woman. This focusing on the way of talking, rather
than on the reality of what is talked about, is sometimes
taken to indicate that we mean by literature a kind of
self-referential language, a language which talks about
itself.
54
Extract from Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’

The phenomenological theory of art lays full stress on the idea that, in
Wolfgang Iser (22 July considering a literary work one must take into account not only the
1926 – 24 January 2007) actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in
was a German literary responding to that text. . .
scholar. (Wikipedia)
It is the virtuality of the work that gives rise to its dynamic nature, and
this in turn is the precondition for the effects that the work calls forth.
As the reader uses the various perspectives offered him by the text in order to relate the patterns and the
"schematised views" to one another, he sets the work in motion, and this very process results ultimately
in the awakening of responses within himself. Thus, reading causes the literary work to unfold its
inherently dynamic character. That this is no new discovery is apparent from references made even in
the early days of the novel. Laurence Sterne remarks in Tristram Shandy: " ... no author, who
understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest
respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him
something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself. For my own part, I am eternally paying him
compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own."
Sterne's conception of a literary text is that it is something like an arena in which reader and author
participate in a game of the imagination. If the reader were given the whole story, and there were nothing
left for him to do, then his imagination would never enter the field, the result would be the boredom
which inevitably arises when everything is laid out cut and dried before us. A literary text must therefore
be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader's imagination in the task of working things out
for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative. In this process of creativity,
the text may either not go far enough, or may go too far, so we may say that boredom and overstrain
form the boundaries beyond which the reader will leave the field of play.
The extent to which the "unwritten" part of a text stimulates the reader's creative participation is brought
out by an observation of Virginia Woolf's in her study of Jane Austen:
Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She
stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed
of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most enduring form of life
scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character The turns and twists
of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present
moment, half upon the future.... Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story,
are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness.
The unwritten aspects of apparently trivial scenes and the unspoken dialogue within the "turns and
twists" not only draw the reader into the action but also lead him to shade in the many outlines suggested
by the given situations, so that these take on a reality of their own. But as the reader's imagination
animates these "outlines," they in turn will influence the effect of the written part of the text. Thus
begins a whole dynamic process: the written text imposes certain limits on its unwritten implications in
order to prevent these from becoming too blurred and hazy, but at the same time these implications,
worked out by the reader's imagination, set the given situation against a background which endows it
with far greater significance than it might have seemed to possess on its own. In this way, trivial scenes
suddenly take on the shape of an "enduring form of life." What constitutes this form is never named, let
alone explained in the text, although in fact it is the end product of the interaction between text and
reader.
The question now arises as to how far such a process can be adequately described. For this purpose a
phenomenological analysis recommends itself, especially since the somewhat sparse observations
55
hitherto made of the psychology of reading tend mainly to be psychoanalytical, and so are restricted to
the illustration of predetermined ideas concerning the unconscious. We shall, however, take a closer
look later at some worthwhile psychological observations.
As a starting point for a phenomenological analysis we might examine the way in which sequent
sentences act upon one another. This is of especial importance in literary texts in view of the fact that
they do not correspond to any objective reality outside themselves. The world presented by literary texts
is constructed out of what (Roman) Ingarden has called intentionale Satzkorrelate (intentional sentence
correlatives):
Sentences link up in different ways to form more complex units of meaning that reveal a very
varied structure giving rise to such entities as a short story, a novel, a dialogue, a drama, a
scientific theory.... In the final analysis, there arises a particular world, with component parts
determined in this way or that, and with all the variations that may occur within these parts - all
this as a purely intentional correlative of a complex of sentences. If this complex finally forms
a literary work, I call the whole sum of sequent intentional sentence correlatives the "world
presented" in the work.
This world, however, does not pass before the reader's eyes like a film. The sentences are "component
parts" insofar as they make statements, claims, or observations, or convey information, and so establish
various perspectives in the text. But they remain only "component parts" - they are not the sum total of
the text itself.
. . . For this reason, expectations are scarcely ever fulfilled in truly literary texts. If they were, then such
texts would be confined to the individualization of a given expectation, and one would inevitably ask
what such an intention was supposed to achieve. . . the more a text individualizes or confirms an
expectation it has initially aroused, the more aware we become of its didactic purpose, so that at best
we can only accept or reject the thesis forced upon us. More often than not, the very clarity of such texts
will make us want to free ourselves from their clutches. But generally the sentence correlatives of
literary texts do not develop in this rigid way, for the expectations they evoke tend to encroach on one
another in such a manner that they are continually modified as one reads. One might simplify by saying
that each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, which is modified, if not
completely changed, by succeeding sentences. While these expectations arouse interest in what is to
come, the subsequent modification of them will also have a retrospective effect on what has already
been read. This may now take on a different significance from that which it had at the moment of
reading.
Whatever we have read sinks into our memory and is foreshortened. It may later be evoked again and
set against a different background with the result that the reader is enabled to develop hitherto
unforeseeable connections. The memory evoked, however, can never reassume its original shape, for
this would mean that memory and perception were identical, which is manifestly not so. The new
background brings to light new aspects of what we had committed to memory; conversely these, in turn;
shed their light on the new background, thus arousing more complex anticipations. Thus, the reader, in
establishing these interrelationships between past, present and future, actually causes the text to reveal
its potential multiplicity of connections. These connections are the product of the reader's mind working
on the raw material of the text, though they are not the text itself - for this consists just of sentences,
statements, information, etc.
This is why the reader often feels involved in events which, at the time of reading, seem real to him,
even though in fact they are very far from his own reality. The fact that completely different readers
can be differently affected by the "reality" of a particular text is ample evidence of the degree to which
literary texts transform reading into a creative process that is far above mere perception of what is
written. The literary text activates our own faculties, enabling us to recreate the world it presents. The
56
product of this creative activity is what we might call the virtual dimension of the text, which endows
it with its reality. This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination of the reader: it
is the coming together of text and imagination.
. . . If one regards the sentence sequence as a continual flow, this implies that the anticipation aroused
by one sentence will generally be realized by the next, and the frustration of one's expectations will
arouse feelings of exasperation. And yet literary texts are full of unexpected twists and turns, and
frustration of expectations . Even in the simplest story there is bound to be some kind of blockage, if
only because no tale can ever be told in its entirety. Indeed, it is only through inevitable omissions that
a story gains its dynamism. Thus whenever the flow is interrupted and we are led off in unexpected
directions, the opportunity is given to us to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections
- for filling in the gaps left by the text itself.
These gaps have a different effect
on the process of anticipation and
retrospection, and thus on the
"gestalt" of the virtual dimension,
for they may be filled in different
ways. For this reason, one text is
potentially capable of several
different realizations, and no
reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own
way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to
how the gap is to be filled. In this very act the dynamics of reading are revealed.
. . . In every text there is a potential time sequence which the reader must inevitably realize, as it is
impossible to absorb even a short text in a single moment. Thus the reading process always involves
viewing the text through a perspective that is continually on the move, linking up the different phases,
and so constructing what we have called the virtual dimension. This dimension, of course, varies all the
time we are reading. However, when we have finished the text, and read it again, clearly our extra
knowledge will result in a different time sequence; we shall tend to establish connections by referring
to our awareness of what is to come, and so ce1tain aspects of the text will assume a significance we
did not attach to them on a first reading, while others will recede into the background. It is a common
enough experience for a person to say that on a second reading he noticed things he had missed when
he read the book for the first time, but this is scarcely surprising in view of the fact that the second time
he is looking at the text from a different perspective. The time sequence that he realized on his first
reading cannot possibly be repeated on a second reading, and this unrepeatability is bound to result in
modifications of his reading experience. This is not to say that the second reading is "true' than the first
- they are, quite simply, different: the reader establishes the virtual dimension of the text by realizing a
new time
. . . The manner in which the reader experiences the text will reflect his own disposition, and in this
respect the literary text acts as a kind of mirror; but at the same time, the reality which this process helps
to create is one that will be different from his own (since, normally, we tend to be bored by texts that
present us with things we already know perfectly well ourselves). Thus we have the apparently
paradoxical situation in which the reader is forced to reveal aspects of himself in order to experience a
reality which is different from his own. The impact this reality makes on him will depend largely on the
extent to which he himself actively provides the unwritten part of the text, and yet in supplying all the
missing links, he must think in terms of experiences different from his own; indeed, it is only by leaving
behind the familiar world of his own experience that the reader can truly participate in the adventure
the literary text offers him.
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. . . This entanglement of the reader is, of course, vital to any kind of text, but in the literary text we
have the strange situation that the reader cannot know what his participation actually entails. We know
that we share in certain experiences, but we do not know what happens to us in the course of this process.
This is why, when we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we
do not want to get away from it by talking about it - we simply want to understand more clearly what it
is in which we have been entangled. We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know
consciously what we have experienced. Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of literary criticism - it
helps to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the
subconscious; it satisfies (or helps to satisfy) our desire to talk about what we have read.
The efficacy of a literary text is brought about by the apparent evocation and subsequent negation of
the familiar. What at first seemed to be an affirmation of our assumptions leads to our own rejection of
them, thus tending to prepare us for a re-orientation. And it is only when we have out- stripped our
preconceptions and left the shelter of the familiar that we are in a position to gather new experiences.
As the literary text involves the reader in the formation of illusion and the simultaneous formation of
the means whereby the illusion is punctured, reading reflects the process by which we gain experience.
Once the reader is entangled, his own preconceptions are continually overtaken, so that the text becomes
his "present" while his own ideas fade into the "past"; as soon as this happens he is open to the
immediate experience of the text, which was impossible so long as his preconceptions were his
"present."
. . . Herein lies the dialectical structure of reading. The need to decipher gives us the chance to formulate
our own deciphering capacity - i.e., we bring to the fore an element of our being of which we are not
directly conscious. The production of the meaning of literary texts - which we dis- cussed in connection
with forming the "gestalt" of the text - does not merely entail the discovery of the unformulated, which
can then be taken over by the active imagination of the reader; it also entails the possibility that we may
formulate ourselves and so discover what had previously seemed to elude our consciousness. These are
the ways in which reading literature gives us the chance to formulate the unformulated.
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Extract from Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’

