Showing papers in "New Literary History in 1975"

An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative

Abstract: of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by 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: 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

The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse

Abstract: BELIEVE THAT speaking or writing in a language consists in performing speech acts of a quite specific kind called "illocutionary acts." These include making statements, asking questions, giving orders, making promises, apologizing, thanking, and so on. I also believe that there is a systematic set of relationships between the meanings of the words and sentences we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of those words and sentences.' Now for anybody who holds such a view the existence of fictional discourse poses a difficult problem. We might put the problem in the form of a paradox: how can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meanings are not complied with: how can it be the case in "Little Red Riding Hood" both that "red" means red and yet that the rules correlating "red" with red are not in force? This is only a preliminary formulation of our question and we shall have to attack the question more vigorously before we can even get a careful formulation of it. Before doing that, however, it is necessary to make a few elementary distinctions.

Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre

Abstract: THE REACTION AGAINST genre theory in recent times is a strategic feature of what must be called the ideology of modernism. And it is certain that of all literary works, so-called modernistic ones are the least classifiable according to traditional "kinds": witness the rise of a new and hybrid form in the novel, and in our own day, the emphasis on the incomparable uniqueness of the style and "world" of the individual writer. Yet the waning of the modern and the return to plot suggest that a reexamination of the question of genre may be in order. Genres are essentially contracts between a writer and his readers; or rather, to use the term which Claudio Guillen has so usefully revived, they are literary institutions, which like the other institutions of social life are based on tacit agreements or contracts. The thinking behind such a view of genres is based on the presupposition that all speech needs to be marked with certain indications and signals as to how it is properly to be used. In everyday life, of course, these signals are furnished by the context of the utterance and by the physical presence of the speaker, with his gesturality and intonations. When speech is lifted out of this concrete situation, such signals must be replaced by other types of directions, if the text in question is not to be abandoned to a drifting multiplicity of uses (or meanings, as the latter used to be termed). It is of course the generic convention which is called upon to perform this task, and to provide a built-in substitute for those older corrections and adjustments which are possible only in the immediacy of the face-to-face situation. Yet it is clear at the same time that the farther a given text is removed from a performing situation (that of village storyteller, or bard, or player), the more difficult will it be to enforce a given generic prescription on a reader; indeed, no small part of the art of writing is absorbed by this (impossible)

The Nineteenth Century

Abstract: B AUDELAIRE'S WORDS about the albatross apply to the nineteenth century: "By the spread of his great wings, he is fastened to B the earth." The beginning of the century still tried to struggle with the traction of earth, with convulsive hops, awkward and weighted half-flights; the end of the century already rests motionlessly, covered by the immense marquee of the outsize wings. The calm of despair. The great wings of the nineteenth century: its cognitive powers. The cognitive capacities of the nineteenth century had no correspondence with its will, its character, its moral growth. Like an immense cyclopean eye, the cognitive capacity of the nineteenth century turned to the past and the future. Nothing except sight, empty and rapacious, with a singular passion for devouring any object, any epoch. Derzhavin on the threshold of the nineteenth century scratched on his slate-board a few verses which could serve as the leitmotif of the

Action, Action Descritpion, and Narrative

Abstract: HE AIM OF THIS PAPER is to show that a general theory of action may provide partial insight into the structure of narrative discourse. The intuitive idea behind this investigation is that one of the characteristic properties of narrative discourse is that it contains action descriptions. Such action descriptions are also given in current action theories of several disciplines, for example, philosophy, logic, the social sciences, and linguistics (pragmatics).' These theories provide a general, systematic, and explicit characterization of the structure of human acts, as distinct from nonacts, events, or states, of act sequences and interaction and of the conditions for successful action. The first part of this paper will briefly and informally summarize conclusions of recent action theories derived from philosophical logic. I shall focus upon the abstract structure and conditions of acts, neglecting specific psychological, social, historical, moral, economical, or other aspects of human action.

