Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 2003"

Universals of Narrative and Their Cognitivist Fortunes (I)

Abstract: We now return to the three narrative universals from another viewpoint, that of false cognitivist pretenders to the title. The chief pretenders, as in Brewer et al., appear at times under the guise and the very name of the genuine article, yet essentially align with their naked disciplinary equivalents. You may therefore want to refresh your memory of the original definitions cited in section  of the first part of this article (Sternberg : –). All the issues to be reviewed next intersect in the following (mis)translation of the generic universals into hard and fast rules, with thumbnail examples to suit:

The Allure of the Archive

Abstract: This article problematizes cultural studies' recent return to the ''thing,'' assessing the archive's position in research work. I draw on my experience of consul- tation of the surviving records of the Lord Chamberlain's theater censorship office in order to demonstrate that the archive's seductive charms often serve to conceal its flaws. This archive's undeniable allure obscures the contingency of its construc- tion, its destructive powers, and the way in which its contents remain vulnerable to interpretative violence. These observations are measured against the metaphorical and theoretical frameworks which continue to condition our approach to the archive, coming to rest at the place where the procedures and concerns of psychoanalysis overlap with those of archaeology. I conclude that any study of this archive requires both a theoretical redefinition of the concept of the archive and the introduction of a rigorous ethical framework which foregrounds the interpretative investment of the researcher.

Polysystem Theory Revisited: A New Comparative Introduction

Abstract: In recent years, Itamar Even-Zohar's Polysystem Theory seems to have lost much of its appeal for students of comparative literature, while more recent forms of systemic approaches to literature—most conspicuously, Pierre Bourdieu's praxiology and Siegfried Schmidt's and Niklas Luhmann's Constructivism—are becoming increasingly popular. To some extent, this is due to the misconception that the more recent forms of system theory have superseded their polysystemic predecessor. This is a misconception for two reasons. On the one hand, Polysystem Theory offers students of literature a framework for a wide-ranging and still topical study of a variety of cultural phenomena (that are not restricted to literature); on the other hand, the more recent system-theoretical approaches simply cannot replace Polysystem Theory, because they are interested in altogether different aspects of the literary system. This critical introduction aspires to rekindle interest in Polysystem Theory and briefly illustrates its application from the author's current research.

Time Passes: Virginia Woolf, Post-Impressionism, and Cambridge Time

Abstract: Virginia Woolf 's experiments begin with Impressionism. But knowing Roger Fry's criticism of Impressionism as analyzing commonsense appearances but destroying design, she adopted Fry's dualist aesthetic. Paul Cezanne's ''Post- Impressionism'' constructed a geometry in Impressionism's sensible world, combin- ing ''vision'' and ''design.'' Literature's counterpart to the geometry of spatial relations were the temporal relations of Cambridge time philosophy. Contrary to a common assumption, Woolf adopted not Henri Bergson's philosophy but G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell's realism. Time passes not as duree but as a series of still moments. Temporal relations connect moments as spatial ones unify Impressionism's atomized color, with the mathematical theory of continuity playing a crucial role. Woolf 's lit- erary impressionism developed through short story experiments, each a moment, an Impressionist canvas. Katherine Mansfield was the decisive influence yet exemplified Impressionism's limits. ''The mere expression of things adequately and sensitively, is not enough,'' Woolf quotes Mansfield. As the painter transformed vision into design, Woolf turned story into novel via continuity of moments through ''the interlude.'' According to this hypothesis, ''The Window'' and ''The Lighthouse'' in To the Light- house are short stories uncannily reminiscent of Mansfield's ''Prelude'' and ''At the Bay.'' The interlude ''Time Passes'' transforms story into novel by relating past to future in a time-series, creating a post-impressionist ''modern fiction.''

“Literary Interpretation” and Cognitive Literary Studies

Abstract: In the discussions of cognitive literary studies in this and earlier volumes of Poetics Today, there regularly seems to be at least a fairly broad consensus as to the significant differences between the typical literary-humanistic and the typical scientific approaches to making claims about a given object of study. Even if the object of study is the same—in this case, literature—a humanistic approach nonetheless seems to establish the validity of its claims in ways quite different from those of a scientific approach. Supporters of cognitive literary studies commonly feel that literary study can benefit from theories and practices that are more in line with the methods of science. To these scholars’ minds, we can have a reasonable blending of humanistic and scientific discourses as long as we are careful about how we bring the approaches together and about what we can expect their blending to reveal. A cognitivist approach to literary interpretation will try to base its claims on relatively solid scientific fact while not failing to treat the text as literature, which is to say as more than a product of biological processes. On the other side, as with theHans Adler and SabineGross () response to the recent Poetics Today special issue (, no.  [spring ]), ‘‘Literature and Cognitive Revolution,’’ we have at least the guarded conviction that the two approaches may simply be incommensurably different.We cannot really hope for a blending that will work. The split between the ‘‘two cultures’’ of the sciences and the humanities that bothered C. P. Snow in  remains in place.