Though the Author’s empire is still very powerful (recent
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French criticism has often merely consolidated it), it is evident that
literary theorist, philosopher, critic, for a long time now certain writers have attempted to topple
and semiotician. Barthes' ideas it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and
explored a diverse range of fields foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting
and he influenced the development language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to
of many schools of theory, including own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks,
structuralism, semiotics, social not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting
theory, design theory, impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating
anthropology, and post- objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where
structuralism. (Wikipedia) language alone acts, “performs,” and not “oneself”:
Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author
for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to
restore the status of the reader . . . Surrealism lastly — to remain on the level of this prehistory of
modernity — surrealism doubtless could not accord language a sovereign place, since language is a
system and since what the movement sought was, romantically, a direct subversion of all codes — an
illusory subversion, moreover, for a code cannot be destroyed, it can only be “played with”; but by
abruptly violating expected meanings (this was the famous surrealist “jolt”), by entrusting to the hand
the responsibility of writing as fast as possible what the head itself ignores (this was automatic writing),
by accepting the principle and the experience of a collective writing, surrealism helped secularize the
image of the Author. Finally, outside of literature itself (actually, these distinctions are being
superseded), linguistics has just furnished the destruction of the Author with a precious analytic
instrument by showing that utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without
requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more
than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a “subject,” not
a “person,” end this subject, void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make
language “work,” that is, to exhaust it.
The absence of the Author (with Brecht, we might
speak here of a real “alienation:’ the Author
diminishing like a tiny figure at the far end of the
literary stage) is not only a historical fact or an act
of writing: it utterly transforms the modern text (or
— what is the same thing — the text is henc eforth
written and read so that in it, on every level, the
Author absents himself). Time, first of all, is no
longer the same. The Author, when we believe in
him, is always conceived as the past of his own
book: the book and the author take their places of
their own accord on the same line, cast as a before
and an after: the Author is supposed to feed the book
— that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of
antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born
simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his
writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that
of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now. This is because (or: it follows that) to
write can no longer designate an operation of recording, of observing, of representing, of “painting”
(as the Classic writers put it), but rather what the linguisticians, following the vocabulary of the Oxford
school, call a performative, a rare verbal form (exclusively given to the first person and to the present),
in which utterance has no other content than the act by which it is uttered: something like the / Command
59
of kings or the I Sing of the early bards; the modern writer, having buried the Author, can therefore no
longer believe, according to the “pathos” of his predecessors, that his hand is too slow for his thought
or his passion, and that in consequence, making a law out of necessity, he must accentuate this gap
and endlessly “elaborate” his form; for him, on the contrary, his hand, detached from any voice, borne
by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin — or which, at
least, has no other origin than language itself, that is, the very thing which ceaselessly questions any
origin.
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the
“message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested
various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the
thousand sources of culture. . . succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself
passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a
writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue
of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
Once the Author is gone, the claim to “decipher” a text becomes quite useless. To give an Author to a
text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.
This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the
Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is
discovered, the text is “explained:’ the critic has conquered; hence it is scarcely surprising not only that,
historically, the reign of the Author should also have been that of the Critic, but that criticism (even
“new criticism”) should be overthrown along with the Author. In a multiple writing, indeed, everything
is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking
that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the
writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to
evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better,
henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is,
an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly
revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science,
the law.
. . . a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with
each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected,
united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the
very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity
of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the
reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who
holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted. This is why it is absurd
to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypo- critically appoints itself
the champion of the reader’s rights. The reader
has never been the concern of classical criticism;
for it, there is no other man in literature but the
one who writes. We are now beginning to be the
dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which
our society proudly champions precisely what it
dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we
know that to restore to writing its future, we must
reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be
ransomed by the death of the Author. Roland Barthes
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Stanley Fish, ‘How to Recognize a Poem When You See One’