Hermeneutics and the Role of History

Abstract: AS A NUMBER of the contributions to this issue1 of New Literary History serve to illustrate, the general retreat from empiricism and positivism in recent analytical philosophy has had a markedly beneficial effect on current discussions about the theory of interpretation. Two aspects of this trend have proved to be of particular relevance. One has been the attack on empiricist epistemology, with the consequent rejection of the belief in sense data which are capable of being directly perceived and embodied in a noninterpretative observation language. It is coming to be widely accepted that Quine, Kuhn, and Feyerabend, in their different but converging ways, have all succeeded in undermining any attempt to build up a structure of empirical knowledge on a basis purporting to be independent of our judgments.2 The next move which a number of analytical philosophers have thus been prompted to make is to appeal directly to the tradition of hermeneutics, as revived by Gadamer, Ricoeur, and especially Habermas, and to argue for a more interpretative model of the natural, as well as the human, sciences.3 The other influential development has been the abandonment, in the theory of meaning, of any positivist disposition to assert that meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meaning of a sentence must be given by its method of verification. The main challenge to this key concept of logical positivism was of course issued by Wittgenstein in the Investigations, with his famous injunction not to ask directly about the meaning of propositions but rather about how they are used in particular language games. More recently, the underlying assumption of this approach-that the analysis of meaning needs to be connected with the use of language for purposes of communication-has been refined and extended in two connected ways. First, J. L. Austin and his followers, in developing the theory of speech acts, have concentrated on the idea that, as a given utterance has a meaning, a given agent will characteristically be doing something-and may thus be said to mean something-in or by the act of issuing that particular utterance.4 Secondly, H. P. Grice, followed by a number of theoretical linguists as well as philosophers of language, has gone on to offer an analysis of the concept of meaning which is at issue when we speak of someone meaning something in or by saying something.5

Towards a Theory of Narrative

Abstract: T HE ELEMENTS OF THE formalist-structuralist theory of narrative, with which I basically concur, can be epitomized as follows. Each narrative has two parts: a story (histoire), consisting of the content, the chain of events (actions and happenings), and what may be called the existents (characters and settings), the objects and persons performing, undergoing, or acting as a background for them; and a discourse (discours), that is, the expression, the means by which the content is communicated, the set of actual narrative "statements."

The Selection of Literary Constructs

Abstract: T is an unrewarding time for literary history. The subject has captured new heights in the last few decades; yet it loses ground. Even among those interested in literature, one senses skepticism as to the possibility of valuable literary history, at least in the traditional sense. On this skepticism F. W. Bateson, himself a literary historian in the best sense, has blown the gaff, speaking openly of a "non-subject par excellence."I Other critics, with an equal air of crisis, have called for abrupt changes of direction: literary history should be a history of forms; literary history should be a history of reception and impact;2 "literary history should . . . be a history of words."3 As for the young, their attitude to the discipline is sometimes one of open hostility or even of insidious neglect. Literature more than a century old seems inaccessible to them; but that doesn't matter, when it is irrelevent.4 Of course, literature of the remote past has always been a minority interest. Moreover, "in growing and enlarging times, arts are commonly drowned in action." It is new, however, for literary history to be branded as a system preserving the social order, a structure subserving bourgeois oppression.5 In the largest form of this tragic misconception, literary history falls in with tradition, under the condemnation of having generated man's current plight. (Though history has also generated the standards by which society is condemned, and must orientate any lasting reform.) More specifically, we may be witnessing a passive and uncomprehending inheritance of a former stance: a reaction, no longer appropriate, against the old, inert, philological sort of literary history.6 I shall not discuss the many social causes of literary history's sad devaluation. The present essay limits itself to pedagogic and theoretical aspects. I mean, the repercussions of the formalist movement upon the foundations of literary history. The triumph of Yale formalism is not to be disputed. Indeed, we still applaud it, even while wishing to moderate the riot of the triumphators' army and to move on to normal life. For W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley meant to direct critical attention to the artifact itself, away from extraneous gossip about genetic circumstances or background. And this purpose was justified, not only by the meandering irrelevance of much previous criticism but also by the fruits of victory, at least when the