Between Thing and Theory

Abstract: ‘‘Between Thing and Theory’’ takes up perennial problems of critical thought and interpretation, particularly as they pertain to the relation between history and aesthetic judgment. The inconclusiveness of aesthetic judgment is perhaps its primary attraction, challenge, and vexation. Aesthetic works are the products of deliberate human imaginative effort and thus reflect the traces of other consciousnesses in some way. Beholders of such works often seem compelled to respond, ‘‘as if,’’ in Derek Attridge’s (1999: 25) words, the work under consideration ‘‘demanded a new work in response.’’ The difficulty has been in locating the grounds of interpretation—the nature of the demand. Is such a ground to be found in the originating consciousness, the work itself, the interpreter, or the historical context within which the work was produced and is apprehended? One goal of critical thought over the long history of Western culture has been to answer

From Practical Criticism to the Practice of Literary Criticism

Abstract: In Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1963 [1929]), I. A. Richards marks his standing as the herald of three trends of literary criticism: the empirical study of literature, New Criticism, and Reader-Response Criticism. What is more, in this book he affiliates himself with the experimental psychology of his time and by extension with the rising prominence of Gestalt theory within this discipline. Our research weaves together not only these three trends but also his Interaction Theory of Metaphor, detailed in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). This essay draws out the implications of Richards's approach to cognitive literary studies for our work on poetic metaphor. In the section entitled "A Gestalt Approach to Poetry" we develop and incorporate his Interaction Theory of Metaphor into our Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor, applying it to a reading of John Donne's poem "The Bait." In the section "An Empirical Study of Poetry" we discuss Richards's empirical study of poetry, followed by our own empirical study, in line with the same Gestalt-Interaction Theory of Metaphor.

Lion on Display: Culture, Nature, and Totality in a Circus Performance

Abstract: This article deals with exclusion and the construction of periphery as modes of ritualizing and binding together a dominant social order. Under scrutiny is the peripheral British traveling circus and the way its traveling and performance define the margins of the modern fragmented order, particularly vis-a-vis the crisis of the premodern Culture/Nature paradigm. A lion act presents the Culture/Nature opposition, that is, human trainer, props, routines versus animals, in the context of circus traveling (fieldwork carried out in 1975–79). The circus display of both animals and humans as exemplifications of their own kind erases their "realness," turning them into images in the public's perception. However, a totalization of the performance and of the display of circus traveling reifies the animal and human images and the circus image, with the effect of placing them out of social time and relations. On the margin of the fragmented modern order, the reified traveling circus thus embodies transcendence of culture/nature categories and implies its own ontological apartness. For its nostalgic spectators, it thereby illusorily resurrects a totality of order—from which the circus itself is apart.

Cognitive Science and the Problem of Representation

Abstract: In this article, I argue that the problem of representation stands at the cen- ter of the debate concerning the legitimacy of cognitivism as a research strategy for the humanities. Yet, curiously, very few commentators in this debate see representa- tion to be a problem at all. Questions about the anthropological origin and function of representation tend to be regarded as at best supplemental, and at worst simply irrelevant, to the synchronic question of the causal mechanisms involved in the pro- duction of representation in the brain. I argue that this view is fundamentally mis- taken and, furthermore, that we won't get clear about the central issues in the debate over cognitivism in literary studies until we get clear about the problem of represen- tation. The problem is essentially one of how to define the human in terms of its most unique trait: the capacity for symbolic representation. After a review of how cogni- tivism misinterprets this question as a gradually evolved genetic adaptation of the nervous system, I turn to the theory of representation proposed by the neuroscien- tist and anthropological researcher Terrence Deacon in The Symbolic Species: The Co- Evolution of Language and the Brain (). Deacon stands out among cognitive scientists for his conclusion that language—symbolic reference—is an ''evolutionary anomaly,'' that is, inassimilable to the mechanism of gene replication. By understanding the exact nature of this evolutionary anomaly, we are in a much better position to assess the skepticism that is routinely directed toward those who use cognitive science to interpret literature. More precisely, I argue that the originary function of the sym-