Last time I sketched out an argument by which meanings
Stanley Eugene Fish is an American are the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free
literary theorist, legal scholar, and independent readers but of interpretive communities
author and public intellectual. He is that are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities
currently the Floersheimer and for the texts those activities produce. In this lecture I
Distinguished Visiting Professor of propose to extend that argument so as to account not only
Law at Yeshiva University's for the meanings a poem might be said to have but for the
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law fact of its being recognized as a poem in the first place. And
in New York City. (Wikipedia) once again I would like to begin with an anecdote.
In the summer of 1971 I was teaching two courses under the
joint auspices of the Linguistic Institute of America and the English Department of the State University
of New York at Buffalo. I taught these courses in the morning and in the same room. At 9:30 I would
meet a group of students who were interested in the relationship between linguistics and literary
criticism. Our nominal subject was stylistics but our concerns were finally theoretical and extended to
the presuppositions and assumptions which underlie both linguistic and literary practice. At 11:00 these
students were replaced by another group whose concerns were exclusively literary and were in fact
confined to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century. These students had been learning how
to identify Christian symbols and how to recognize typological patterns and how to move from the
observation of these symbols and patterns to the specification of a poetic intention that was usually
didactic or homiletic. On the day I am thinking about, the only connection between the two classes was
an assignment given to the first which was still on the blackboard at the beginning of the second. It
read:
Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)
I am sure that many of you will already have recognized the names on this list, but for the sake of the
record, allow me to identify them. Roderick Jacobs and Peter Rosenbaum are two linguists who have
coauthored a number of textbooks and coedited a number of anthologies. Samuel Levin is a linguist
who was one of the first to apply the operations of transformational grammar to literary texts. J. P.
Thorne is a linguist at Edinburgh who, like Levin, was attempting to extend the rules of transformational
grammar to the notorious ir-regularities of poetic language. Curtis Hayes is a linguist who was then
using transformational grammar in order to establish an objective basis for his intuitive impression that
the language of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is more complex than the language of
Hemingway's novels. And Richard Ohmann is the literary critic who, more than any other, was
responsible for introducing the vocabulary of transformational grammar to the literary community.
Ohmann's name was spelled as you see it here because I could not remember whether it contained one
or two n's. In other words, the question mark in parenthesis signified nothing more than a faulty memory
and a desire on my part to appear scrupulous. The fact that the names appeared in a list that was arranged
vertically, and that Levin, Thorne, and Hayes formed a column that was more or less centered in relation
to the paired names of Jacobs and Rosenbaum, was similarly accidental and was evidence only of a
certain compulsiveness if, indeed, it was evidence of anything at all.
61
In the time between the two classes I made only one