The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature

Abstract: SVERY TEXTUAL MODEL involves certain heuristic decisions; the model cannot be equated with the literary text itself, but simply opens up a means of access to it. Whenever we analyze a text, we never deal with a text pure and simple, but inevitably apply a frame of reference specifically chosen for our analysis. Literature is generally regarded as fictitious writing, and indeed, the very term fiction implies that the words on the printed page are not meant to denote any given reality in the empirical world, but are to represent something which is not given. For this reason "fiction" and "reality" have always been classified as pure opposites, and so a good deal of confusion arises when one seeks to define the "reality" of literature. At one moment it is viewed as autonomous, the next as heteronomous,1 in accordance with whatever frame of reference is being applied. Whatever the frame, the basic and misleading assumption is that fiction is an antonym of reality. In view of the tangled web of definitions resulting from this juxtaposition, the time has surely come to cut the thread altogether and replace ontological arguments with functional, for what is important to readers, critics, and authors alike is what literature does and not what it means. If fiction and reality are to be linked, it must be in terms not of opposition but of communication, for the one is not the mere opposite of the other-fiction is a means of telling us something about reality. Thus we need no longer search for a frame of reference embracing both ends of a reality scale, or for the different attributes of truth and fiction. Once we are released from

Point of View in a Text

Abstract: INCE ONLY SOMETHING which has an antithesis can act as a sign,' any compositional device becomes semantically distinctive once it is juxtaposed with a contrasting system. When a whole text is sustained in a single dimension, we are not aware of that dimension at all, as, for instance, in epic narrative. What Pushkin referred to as the "rapid transitions" of Romantic tales only acquire meaning when combined with passages of leisurely narration. In the same way, "point of view" is an element of literary structure which we become aware of as soon as there is a possibility of switching it in the course of the narrative (or of projecting the text onto another text with a different point of view) . 2 The concept of "point of view" is analogous to that of perspective in painting and film. The concept of "literary point of view" unfolds as the relationship of the system to its "subject" (or "sentient center"), where "system" may be on the linguistic level or on some higher level. By "subject" or "sentient center" of a system (whether ideological or stylistic or whatever) we have in mind some consciousness which is capable of generating a structure of this kind, and, hence, is reconstructable through the process of reading. A literary system is composed of a hierarchy of relationships. The very notion of "having meaning" presupposes a certain relationship, the presence of a defined sense of direction. But since the literary model at its most general re-creates an image of the world as seen by a particular consciousness, that is, provides a model for the relationship between a personality and the world (frequently, a perceiving personal-

The Problem of Change in Literary History

Abstract: begin with an identification of the objects conceived to inhabit what might be called the "literary field." It is these objects and the relationships among them that undergo the process of "change" alluded to in the designation of the topic. The determination of the different kinds of changes that these objects and relationships sustain and the laws or principles governing any given sequence of changes will be the desired result of any systematic analysis of the field. What are the objects inhabiting the "literary field"? At first glance this appears to be a question easily answered. We are inclined to say that the literary field consists of all objects that are manifestly "literary" rather than merely "verbal." But the distinction between the specifically "literary" and the generally "verbal" artifact is not apodictically given. In fact, the millenial disagreement over the criteria for this distinction has generated the four principal traditions of literary criticism identified by historians of literary theory: the mimetic, pragmatic or didactic, expressive, and objective.1 In fact, it is the problematical nature of the specifically literary artifact that necessitates literary criticism. If we possessed generally agreed-upon criteria for determining what the specifically literary artifact consisted of, we should have no difficulty in defining the objects inhabiting the literary field. And we should probably have very little difficulty identifying the changes occurring in that field. But because we possess no generally agreed-upon criteria for determining what is and what is not a specifically literary work, we are uncertain as to what objects actually inhabit the literary field and, a fortiori, what changes these objects undergo and the laws or principles that govern the sequence of the field's articulation in time.

How to Read Freud on Jokes: The Critic as Schadchen

Abstract: the dream as representatives of the dream-thoughts, so that an element in the dream corresponds to a nodal point (Knotenpunkt) or junction in the dream thoughts .. ." 1 The allusion to the Knotenpunkt reminds the reader of that perspective in Freud more concerned with discovering a latent organization of the manifest content than a hidden meaning behind it. To locate the dream element in which the various associative strands of the dream converge is no doubt to isolate the "other center" of dreams and consequently to come to terms with the strange "syntax" regulating the transformations of the dream-work. This for Freud constituted the analytic task par excellence: to bring into relief the structural function-even more than the meaning(s)-of a "nodal term." It is for this reason that the reader may be surprised to find the following statement, toward the end of the same chapter, in the course of the author's comments on his own procedure: "[one] rightly refuses to regard the relation of the hypothesis to the material from which it was inferred as a 'proof' of it. It can only be regarded as 'proved' if it is reached by another path as well and if it