Materialism and the Book

Abstract: Contemporary materialist theory is converging with the study of material culture, as evidenced by increasing attention given to the book as a material object produced, circulated, and consumed as a commodity. It is, however, problematic to conceive of the book as a material object, since writing itself cannot be straightforwardly conceived as a material thing, as Derrida has shown. Moreover, it is difficult to conceive the book as a commodity, since the notion of the commodity is also problematically rooted in the notion of the material, as can be established by reference to Marx and Benjamin. To consider the materiality of the book we need in place an architext of the use of the terms matter and materiality in theoretical thought. These terms are central but elusive, even when they are consciously thematized, as they are, for example, in the work of Judith Butler. This elusiveness arises only partly because the distinction between Cartesian and Aristotelian matter is forgotten, but mainly because these terms are used in an approximate fashion by Marx, who is the principal source of this vocabulary in contemporary theory. We should treat the term matter with the same skepticism we employ when dealing with other idealist concepts, not as their preconceptual other and redemption.

"Ocular Proof": Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response

Abstract: A new materialism in literary and cultural criticism has regrounded much scholarly debate in the archive as a corrective to ahistorical theorizing. Often, in granting archival discoveries the evidentiary status of fact, historical criticism fails to attend to the difficulties surrounding the mediation of historical understanding by material things. In order to get at the thorny issues surrounding the material as an authorizing category in cultural analysis, I focus on Shakespeare's well-known liter- ary meditation on visual proof (and visual perception) in Othello. Reemphasizing the problems that nag materialist epistemologies, I examine the role of material (ocu- lar) proof in Othello, in the form of the much discussed handkerchief. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of perception, I argue that Othello provides a par- able about the disaster of confusing the objecthood of things with the stories we tell about them. I conclude that as cultural history moves into its next phase—beyond the return to the archive—it must respond to the phenomenological challenge and avoid the temptation to stop with either thing or theory, always working to occupy the space between.

Gadamer and the Mechanics of Culture

Abstract: The guest editors of this special issue, James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence, contend that the current preoccupation with the materiality of things has usually generated a polarization between "history" and "theory" in literary criticism, whereby the work of scholars who continue to align themselves with the critical motives and methods of theory is dismissed for being un- or trans-historical. The primary goal of this essay is to suggest a middle way between these polarities, especially concerning recent scholarly interest in the history of the book. Specifically, this essay argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer's important contribution to the field of hermeneutics not only anticipates recent developments in textual scholarship, but also has much to offer scholars who are attempting to write the history of the material book. In such light, the so-called "turn toward history" commented upon at length in this issue does not require a concomitant turning away from theory. The essay begins with an examination of some important links between Gadamer's most significant assertions about the hermeneutic consciousness and comparably significant assertions about the study of the material book. Subsequently, this comparative analysis is applied to the discussion of a specific material book, the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare. From both of these contexts (general and specific), we can begin to see the necessity of a mutual engagement between "history" and "theory."

The Power of Double Coding to Represent New Forms of Representation: The Truman Show, Dorian Gray, "Blow-Up," and Whistler's Caprice in Purple and Gold

Abstract: Doubly coded artworks—artworks that are embedded in other artworks—sometimes represent an art form (a medium, a genre) that at the time they are made cannot be represented except through double coding. The phenomenon is rare and occurs only when several conditions are met. First, in the doubly coded (embedded) section, the subordination of one voice to the other voice is so extreme that the section can be likened to a duet sung by one voice. This hierarchical relation in which the materiality of the representation is fully controlled by the embedding voice permits a filmmaker or visual artist or fiction writer to speak or embody a world-making voice other than her or his own. The final requirement for double coding to enable representation of a new art form is the imaginative leap of a perceiver, who interprets the artwork in the fictional world (the artwork made by the fictional world-making voice) as an example of a new art form potentially capable of independent existence in our world.

Reframing the Adjustment: A Response to Adler and Gross

Abstract: We admire the seriousness of purpose evident throughout ‘‘Adjusting the Frame,’’ the substantive response by Hans Adler and Sabine Gross to our coedited special issue of Poetics Today (, no. ), ‘‘Literature and the Cognitive Revolution.’’ Responding in turn, we also wish to acknowledge the extensive scholarship that informs their response, not least their close acquaintance with primary and critical texts in German that clearly ought to play a greater role in the growing area of cognitive literary and cultural studies. Not least, we appreciate the spirit of hospitality that marks especially the first section of ‘‘Adjusting the Frame.’’ Adler and Gross make a point of welcoming the new work in cognitive criticism that we sought at once to feature, challenge, and extend in the special issue. They find it ‘‘refreshing’’ and admire its ‘‘inclusionary’’ ethos and the resulting ‘‘heterogeneous’’ mix of essays, positions, and objects of critical interest (Adler and Gross : –).Given the suspicion, hostility, or (perhapsworst) indifference that a novel critical field may sometimes provoke, we relish the significant common ground that Adler andGross establish with the critics and theorists represented in the special issue. In fact, we have still more in common with Adler and Gross than they seem to allow, as we hope to demonstrate in the course of this rejoinder. At the same time, we have found