change. I drew a frame around the assignment and wrote on
the top of that frame "p. 43." When the members of the
second class filed in I told them that what they saw on the
blackboard was a religious poem of the kind they had been
studying and I asked them to interpret it. Immediately they
began to perform in a manner that, for reasons which will
become clear, was more or less predictable. The first
student to speak pointed out that the poem was probably a
hieroglyph, although he was not sure whether it was in the
shape of a cross or an altar. This question was set aside as
the other students, following his lead, began to concentrate
on individual words, interrupting each other with
suggestions that came so quickly that they seemed
spontaneous. The first line of the poem (the very order of
events assumed the already constituted status of the object)
received the most attention: Jacobs was explicated as a
reference to Jacob's ladder, traditionally allegorized as a
figure for the Christian ascent to heaven. In this poem,
however, or so my students told me, the means of ascent is
not a ladder but a tree, a rose tree or rosenbaum. This was
seen to be an obvious reference to the Virgin Mary who was
often characterized as a rose without thorns, itself an
emblem of the immaculate conception. At this point the
poem appeared to the students to be operating in the
familiar manner of an iconographic riddle. It at once posed
the question, "How is it that a man can climb to heaven by
means of a rose tree?" and directed
the reader to the inevitable answer:
by the fruit of that tree, the fruit of
Mary's womb, Jesus. Once this
interpretation was established it
received support from, and
conferred significance on, the word
"thorne," which could only be an
allusion to the crown of thorns, a
symbol of the trial suffered by Jesus
and of the price he paid to save us
all. It was only a short st ep (really
no step at all) from this insight to
the recognition of Levin as a double Figure 3 Jacob's Ladder
reference, first to the tribe of Levi,
of whose priestly function Christ was the fulfillment, and second to the unleavened bread carried by the
children of Israel on their exodus from Egypt, the place of sin, and in response to the call of Moses,
perhaps the most familiar of the old testament types of Christ. The final word of the poem was given at
least three complementary readings: it could be "omen," especially since so much of the poem is
concerned with foreshadowing and prophecy; it could be Oh Man, since it is mans story as it intersects
with the divine plan that is the poem's subject; and it could, of course, be simply "amen," the proper
conclusion to a poem celebrating the love and mercy shown by a God who gave his only begotten son
so that we may live.
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In addition to specifying significances for the words of the poem and relating those significances to one
another, the students began to discern larger structural patterns. It was noted that of the six names in the
poem three--Jacobs, Rosenbaum, and Levin--are Hebrew, two--Thorne and Hayes--are Christian, and
one--Ohman--is ambiguous, the ambiguity being marked in the poem itself (as the phrase goes) by the
question mark in parenthesis. This division was seen as a reflection of the basic distinction between the
old dis-pensation and the new, the law of sin and the law of love. That distinction, however, is blurred
and finally dissolved by the typological perspective which invests the old testament events and heroes
with new testament meanings. The structure of the poem, my students concluded, is therefore a double
one, establishing and undermining its basic pattern (Hebrew vs. Christian) at the same time. In this
context there is finally no pressure to resolve the ambiguity of Ohman since the two possible readings-
-the name is Hebrew, the name is Christian--are both authorized by the reconciling presence in the poem
of Jesus Christ. Finally, I must report that one student took to counting letters and found, to no one's
surprise, that the most prominent letters in the poem were S, O, N.
Some of you will have noticed that I have not yet said anything about Hayes. This is because of all the
words in the poem it proved the most recalcitrant to interpretation, a fact not without consequence, but
one which I will set aside for the moment since I am less interested in the details of the exercise than in
the ability of my students to perform it. What is the source of that ability? How is it that they were able
to do what they did? What is it that they did? These questions are important because they bear directly
on a question often asked in literary theory. What are the distinguishing features of literary language?
Or, to put the matter more colloquially, How do you recognize a poem when you see one? The
commonsense answer, to which many literary critics and linguists are committed, is that the act of
recognition is triggered by the observable presence of distinguishing features. That is, you know a poem
when you see one because its language displays the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems.
This, however, is a model that quite obviously does not fit the present example. My students did not
proceed from the noting of distinguishing features to the recognition that they were confronted by a
poem; rather, it was the act of recognition that came first--they knew in advance that they were dealing
with a poem-- and the distinguishing features then followed.
In other words, acts of recognition, rather
than being triggered by formal
characteristics, are their source. It is not that
the presence of poetic qualities compels a
certain kind of attention but that the paying
of a certain kind of attention results in the
emergence of poetic qualities. As soon as
my students were aware that it was poetry
they were seeing, they began to look with
poetry-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes that
saw everything in relation to the properties
they knew poems to possess. They knew,
for example (because they were told by
their teachers), that poems are (or are
supposed to be) more densely and intricately organized than ordinary communications; and that
knowledge translated itself into a willingness--one might even say a determination--to see connections
between one word and another and between every word and the poem's central insight. Moreover, the
assumption that there is a central insight is itself poetry-specific, and presided over its own realization.
Having assumed that the collection of words before them was unified by an informing purpose (because
unifying purposes are what poems have), my students proceeded to find one and to formulate it. It was
in the light of that purpose (now assumed) that significances for the individual words began to suggest
themselves, significances which then fleshed out the assumption that had generated them in the first
place. Thus the meanings of the words and the interpretation in which those words were seen to be
63
embedded emerged together, as a consequence of the operations my students began to perform once
they were told that this was a poem.
It was almost as if they were following a recipe--if it's a poem do this, if it's a poem, see it that way--
and indeed definitions of poetry are recipes, for by directing readers as to what to look for in a poem,
they instruct them in ways of looking that will produce what they expect to see. If your definition of
poetry tells you that the language of poetry is complex, you will scrutinize the language of something
identified as a poem in such a way as to bring out the complexity you know to be "there." You will, for
example, be on the look-out for latent ambiguities; you will attend to the presence of alliterative and
consonantal patterns (there will always be some), and you will try to make something of them (you will
always succeed); you will search for meanings that subvert, or exist in a tension with the meanings that