The Future's Past

Abstract: T HE LIFE OF THINGS is in reality many lives. A warrior's sword, known to him by its feel and balance, by its sound as it cuts the air, known or seen by his community when the sight of the sword strapped on for battle is the sign-we go to war tomorrow. The sight of it is one of the signs of war, terror, possible defeat, and yet being his sword, a sign of the barrier still between themselves and defeat. His as property, but kept sharp and ready by a younger warrior whose right to touch the sword is a sign of his social place. The sword after the warrior's death becomes a sacred object, no longer enters battle, but is controlled by the priests of the society. Now it is more often heard of in legends than seen, for it is kept hidden except for ceremonial uses to summon and transmit the spirit of the warrior. Used for the initiation of young warriors, and, like many sacred objects, used medically-one touch being enough to heal wounds, cure disease, drive off dejection. The priests, their ceremonies, those who touch or use the sword under what rules and limits-these make up a second life, a second system of access. In time the society suffers defeat. The sword along with all valued objects whether sacred, monetary, or human (the attractive women of the conquered group) is seized as loot, converted to treasure by the victors for whom it is a souvenir that reminds them of a victory. It is an object of wealth. A third system of access-that of wealth, inheritance, treasure and loot, the permissible displays, self-glorification and a new community of objects that interdefine one another, like the military objects, the sacred objects (potions, chants, relics, etc.) comes into being. The community of objects that make up treasure shares social access and, of course, the withholding of access. Finally, all groups of this culture are destroyed by a higher civilization whose anthropologists take the sword to a museum, classifying it along with cooking implements, canoes, clothing, statues, and toys as an example of a cultural "style" by contrast to the "artifacts" of other cultures or earlier or later "stages" of this style. In this new community of objects, which the sword could never have joined had it not been

The Victorianism of Victorian Literature

Abstract: T IS A TRIBUTE to criticism published during the last decade that the Victorians are in danger of losing their identity and becoming "mid-nineteenth century" or "premodern." In reaction perhaps to the stigma that the term carried, literary historians and critics have attempted to demonstrate the "un-Victorian" characteristics of the age and to indicate what they consider to be its true nature. Three influential studies reveal their approach by the subtitles: "The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition"; "Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenthand Twentieth-Century Literature"; and "Five Nineteenth-Century Writers." No longer, it seems are such titles as The Victorian Frame of Mind or The Victorian Temper or even Victorian England: Portrait of an Age suitable.1 Perhaps the most influential studies in this tradition have been Robert Langbaum's The Poetry of Experience and The Modern Spirit, both of which focus on the similarities rather than the differences of Romantic, Victorian, and modern. In the former, Langbaum stresses particularly the way that the writers of all three periods were influenced by the Enlightenment: "Whatever the differences between the literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries," he writes, "they are connected by their view of the world as meaningless, by the response to the same wilderness." In The Modern Spirit his approach is best indicated by the subtitle.2 One other example will help define this tradition. In his perceptive analysis of the reactions of De Quincey, Browning, Bronti, Arnold, and Hopkins to the "disappearance" of God, J. Hillis Miller places all five in the tradition of Romanticism. After citing other possible reactions to the withdrawal of God-that is, humanism,

Oral Narrative Process and the Use of Models

Abstract: MAGE, THE BASIC MATERIAL of oral narrative art forms, mediates between audience and reality. It is so constructed and manipulated in performance that it shapes the audience's perception of the real. Image is composed of words that are given a unique framework by means of rhythm, for example, and intonation and gesture, by body movement which tends to dance, verbal drama which tends to song. Image is a visualized action or set of actions evoked in the minds of the audience by verbal and nonverbal elements arranged by the performer, requiring a common experience of images held by both artist and audience, the artist seeking by a judicious and artistic use of images to shape that experience and to give it meaning. The performer can have little effect on his audience if its members do not share with him certain experiences of traditional images; he depends on those common experiences, for the oral narrative is a communion between artist and audience on the one hand and the con-