History of Narratology: A Rejoinder

Abstract: The comment takes issue with David Darby's presentation of German nar- ratology, arguing that German contributions to the field of narrative studies are much broader and more varied than argued by Darby in his article in Poetics Today, vol. , no.  (). David Darby's article ''Form and Context: An Essay in the History of Nar- ratology'' () performs at least three separate tasks. First, Darby presents a detailed history of German 1 narrative theory before the rise of its most famous exponents, Kate Hamburger, Franz Karl Stanzel, and Eberhard Lammert. Second, he compares German narratological studies (Erzahl- theorie) with structuralist narratology, arguing that structuralist narratology and German Erzahltheorie have remained separate schools of thought. Third, Darby (: ) argues his preference for the structuralist tradi- tion to the detriment of German achievements in narrative studies on the presumption that only structuralist narratology, particularly in its Ameri- can versions, reflects the key importance of reception—instanced by the ''controversial narratological abstraction of implied authorship''—whereas German narrative studies, as he argues, concentrate ''on rhetoric and voice'' to the exclusion of a receptive point of view (leaving reception issues to the . In this response, as in Darby's original piece, German is equivalent to from German-speaking areas. In other words, German narrative theory refers to work published in German by Ger- man, Austrian, and Swiss-German scholars.

Toward a Theory of Embodiment for Literature

Abstract: When I was a graduate student in the s, I asked a neurophysiologist friend how my brain allowed me to understand what it meant for my love to be like a red red rose. ‘‘Hmph,’’ he snorted, in scorn of my presumption: ‘‘I work on a single neuron in the squid.’’ Even though he is also a prizewinning poet himself, he was not interested in speculating about how the phenomenology of understanding poetrymight be instantiated in the brain. Accepting this rebuff, I contented myself with the formal theories of meaning that predominated at the time. Describing a theory as ‘‘formal,’’ at least in generative linguistic circles, was and still is a shorthandway of saying that it makes no claims about how the components and processes hypothesized by the model might map onto either the processes of the human mind, as psychologists would describe them, or its physiology or neurology. Theories that do make such claims have recently come to be called theories of embodiment, and it is as a contribution to these theories and to their struggles against formalism that I value Elaine Scarry’s book. The formalist disengagement of levels of description is a methodological reduction that produces a distinction between form and function, usually with an assumption that the twowill eventually be reconnected.The advantage of this approach is assumed to be that, even while the second goal is elusive, work can continue on the first. There is an unspoken trust that the explanation of the relationship will somehow emerge from the sheer den-

A Cognitive Approach to Metaphor in Prose: Truth and Falsehood in Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Il'ich"

Abstract: Russian has two words corresponding to English truth and four words cor- responding to English lie. While studies have detailed the semantic and pragmatic differences between these two terms, how these domains are metaphorized in every- day language—and exploited in literature—has yet to be examined. In the first half of the article, I present an analysis of everyday metaphorical expressions for Truth and Falsehood in contemporary Russian. Linguistic evidence suggests that these domains are understood via a small set of interrelated conceptual structures. Metaphorical expressions in Russian cluster around one basic metaphor (KNOWING IS SEEING) and three image-schematic structures (STRAIGHT, PATH, and CONTAINER). This network of everyday metaphors serves as a point of reference for an examina- tion of Tolstoy's aesthetic representations of the same domains. In the second part, I examine Tolstoy's extensions and elaborations of metaphors for Truth and Falsehood in his postconversion works, and I argue that they comprise a central metaphorical motif, the full complexity of which has yet to be appreciated, in his novella ''The Death of Ivan Il'ich.''

Narratology and Interpretation: A Rejoinder to David Darby

Abstract: This contribution discusses the two programmatic assumptions made by David Darby in his outline of the history of narratology or Erzahltheorie (narrative theory).The first is that narratology ought to be remodeled into a contextualist theory of interpretation; the second is that such a ''contextualist narratology'' necessarily requires the category of the ''implied author.'' By contrast, we argue that the ''contex- tualists'' can state convincing reasons neither for a change of narratology's aims nor for a necessary widening of its object domain. Finally, we demonstrate that Darby's thoughts on Wayne C. Booth's concept of the ''implied author'' are based on the mixing of two definitions of this concept that are in fact mutually exclusive.