first present themselves; and if these operations fail to produce the anticipated complexity, you will
even propose a significance for the words that are not there, because, as everyone knows, everything
about a poem, including its omissions, is significant. Nor, as you do these things, will you have any
sense of performing in a willful manner, for you will only be doing what you learned to do in the course
of becoming a skilled reader of poetry. Skilled reading is usually thought to be a matter of discerning
what is there, but if the example of my students can be generalized, it is a matter of knowing how to
produce what can thereafter be said to be there. Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of
constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.
To many, this will be a distressing conclusion, and there are a number of arguments that could be
mounted in order to forestall it. One might point out that the circumstances of my students' performance
were special. After all, they had been concerned exclusively with religious poetry for some weeks, and
therefore would be uniquely vulnerable to the deception I had practiced on them and uniquely equipped
to impose religious themes and patterns on words innocent of either. I must report, however, that I have
duplicated this experiment any number of times at nine or ten universities in three countries, and the
results are always the same, even when the participants know from the beginning that what they are
looking at was originally an assignment. Of course this very fact could itself be turned into an objection:
doesn't the reproducibility of the exercise prove that there is something about these words that leads
everyone to perform in the same way? Isn't it just a happy accident that names like Thorne and Jacobs
have counterparts or near counterparts in biblical names and symbols? And wouldn't my students have
been unable to do what they did if the assignment I gave to the first class had been made up of different
names? The answer to all of these questions is no. Given a firm belief that they were confronted by a
religious poem, my students would have been able to turn any list of names into the kind of poem we
have before us now, because they would have read the names within the assumption that they were
informed with Christian significances. (This is nothing more than a literary analogue to Augustine's rule
of faith.)' You can test this assertion by replacing Jacobs-Rosenbaum, Levin, Thorne, Hayes, and
Ohman with names drawn from the faculty of Kenyon College--Temple, Jordan, Seymour, Daniels,
Star, Church. I will not exhaust my time or your patience by performing a full-dress analysis, which
would involve, of course, the relation between those who saw the River Jordan and those who saw more
by seeing the Star of Bethlehem, thus fulfilling the prophecy by which the temple of Jerusalem was
replaced by the inner temple or church built up in the heart of every Christian. Suffice it to say that it
could easily be done (you can take the poem home and do it yourself) and that the shape of its doing
would be constrained not by the names but by the interpretive assumptions that gave them a significance
even before they were seen. This would be true even if there were no names on the list, if the paper or
blackboard were blank; the blankness would present no problem to the interpreter, who would
immediately see in it the void out of which God created the earth, or the abyss into which unregenerate
sinners fall, or, in the best of all possible poems, both.
Even so, one might reply, all you've done is demonstrate how an interpretation, if it is prosecuted with
sufficient vigor, can impose itself on material which has its own proper shape. Basically, at the ground
level, in the first place, when all is said and done, "Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Thorne Hayes Ohman (?)"
64
is an assignment; it is only a trick that allows you to transform it into a poem, and when the effects of
the trick have worn off, it will return to its natural form and be seen as an assignment once again. This
is a powerful argu-ment because it seems at once to give interpretation its due (as an act of the will) and
to maintain the independence of that on which interpretation works. It allows us, in short, to preserve
our commonsense intuition that interpretation must be interpretation of something. Unfortunately, the
argument will not hold because the assignment we all see is no less the product of interpretation than
the poem into which it was turned. That is, it requires just as much work, and work of the same kind, to
see this as an assignment as it does to see it as a poem. If this seems counterintuitive, it is only because
the work required to see it as an assignment is work we have already done, in the course of acquir-ing
the huge amount of background knowledge that enables you and me to function in the academic world.
In order to know what an assignment is, that is, in order to know what to do with something identified
as an assignment, you must first know what a class is (know that it isn't an economic grouping) and
know that classes meet at specified times for so many weeks, and that one's performance in a class is
largely a matter of performing between classes.
Think for a moment of how you would explain this last to someone who did not already know it. "Well,"
you might say, "a class is a group situation in which a number of people are instructed by an informed
person in a particular subject." (Of course the notion of "subject" will itself require explication.) "An
assignment is something you do when you're not in class." "Oh, I see," your interlocutor might respond,
"an assignment is something you do to take your mind off what you've been doing in class." "No, an
assignment is a part of a class." "But how can that be if you only do it when the class is not meeting?"
Now it would be possible, finally, to answer that question, but only by enlarging the horizons of your
explanation to include the very concept of a university, what it is one might be doing there, why one
might be doing it instead of doing a thousand other things, and so on. For most of us these matters do
not require explanation, and indeed, it is hard for us to imagine someone for whom they do; but that is
because our tacit knowledge of what it means to move around in academic life was acquired so gradually
and so long ago that it doesn't seem like knowledge at all (and therefore something someone else might
not know) but a part of the world. You might think that when you're on campus (a phrase that itself
requires volumes) that you are simply walking around on the two legs God gave you; but your walking
is informed by an internalized awareness of institutional goals and practices, of norms of behavior, of
lists of do's and don't's, of invisible lines and the dangers of crossing them; and, as a result, you see
everything as already organized in relation to those same goals and practices. It would never occur to
you, for example, to wonder if the people pouring out of that building are fleeing from a fire; you know
that they are exiting from a class (what could be more obvious?) and you know that because your
perception of their action occurs within a knowledge of what people in a university could possibly be
doing and the reasons they could have for doing it (going to the next class, going back to the dorm,
meeting someone in the student union). It is within that same knowledge that an assignment becomes
intelligible so that it appears to you immediately as an obligation, as a set of directions, as something
with parts, some of which may be more significant than others. That is, it is a proper question to ask of
an assignment whether some of its parts might be omitted or slighted, whereas readers of poetry know
that no part of a poem can be slighted (the rule is "everything counts") and they do not rest until every
part has been given a significance.
In a way this amounts to no more than saying what everyone already knows: poems and assignments