The Idealist Embarrassment: Observations on Marxist Aesthetics

Abstract: T IS surely no mere accident that this question concludes the draft of the "Einleitung zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie" of 1857, which was published not by Marx himself, but only posthumously in 1903 from his manuscript remains. This late publication is responsible for the fact that Marxist aesthetics received its first orientation not from a new understanding of antiquity or a coming to terms with the "classical heritage," but from the Sickingen Debates, an exchange of letters about the tragedy of the contradiction between the revolutionary Idea and class consciousness. The narrowing of the aesthetic issue to a particular problem of postclassical tragedy becomes only too obvious if we recall that the Okonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte of I844 first saw the light of day after an even longer time lag, in 1932. The categories there developed-the appropriation of Nature, the formation of the senses, history as labor or "the emergence of Nature for man," alienation brought about by the category of having, society as the true "resurrection of nature"-could have given to Marxist aesthetics, which for decades had engaged in scholastic exegeses of the reflection dogma, a new level of discussion which would doubtless have saved it also from its notorious

The Use and Abuse of Structural Analysis: Riffaterre's Interpretation of Wordsworth's "Yew-Trees"

Abstract: There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale, Which to this day stands single, in the midst Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore: Not loth to furnish weapons for the bands Of Umfraville or Percy ere they marched 5 To Scotland's heaths; or those that crossed the sea And drew their sounding bows at Azincour, Perhaps at earlier Crecy, or Poictiers. Of vast circumference and gloom profound This solitary Tree! a living thing 10 Produced too slowly ever to decay; Of form and aspect too magnificent To be destroyed. But worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; 15 Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane; a pillared shade, 20 Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged Perennially-beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose decked With unrejoicing berries-ghostly Shapes 25 May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton And Time the Shadow;-there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, 30 United worship; or in mute repose To lie, and listen to the mountain flood Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves.

Twelve Digressions toward a Study of Composition

Abstract: ORM is itself a metaphor and that of fiction is perhaps the most inclusive for our society. The form of the traditional novel is a metaphor for a society that no longer exists. Mario Praz has described the detective story as a bourgeois fairy tale, but one could apply the description as well to the novel of social realism. Its present function is to sustain a series of comforting illusions, among which one might include the feeling that the individual is the significant focus among the phenomena of "reality" (characterization); the sense that clock, or public time is finally the reigning form of duration for consciousness (historical narration); the notion that the locus of "reality" may be determined by empirical observation (description); the conviction that the world is logical and comprehensible (causal sequence, plot). The fairy tale of the "realistic" novel whispers its assurance that the world is not mysterious, that it is predictable-if not to the characters then to the author, that it is available to manipulation by the individual, that it is not only under control but that one can profit from this control. The key idea is verisimilitude: one can make an image of the real thing which, though not real, is such a persuasive likeness that it can represent our control over reality. This is the voodoo at the heart of mimetic theory which helps account for its tenacity. Though such schizoid illusions are fostered by concepts of imitation, one cannot have control "over" that of which one is part, or even formulate it completely-one can only participate more deeply in it.

Freud and the Myth of the Origin

Abstract: rrIERARY CRITICISM is neither "objective" nor universal. Any critical method has limitations because it must necessarily be organized around certain principles, the hypotheses, which act as its center or origin. These principles allow the method to attain its results but at the same time they prevent the method from accounting for everything-they are responsible for closing the method off to the elements for which it cannot account. Thus, in order to understand the implications of any critical system, it is necessary to consider not only what it includes within itself, but also what it rejects, what is considers to be foreign, unimportant, insignificant, or even dangerous.' Most methods in order to justify themselves assume this center to be substantial, a plenitude, a sufficient explanation for the works they treat. To take the case of thematic critics such as Jean-Pierre Richard and Georges Poulet, it would not be difficult to show how the center or origin of their respective systems generates and controls their results. For Richard the center or origin of the work is what he calls the moi profond of the writer, a self supposedly discovered by the critic through his work on the texts (I would say constructed by the critic with the material of the texts), whose existence is necessary to justify the thematic patterns Richard valorizes.2 The writer's thematic universe which Richard constructs is dependent on this origin, an origin which he assumes to exist and which at the same time is only determined and defined by the themes he isolates in the texts. The universe is completed and closed when the moi profond has been conclusively defined, and the moi profond has been conclusively defined only when the universe has been completely constructed. They are interdependent even