Form and Context Revisited

Abstract: While I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to the commentaries both of Monika Fludernik and of Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller, I am confronted by the challenge of their having cast me in two distinct, contradictory roles. I am presumed, it seems, to play the part of the contextualist aggressor (or at least the author of a contextualist manifesto) upon the uncontaminated fields of ‘‘classical’’ narratology,while at the same time I am said to have underrepresented the contextualist dimensions of contemporary ‘‘postclassical’’ narratological scholarship conducted in the German-speaking areas. Given the impossibility of occupying these conflicting positions simultaneously, not to mention the dangers inherent in attempting to mediate here in a controversy that, as exemplified in the differences between the arguments of these two responses, is clearly as alive and unresolved in German narratology as it is elsewhere, my response will address separately the points raised in the two rejoinders.1

Narratology and Psychology: Holding on to One's Perspective

Abstract: If only because they are very often interested in interpretations that turn detailed formal aspects into meaning, theorists of literary narrative have always considered their object of investigation in terms of its effect on an ideal reader. Even reception aesthetics, as practiced byWolfgang Iser (, ), boiled down to a hermeneutics in which this ideal audience took the form of a readerly role determined by the text. Despite early studies into the cognitive dynamics of the reading process byMeir Sternberg () and Menakhem Perry (), the role of the real reader did not become central to narratology until its constructivist phase, which started about a decade ago. There is, however, a serious problem with this approach. Although constructivist narratologists, such asAnsgarNünning, investigate ‘‘the cognitive activity through which observers create subjective models of the world they regard as actual’’ (), they mostly refrain from empirical testing, perhaps because they simply have not been trained for this kind of research. As a consequence, the empirical study of narrative processing has largely been left to social psychologists, whose interest in the specific workings of literary narrative has been very limited. Representative contributions to the field, such as by Gordon H. Bower and Daniel G. Morrow () and Richard Gerrig (), indicate that studies of narrative in social psychology are mainly concerned with relatively short and ‘‘simple narra-

On Cognition, Interpretation, and the Survival of Literature: A Response to Hans Adler and Sabine Gross

Abstract: Storytelling, allegory, and metaphor have long been associated with imaginative literature.Yet narrative presentation, analogical thought, and figurative language are constantly encountered in workaday cognition and communication as well. Likewise, role-playing andmind reading occur not only in the theater or through the overheard soliloquies of poetry and the psychological novel. They are omnipresent in ordinary life. Such shared features of literary and nonliterary mentation could understandably prompt MarkTurner’s (: v) epigrammatic formulation: ‘‘the literary mind is the fundamental mind.’’ After all, we do not need to leave one mind in the cloak room and rent a different mind for the proper appre-

Robert Hunter's Oral Poetry: Mind, Metaphor, and Community

Abstract: This essay takes an oral poetics approach to the analysis of the song lyrics of Robert Hunter as performed by the Grateful Dead from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Hunter's work is treated as an exemplary case for the study of the use of oral poetry within the contemporary electronic communication milieu. The reception of the poetry by the specific listening audience is considered, with special attention given to the functioning of metaphor in relation to states of mind brought about by the use of psychedelics, such as LSD. The poetry itself is situated as both contribution to and commentary on American folk poetry and its accompanying mythology. Reference points include Ruth Finnegan on oral poetics, George Lakoff on the contemporary theory of metaphor, and Aldous Huxley on the nature of altered states of cons

On Blanchot's Fiction

Abstract: This study is the latest in the recent spate of French critical activity devoted to the writings of Maurice Blanchot (Schulte Nordholt ;Mesnard ; Michel ; Bident ; Derrida ; Miraux )Unlike these works, however, Hurault takes as the sole subject of her study Blanchot’s fiction, spanning the whole of his literary career from  to  Hurault resolutely sets out to separate Blanchot’s theoretical writings from his fictional output in order to show that the ‘‘principle of fiction’’ is a purely internal affair and needs to be read on its own specific terms, rather than as an accessory to or illustration of Blanchot’s theoretical ideas On the whole, this proves to be a fruitful means of investigating what many readers find impenetrable in Blanchot’s fictional world Hurault’s main argument is geared toward disproving the common belief that Blanchot’s texts share with other modernist texts a specular concern with self-reflexivity She suggests rather that the specularity in question should be read as ‘‘feinte,’’ ruse or dissimulationHer introductory programmatic declarations, though, are not free from rehearsing familiar Blanchotian territory, such as that the recit is the event of the impossibility of recounting, that Blanchot’s fiction is the progressive reduction of the fictional to the point of disappearance, or that his fictional space ‘‘ruins’’ the ontological In the first of two equal parts, Hurault shows how the Blanchotian figure is not a representation, that the mimesis concerns not the real, but the