are different, but my point is that the differences are a result of the different interpretive operations we
perform and not of something inherent in one or the other. An assignment no more compels its own
recognition than does a poem; rather, as in the case of a poem, the shape of an assignment emerges
when someone looks at something identified as one with assignment-seeing eyes, that is, with eyes
which are capable of seeing the words as already embedded within the institutional structure that makes
it possible for assignments to have a sense. The ability to see, and therefore to make, an assignment is
no less a learned ability than the ability to see, and therefore to make, a poem. Both are constructed
65
artifacts, the products and not the producers of interpretation, and while the differences between them
are real, they are interpretive and do not have their source in some bedrock level of objectivity.
Of course one might want to argue that there is a bedrock level at which these names constitute neither
an assignment nor a poem but are merely a list. But that argument too falls because a list is no more a
natural object--one that wears its meaning on its face and can be recognized by anyone--than an
assignment or a poem. In order to see a list, one must already be equipped with the concepts of seriality,
hierarchy, subordination, and so on, and while these are by no means esoteric concepts and seem
available to almost everyone, they are nonetheless learned, and if there were someone who had not
learned them, he or she would not be able to see a list. The next recourse is to descend still lower (in
the direction of atoms) and to claim objectivity for letters, paper, graphite, black marks on white spaces,
and so on; but these entities too have palpability and shape only because of the assumption of some or
other system of intelligibility, and they are therefore just as available to a deconstructive dissolution as
are poems, assignments, and lists.
The conclusion, therefore, is that all objects are made and not found, and that they are made by the
interpretive strategies we set in motion. This does not, however, commit me to subjectivity because the
means by which they are made are social and conventional. That is, the "you" who does the
interpretative work that puts poems and assignments and lists into the world is a communal you and not
an isolated individual. No one of us wakes up in the morning and (in French fashion) reinvents poetry
or thinks up a new educational system or decides to reject seriality in favor of some other, wholly
original, form of organization. We do not do these things because we could not do them, because the
mental operations we can perform are limited by the institutions in which we are already embedded.
These institutions precede us, and it is only by inhabiting them, or being inhabited by them, that we
have access to the public and conventional senses they make. Thus while it is true to say that we create
poetry (and assignments and lists), we create it through interpretive strategies that are finally not our
own but have their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility. Insofar as the system (in this
case a literary system) constrains us, it also fashions us, finishing us with categories of understanding,
with which we in turn fashion the entities to which we can then point. In short, to the list of made or
constructed objects we must add ourselves, for we no less than the poems and assignments we see are
the products of social and cultural patterns of thought.
To put the matter in this way is to see that the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity is a false
one because neither exists in the pure form that would give the opposition its point. This is precisely
illustrated by my anecdote in which we do not have free-standing readers in a relationship of perceptual
adequacy or inadequacy to an equally free-standing text. Rather, we have readers whose
consciousnesses are constituted by a set of conventional notions which when put into operation
constitute in turn a conventional, and conventionally seen, object. My students could do what they did,
and do it in unison, because as members of a literary community they knew what a poem was (their
knowledge was public), and that knowledge led them to look in such a way as to populate the landscape
with what they knew to be poems.
Of course poems are not the only objects that are constituted in unison by shared ways of seeing. Every
object or event that becomes available within an institutional setting can be so characterized. I am
thinking, for example, of something that happened in my classroom just the other day. While I was in
the course of vigorously making a point, one of my students, William Newlin by name, was just as
vigorously waving his hand. When I asked the other members of the class what it was that Mr. Newlin
was doing, they all answered that he was seeking permission to speak. I then asked them how they knew
that. The immediate reply was that it was obvious; what else could he be thought to be doing? The
meaning of his gesture, in other words, was right there on its surface, available for reading by anyone
who had the eyes to see. That meaning, however, would not have been available to someone without
any knowledge of what was involved in being a student. Such a person might have thought that Mr.
66
Newlin was pointing to the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, or calling our attention to some
object that was about to fall ("the sky is falling," "the sky is falling"). And if the someone in question
were a child of elementary or middle-school age, Mr. Newlin might well have been seen as seeking
permission not to speak but to go to the bathroom, an interpretation or reading that would never occur
to a student at Johns Hopkins or any other institution of "higher learning" (and how would we explain
to the uninitiated the meaning of that phrase).
The point is the one I have made so many times before: it is neither the case that the significance of Mr.
Newlin's gesture is imprinted on its surface where it need only be read off, or that the construction put
on the gesture by everyone in the room was individual and idiosyncratic. Rather, the source of our
interpretive unanimity was a structure of interests and understood goals, a structure whose categories
so filled our individual consciousnesses that they were rendered as one, immediately investing
phenomena with the significance they must have, given the already-in-place assumptions about what
someone could possibly be intending (by word or gesture) in a classroom. By seeing Mr. Newlin's raised
hand with a single shaping eye, we were demonstrating what Harvey Sacks has characterized as "the
fine power of a culture. It does not, so to speak, merely fill brains in roughly the same way, it fills them
so that they are alike in fine detail. "I The occasion of Sacks's observation was the ability of his hearers
to understand a sequence of two sentences--"The baby cried. The mommy picked it up."---exactly as he
did (assuming, for example that "the 'mommy' who picks up the 'baby' is the mommy of that baby"),
despite the fact that alternative ways of understanding were demonstrably possible. That is, the mommy
of the second sentence could well have been the mommy of some other baby, and it need not ever have
been a baby that this "floating" mommy was picking up. One is tempted tc say that in the absence of a
specific context we are authorized to take the words literally, which is what Sacks's hearers do; but as
Sacks observes, it is within the assumption of a context--one so deeply assumed that we are unaware of
it---that the words acquire what seems to be their literal meaning. There is nothing in the words that
tells Sacks and his hearers how to relate the mommy and the baby of this story, just as there is nothing
in the form of Mr.Newlin's gesture that tells his fellow students how to determine its significance. In
both cases the determination (of relation and significance) is the work of categories of organization--
the family, being a student--that are from the very first giving shape and value to what is heard and
seen.
Indeed, these categories are the very shape of seeing itself, in that we are not to imagine a perceptual
ground more basic than the one they afford. That is, we are not to imagine a moment when my students
"simply see" a physical configuration of atoms and then assign the configuration a significance,
according to the situation they happen to be in. To be in the situation (this or any other) is to "see" with
the eyes of its interests, its goals, its understood practices, values, and norms, and so to be conferring
significance by seeing, not after it. The categories of my students' vision are the categories by which
they understand themselves to be functioning as students (what Sacks might term "doing studenting"),
and objects will appear to them in forms related to that way of functioning rather than in some objective
or preinterpretive form. (This is true even when an object is seen as not related, since nonrelation is not
a pure but a differential category--the specification of something by enumerating what it is not; in short,
nonrelation is merely one form of relation, and its perception is always situation-specific.)
Of course, if someone who was not functioning as a student was to walk into my classroom, he might
very well see Mr. Newlin's raised hand (and "raised hand" is already an interpretation-laden description)
in some other way, as evidence of a disease, as the salute of a political follower, as a muscle-improving
exercise, as an attempt to kill flies; but he would always see it in some way, and never as purely physical
data waiting for his interpretation. And, moreover, the way of seeing, whatever it was, would never be
individual or idiosyncratic, since its source would always be the institutional structure of which the
"see-er" was an extending agent. This is what Sacks means when he says that a culture fills brains "so
that they are alike in fine detail"; it fills them so that no one's interpretive acts are exclusively his own
but fall to him by virtue of his position in some socially organized environment and are therefore always
67
shared and public. It follows, then, that the fear of solipsism, of the imposition by the unconstrained
self of its own prejudices, is unfounded be-cause the self does not exist apart from the communal or
conventional categories of thought that enable its operations (of thinking, seeing, reading). Once one
realizes that the conceptions that fill consciousness, including any conception of its own status, are
culturally derived, the very notion of an unconstrained self, of a consciousness wholly and dangerously
free, becomes incomprehensible.
But without the notion of the unconstrained self, the arguments of Hirsch, Abrams, and the other
proponents of objective interpretation are deprived of their urgency. They are afraid that in the absence
of the controls afforded by a normative system of meanings, the self will simply substitute its own
meanings for the meanings (usually identified with the intentions of the author) that texts bring with
them, the meanings that texts "have"; however, if the self is conceived of not as an independent entity
but as a social construct whose operations are delimited by the systems of intelligibility that inform it,
then the meanings it confers on texts are not its own but have their source in the interpretive community
(or communities) of which it is a function. Moreover, these meanings will be neither subjective nor
objective, at least in the terms assumed by those who argue within the traditional framework: they will
not be objective because they will always have been the product of a point of view rather than having
been simply "read off"; and they will not be subjective because that point of view will always be social
or institutional. Or by the same reasoning one could say that they are both subjective and objective: they
are subjective because they inhere in a particular point of view and are therefore not universal; and they
are objective because the point of view that delivers them is public and conventional rather than
individual or unique.
To put the matter in either way is to see how unhelpful the terms "subjective" and "objective" finally
are. Rather than facilitating inquiry, they close it down, by deciding in advance what shape inquiry can
possibly take. Specifically, they assume, without being aware that it is an assumption and therefore
open to challenge, the very distinction I have been putting into question, the distinction between
interpreters and the objects they interpret. That distinction in turn assumes that interpreters and their
objects are two different kinds of acontextual entities, and within these twin assumptions the issue can
only be one of control: will texts be allowed to constrain their own interpretation or will irresponsible
interpreters be allowed to obscure and overwhelm texts. In the spectacle that ensues, the spectacle of
Anglo-American critical controversy, texts and selves fight it out in the persons of their respective
champions, Abrams, Hirsch, Reichert, Graff on the one hand, Holland, Bleich, Slatoff, and (in some
characterizations of him) Barthes on the other. But if selves are constituted by the ways of thinking and
seeing that inhere in social organizations, and if these constituted selves in turn constitute texts
according to these same ways, then there can be no adversary relationship between text and self because
they are the necessarily related products of the same cognitive possibilities. A text cannot be
overwhelmed by an irresponsible reader and one need not worry about protecting the purity of a text
from a reader's idiosyncrasies. It is only the distinction between subject and object that gives rise to
these urgencies, and once the distinction is blurred they simply fall away. One can respond with a
cheerful yes to the question "Do readers make meanings?" and commit oneself to very little because it
would be equally true to say that meanings, in the form of culturally derived interpretive categories,
make readers.
Indeed, many things look rather different once the subject-object dichotomy is eliminated as the
assumed framework within which cri tical discussion occurs. Problems disappear, not because they
have been solved but because they are shown never to have been problems in the first place. Abrams,
for example, wonders how, in the absence of a normative system of stable meanings, two people could
ever agree on the interpretation of a work or even of a sentence; but the difficulty is only a difficulty if
the two (or more) people are thought of as isolated individuals whose agreement must be compelled by
something external to them. (There is something of the police state in Abrams's vision, complete with
posted rules and boundaries, watchdogs to enforce them, procedures for identifying their violators as
68
criminals.) But if the understandings of the people in question are informed by the same notions of what
counts as a fact, of what is central, peripheral, and worthy of being noticed--in short, by the same
interpretive principles--then agreement between them will be assured, and its source will not be a text
that enforces its own perception but a way of perceiving that results in the emergence to those who
share it (or those whom it shares) of the same text. That text might be a poem, as it was in the case of
those who first "saw" "Jacobs-Rosenbaum Levin Hayes Thorne Ohman (?)," or a hand, as it is every
day in a thousand classrooms; but whatever it is, the shape and meaning it appears immediately to have
will be the "ongoing accomplishment" of those who agree to produce it.
69
Knowledge
Define these terms:
1. Phenomenology
2. Gaps and silences
3. The death of the author
Who were these thinkers and what were their theories?
1. Jean Paul Sartre
2. Wolfgang Iser
3. Stanley Fish
70

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Looking (and not looking) at Velazquez' Las Meninas

Literary Worlds ....................................................................................................................................... 3

Extract from Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ ................................................ 47

Unpacking the Rubric

English Extension 1 Year 12 Assessment Schedule

Common Module Elective Trial HSC

Nature of tasks Writing Task Writing Task Common Module

Timing Week 9 Term 4 Week 6 Term 2 Weeks 3-5 Term 3

EE12-1, EE12-2, EE12-3, EE12-1, EE12-3, EE12-4, EE12-1, EE12-2, EE12-3

Knowledge and understanding

Skills in complex analysis,

Possible Forms of Assessment

Hermeneutics – Mapping Literary Worlds

Mapping Theories about Literary Worlds

Figure 1 M H Abrams conception of Literary Worlds

An Interpretation of Abrams' Map

Mimesis - Differences within Theoretical Orientations

And for which audience should the poet write? Horace's

means of marginalizing all that is different, other,

What makes literature work?

The Gutenberg Press

The text itself?

This, in effect, was the definition of the 'literary' advanced by the

Extract from Daniel Chandler, An Introduction to Genre Theory

Pieter Bruegel, The Tower of Babel

Extract from Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry

its consolation and stay. But the consolation and

Extract from Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘In Defence of Poetry’

Extract from T S Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’

Extract from W K Wimsatt and M C Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’

Extract from Susan Sontag, ‘On style’

knowledge—e.g., philosophy, sociology, psychology, history) but to something like an excitation, a

Extract from Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’

It is time to liberate the New Woman from the Old by coming

Jan van Eycke's Arnolfini Portrait

Extract from Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’

Extract from Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’

Stanley Fish, ‘How to Recognize a Poem When You See One’

In the time between the two classes I made only one

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