Wordsworth and Goethe in Literary History

Abstract: importance for the person we consider its principal founder. "I may soon persecute you with a Psychology drawn from the poems of Ossian," Herder warns the reader in his letters on German Art published in I773-1 The psychology he refers to is clearly what we now call historicism. "The human race is destined to undergo a procession of scenes, of types of culture and manners: woe to the man who does not like his part in the drama in which he must act out and consummate his life! Woe also to the humane or moral Phi-

Intention, Words, and Meaning: The Case of More's Utopia

Abstract: De l'utilite d'une analyse textuelle exhaustive en cas d'ambiguite referentielle. Les mots n'ont pas toujours le meme referent semantique et hierarchique selon la societe et le contexte. Pour lever l'ambiguite, il faut selon l'A. faire une analyse statistique des mots et de leur contexte. Il illustre sa methodologie par l'examen des elements d'une phrase d'Utopia a propos de l'inexistence de l'argent.

The Discrete Text and the Iconic Text: Remarks on the Structure of Narrative

Abstract: S A SEMIOTIC SYSTEM without signs possible? This question taken by itself may seem absurd. If, however, we reformulate it as follows: "Can meaning be conveyed by a message in which we cannot single out signs in the sense in which they are defined most often-as the words of natural language?" then, if we consider painting, music, and cinema, we cannot but answer in the affirmative. This is the first contradiction which we would like to resolve in the

The Meaning of Literary History

Abstract: S THE historian's activity entirely retrospective? It is true that the object of his preoccupation indubitably belongs to the past. But his project is rooted in the here-and-now: in his personal life, the historian precedes the history he will write. If he turns to already existing documents and works, it is with the intention of creating a new work which tomorrow will itself become a document. Moreover, this project, especially if it pertains to literary history, cannot be dissociated from the totality of other projects-whether literary, scientific, or philosophicalwhich will define the "cultural" climate of the future. One should go so far as to affirm that literary history-be it of the most academic, most scientific variety, be it of the kind which is, at least in appearance, most clearly untouched by the theories professed by the writers of the avantgarde-is ultimately linked with literature in the making: whether we approve or condemn, we are indebted to what is thought and written by our contemporaries, to the conditions in which we all seek our way. As for the avant-garde itself, however great its contempt for the type of narrative history which takes stock of everything that could lay claim to the prestigious name of "literature," rare are those among its representatives who do not look to the past for precedents and support, and who, in order to justify their undertakings, do not on occasion themselves become historians (of the most partial and selective kind). Literature in the making, as well perhaps as our conception of what literature ought in the future to be, plays an important part in our definition of what will become history. In this, as is all too obvious, the situation of the literary historian does not appreciably differ from that of any other historian.1 His choice, when selecting a topic of research, is an expression of his present interests. "In choosing his subject, the historian is in fact choosing himself." 2 More particularly in connection with literature, one should start by observing that both criticism and history arose and began to constitute a specific area of intellectual activity only after prevailing literary practice itself had begun to take on a distinctive, specific definition amidst the variety of social activities. A first instance of this can be seen in what remains of Aristotle's Poetics, which opens precisely with an account of the

Some Methodological Problems in Literary History

Abstract: T IWO TERMS which occur in the title of this paper require explanations: methodological and literary history. I will begin by commenting on the term methodology and, accordingly, the adjective methodological. In the most general sense of the word, methodology is the science of methods, i.e., manners of all action. We can distinguish from it general logical methodology as the theory of science, and specialized logical methodologies as theories of scientific systems of various kinds. They may be considered the logic of science or the logic of the various disciplines, respectively, and hence a type of application of logic to science or to sciences interpreted as products of the activity of researchers, i.e., as systems of theorems which they accept. But the term science may also be interpreted as the totality of operations performed by scientists when they act qua scientists. This interpretation of the term science has its counterpart in the concept of methodology as the analysis of cognitive operations, an analysis which is intended to offer definitions of such operations. This analysis covers the singling out of the various types of research operations, descriptions of research procedures, the enumeration of researchers' objectives, and the codification of the standards of correct procedures in the various disciplines. By engaging in the methodology of research operations we over and over again refer to the results obtained by the methodology of the products of those operations. It was the methodology of research operations which I had in mind when giving my essay its title. Note also that I shall mainly be concerned with one of the specialized methodologies, namely, that of literary research.

Narrative and the Film Image

Abstract: (I) the verisimilitude of the space, within which the position of the character is always determined, even when a close-up eliminates the decor; (2) [the fact that] the intention and effects of the decoupage are exclusively dramatic or psychological. In other words, played in a theater and seen from a seat in the orchestra, the scene would have exactly the same meaning, the event would continue to exist objectively. The changes in the camera's point of view add nothing. They only present reality in a more effective manner. First by permitting a better view, then by putting the accent where it belongs.1

From Family Album to Literary History

Abstract: Given that our concern with the past is a concern of our understanding, and that, accordingly, the criteria we apply when selecting past events are those of intellectual coherence; given also that the past is finished and dead and rounded off, and that we can survey it because it is finished and rounded off, I shall take history to be a world of ideas2 relating to that past and aiming at a consistent presentation of it (and therefore something different both from chronicles composed on the ". . . begat ... begat" pattern, and also from the biographies of men and individual institutions). It is a coherence which gets its strength, "not from any fibre that runs through it from one end to the other, but from the fact that there is a vast number of fibres overlapping." 3 Moreover, history is always "a history of ... " (just as philosophy is always "a philosophy of ... "). But I shall nevertheless take it that the historian who attempts to articulate a "comprehensive feeling" and an unwritten "total vision of historical life" ("ein Gesamtgefiihl und eine Gesamtheit des historischen Lebens")4 is not only not going beyond the limits of his calling, but is attempting its most ambitious and most appropriate task. Assuming that a literary history displays the same characteristics in respect of past works of literature, I shall argue that its coherence must be both literary and historical, for the "period of literature" with which it deals is also necessarily a "period of history"; the implications of this recognition, however, are likely to vary from one period to another. There are many kinds of institutional continuity (that of a nation, a state, a dynasty, a sect . .. ), yet a continuity which coheres into a history must always be of some magnitude. Similarly, the history of a genre or a theme will amount to a literary history only to the extent that it will attempt to encompass a nonliterary continuity of some magnitude, such as is embodied in the history of a nation or a complex of major institutions. Let us imagine a book, to be written on the subject of

Literary Criticism and History: The Endless Dialectic

Abstract: I HE MAN WHO thought up this Hydra-headed topic was a perverse genius; he knew it was interminable and thus the perfect topic for a symposium. Trying to make a beginning, one explores its possibilities and permutations; one thinks about one's own endeavors as a critic, about those of his contemporaries, and about those who have gone before him. One defines his terms, clarifies his concepts, and works out the critical continuum from the everyday practical business of criticism to the rare periodic endeavors at purely theoretical criticism. One triangulates this topic, as one must, and thinks about the critic, the poet, and history, or, more broadly, about criticism and literary criticism, poetry (in the inclusive sense), and history. One soon realizes that any attempt to think one's way into a historiography is to die into this topic before it is even born; any fool of a literary critic knows that much and so grabs onto working conceptions of history (or, more wisely, uses the term history as if it were defined and had a universally accepted meaning) and begins immediately to speak reasonably of literary criticism as a verbal action upon a historical scene; as the actions of the mind upon the grounds of being; as human action in and counter to history; as a critical action of the mind which begins in history, goes out of history, and then returns to and into it, thus engaging in a kind of perpetual dialectical relationship with history. But, one realizes, all of these bare statements avoid some fundamental issues and confuse the mind with simplicities. This is similar to the simpleminded notion that cutting off one of the Hydra's heads ends the matter. There is a disjunction of some kind because the topic is protean and polymorphous; it cannot easily (if ever) be brought under the control of a single human will. Encountering the Hydra

Why It Is So, and Not Otherwise

Abstract: NOTHING CAN PERMANENTLY PLEASE, which does not contain within itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise." Coleridge's dictum--one of the dozen or so phrases, sentences, or paragraphs in the Biographia Literaria which taken together allow the reader to reconstitute a literary-critical theory which may indeed be Coleridge's-lies behind the "critical" position in the controversy between literary critics, literary historians, linguists, aestheticians, and literary theorists generally. Of the other loci in the Biographia I will only bring forward two: